Two Ways to Belong in America
- Bharati Mukharjee
Bharati Mukharjee subjectively describes her and her sister Mira's situation in the US. She explains how they are different from each other. Initially, they planned to stay in America for two years that's until they complete their degree, and then they had a plan to return back to India to get married to the grooms their father would choose. In reverse to her plan, they got married to the one they chose and remained in the US. When she compares and contrasts the situation they both have in the US, it's already been 35 years.
Bharati and her sister have so many common things like appearance and attitude but gradually their preferences are changed. After two years of education in the US, they got married. Mira got married to an Indian student and got a labor certificate to acquire hassle-free residence and employment. Whereas Bharati got married to an American fellow student of Canadian parentage. She had a good position as she got married to an Ameican man. She has a superior position in merit and job.
She says she welcomed the emotional strain of marrying outside her ethnic community because she got married to someone away from her origin. She chose fluidity, self-invention, blue jeans, and T-shirts, renouncing the pure cultural marriage of the Mukherjee family.
Mukharjee is different from her sister. Despite coming from the same cultural background they are contrasted to each other when they got exposed to the new environment of the US. Their situation was different. She thinks her sister has narrow perspectives and she is uninvolved with the pop culture in the US. Whereas her sister thinks Mukharjee lacks structure in her life, lacks Indianess, and unvarying daily cores.
They have a close relationship and very affectionate about each other because they are each other close blood relatives in a foreign land.
Mira feels she is used by the US as it is about to pass an anti-immigration bill. She finds it an unfair treatment to talented people like her who have invested her creativity and professional skills into the improvement of the pre-school system in the US. She has obeyed all the rules, paid taxes, and also affectionate about the people of America. But the new bill has discarded her contribution. She opines new rules should be only applied to those who arrive after those rules are passed. Since she has been in the US for more than 35 years, the US system should recognize her contribution.
According to Mukharjee, her sister has rooted in one job, one city, one house, one ancestral culture, one cuisine. She hasn't fully surrendered her cultural values, she wears a saree. She has retained delightfully accented English and at the same time, she speaks about so many other immigrants and illegal dwellers in the US. Although she is educated and living a better life than so many poorly documented immigrants, she is still connected to her homeland, India.
Mukherjee's thesis statement is a Green Paper betrayed immigrant communities especially from South Asia in the US as it is against its immigrant communities.
Mukherjee's thesis is that experiences as an immigrant in America can differ greatly from one person to another. She states her thesis most explicitly in paragraph 11, when she writes, "In one family, from two sisters alike as peas in a pod, there could not be a wider divergence of the immigrant experience."
Mukherjee's remarks are probably directed at other immigrants like herself; though she initially comes off as a bit harsh on her sister, she seems to understand her sister's decisions more by the end of the essay. Her journey toward a better understanding of the validity of resisting citizenship may offer helpful insights for others who hold the same views as Mukherjee did.
Mukherjee's purpose is to inform; she likely wants her audience to reconsider their own perspective on immigration. She wants the reader to recognize that there is not just one universal immigrant experience and that each immigrant's motives and values are going to be different, even for those from such similar backgrounds as Mukherjee and her sister.
The basis of comparison for the two is established immediately in the essay; both sisters have lived in the US for the same amount of time. She goes on in the following paragraphs to describe more similarities; both sisters planned to stay for only 2 years but stayed long after they each got married and started lives in the US.
Mukherjee's essay is written with a point-by-point structure. She chooses specific points and goes over her experiences and her sister's experiences for each point. This format works well because it allows Mukherjee to go into specifics regarding how each sister's experiences have differed in different areas of their lives in an easy-to-follow way.
The points Mukherjee discusses include each sister's marriage, each sister's views on her Indian heritage, whether or not to become an American citizen, and the choice to embrace American culture. These points are sufficient, especially since the author often goes back to reconsider these points throughout the essay as she recalls how her views have shifted over time with the country's changing views on immigration.
The transitional words and phrases Mukherjee uses include: "Instead," "...we never said what was really on our minds, but we probably pitied one another," "I realize," and "Nearly 20 years ago."
Mukherjee's conclusion is quite effective. She is letting the reader know that despite how these experiences differ, they still ultimately come with the same cost. To stay in America, an immigrant must change themselves in one way or another in order to fit in comfortably. In the writer's case, this change came more willingly, but she was still punished by her family for her choice to work so hard toward assimilation. She also faced difficulty achieving this assimilation while in Canada. In her sister's case, she was forced to gain citizenship, which she did not want to do, in order to stay in the US; she was not able to keep ties to India in the way that was most comfortable for her.
This strategy was the right choice for Mukherjee. The author spent a lot of time in her essay writing about ways in which she and her sister couldn't see eye to eye. Ending the essay with this statement helps emphasize that, despite this longstanding disagreement, the two sisters share a common struggle.
Vocabulary Projects
saris- garments made from cotton or silk worn by Hindu women
certifications- documents serving as evidence of something's validity
mongrelization- to make impure
perspective- the state of one's ideas or how one sees the world
mythic- not based in fact
superficial- surface-level; shallow
scrutiny- examination; investigation
discretion- freedom of judgment
curtailing- cutting short; reducing or diminishing
divergence- the difference in opinion, choice, or form;
expatriate- someone who has withdrawn allegiance to their original country
trauma- an experience that causes psychological pain
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