Asian American Immigrants

I thought the poem in class was interesting, and made you think about positions of Japanese Americans split loyalties. If a person came from Japan, they still have ties there. They could have family or friends that they still talk to, so to ask them to give that up would be hard. But if they did not give it up they were seen as enemies during wartime. The groups of Japanese Americans that were born in America, and did not have strong ties in Japan, were easily able to pledge their loyalties to America.

When thinking about immigrants many times people do not think of difficulties they have gone through. With first generation Japanese Americans during World War II, they not only had to leave there homeland for one reason or another. They also then had to turn their backs on their country or be detained. Other Asian American groups, such as refugees, had to leave their homes in horrible conditions. Some groups had to sneak out. One of the family of Laotians that my grandparents sponsored had to sneak out of Laos in the storage of a boat, if they were discovered they would have been killed. Then they were forced to stay in a refugee camp until an American agreed to help. When my grandparents called about it, they were told that there was a bigger family that had been at the refugee camp for a long time, because no one wanted to take on that big of a family. Then when they got over here, they had to start up a new life. My grandparents gave them a place to live, jobs, and everything they needed. The kids had to adapt to a new school, learn new ways of life. They became part of the family, but I’m not naive enough to think that they were excepted everywhere they went. So on top of everything they went through, they also then have to deal with the discrimination of American society.

Cassandra Paternosh #11