American Dream "Hey, Kim, Do Essay

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My heart was always full of things I wanted to say -- questions that needed answering, or opinions bubbling beneath the surface, but I no longer had words to say them. I had lost my old world, but could not gain my footing in my new land.

How I longed to be normal -- a normal Korean or a normal American, I did not care. But I knew that I was neither. My family history had aged me far beyond my years, although I had only a child's vocabulary in English. I could not go back, as my American experience soon made me different from my fellow Koreans. But my assimilation into America was imperfect. I chuckled at Gary Soto's essay "Looking for Work," about how he wished to make his American family act like the perfect families on TV, like Father Knows Best. It is hard to imagine one's family like a typical American stereotype when kimchi rather than Kool-Aid is more commonly seen on the dining room table! And like many Asian students, I felt pressured to succeed, given how much my parents had been through, and also because of the self-imposed pressures to which I subjected myself. Perhaps more so than white students, Asian students feel an added drive to achieve great things in school because the cultural stereotype suggests that they must be 'better than average' at academics. Yet I simply wanted to improve my English and feel normal when I arrived. I felt a great deal of pressure put upon me by my fellow first-generation adolescent immigrants.

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I was still playing catch-up, culturally and linguistically.

So I ask my reader, do not be so quick to judge the person with halting English, or assume that he or she has transitioned with ease into an American academic environment, simply because he or she is Asian. That person may be struggling in the classroom because of language barriers. Far from not caring about seeming like a 'normal American' he or she may long to have such a status. My father struggled with English as well, but rather than receiving aid, he was often laughed at, even while he bravely struggled to establish a new business in America. Sadly, I feel the common media image of the inscrutable Asian who cannot speak English still exists: there is an expectation that an Asian person's English will be imperfect, and no assistance is given to help the new student transition into America. Incomprehension at American customs like football is humorous, and it is assumed that a member of a so-called model minority will quickly become better than average. The author of the book Yellow, Frank Wu has said that the greatest victims of the "model minority myth" are Asians themselves: while it may seem to be nice to be assumed that one will succeed because one is Asian, that assumption can erase the struggles that take place to make a home in a new land (Wu 18). People must learn to confront one another as human beings, not as stereotypes, whether those stereotypes are 'good' or bad.

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