Immigrant Reflection

During this course, I have learned that the immigrants have so many difficulties in the America, they struggle with life as an outsider, they are different in languages, cultures, religions. I also know the reasons that forced them to leave their mother country: it is because of the politic issue, the war, the poverty, etc. And all of those things, were described completely through the story of my participant. His story truly reflects every thing that I have learned about life of an immigrant. He came here because he wanted to have a better life, he wanted to help his mother back home and he wanted that his children, his grandchildren can have a brighter future in this dreamed land. He struggled with his language, he had to work two jobs, he
They keep doing things in the way they did in their homeland. He told me that all of his grandchildren, are able to speak Vietnamese fluently, although they were raised in the US, his family celebrates “TET” ( a national holiday of Vietnam) every year with Vietnamese foods, he gathers with his old friends every morning to play chess and drink coffee. In America, he sees Vietnam in everything of his lifestyle, he feels Vietnam everywhere he comes. The most significant thing that I heard from his story and I think it is missing in the mediated version is that he had to work two jobs and he was so tired that he couldn’t eat or drink anything by himself. That is the most touchable detail in his story because it reflects a hard working life and never giving up, it reflects how strong he is, how brave he is. One more thing is that in the mediate version, people only mention about life of young immigrants but rarely describes life of old immigrants. In my perspective, old immigrants have more difficulties compared with young
Secondly, it is a challenge to old immigrants if they have to learn a new language. Take the man in my story as an example, he cannot speak english fluently although he has lived in US for almost 20 years, this is a disadvantage for him to communicate in an english-speaking society. And because of this reason, he couldn’t get a high paying job. I think the missing in mediated version is that it rarely describes how hard a life of an old immigrant is in the US. The common reason why they left their country to come to the US without any concern about the difficulties that they would have met at their ages is because they want their children, their younger generations to have a better life. They sacrifice the rest of their life - at the age that they deserve to retire - to start everything again in a new country, to chase a dream about a wealthy life for their