Facing Poverty With A Rich Girl's Habits Summary

Assignment 1.2: Summary and Personal Response

In Suki Kim’s “Facing Poverty with a Rich Girl’s Habits”, the author depicts what life was like for her as she dealt with the transition of being a young girl from a wealthy family in South Korea to a young girl from a poor family in the United States. Suki Kim tells how the language barrier in the United States altered her relationships with fellow Korean-American citizens. Kim’s essay was written for the New York Times, and so her audience would have been readers of the New York Times, which could have included a lot of people who were immigrants or had come from a family of immigrants who were familiar with the difficulties of coming to a new country. The United States has been viewed as the land of opportunity where a person’s dream could come to fruition and where the poor is able to gain financial security through hard-work, but Suki Kim’s immigration to the United States seemed more as a digression than a progression. Kim’s mother went from being a woman of status in South
Korea to “taking a job as fish filleter at a market”, and her father, who had multiple businesses, was “penniless”. Kim’s “small world” only became more of a distant memory as the reality of the society she was engulfed in quickly altered her perception and views of various situations. The author’s depiction of her life was severely altered through her description of her life in the early 1980’s neighborhood of Queens, New York.
The home was described as being a “crammed, ugly place” as opposed to the mansion in South Korea that sat on the hillside with a beautiful view she had grown accustomed to for thirteen years. Kim describes the difference in lifestyles more in-depth in Paragraph 3 of her essay as she took public transportation instead of being driven to school, did homework alone as opposed to having someone helping her, and how noticeable the home was without maids to clean it. Kim also dealt with the idea of knowing that, instead of being known as Korean, she was classified as Asian. The standards of respect in South Korean schools were different from American schools. As Kim described in Paragraph 5 of her essay, she experienced no paying the teacher any attention and the walls being covered by
graffiti. No challenge could have been more difficult to Suki Kim than learning the English language and how it showed the vast separation between her and her fellow Koreans. Kim found that, even though she shared a classroom with her fellow E.S.L. students, she had nothing in common with her classmates as they already came from poor families. Kim also realized that she was classified as part of the “1.5 generation” because of their basic understanding of the English language. The “1.5 generation” was caught in the wanting to learn the American ways while still honoring the Korean traditions they were raised on. But most importantly, her continuous learning of the English language came through various avenues, like watching television without a clear understanding of what was being watched. Kim’s story could simply be perceived as a girl who had a snobbish attitude because she came from a rich family, but I believe her story falls in place in with many of the people who have immigrated to the United States. Even people who are born in the same country can experience culture shock just by stepping across. I feel as though her story was one of realization with a sense of acceptance through her adaptation to a new country. Even though the essay is filled with her personal disgust and confusion, Kim’s tone was deliberate, concise, and straight forward with her description of her life during that time. Though people endure difficult times through transitional periods, home is ultimately what you make it even if home is not the “hilltop mansion with an orchard and a pond and peacocks”.