Immigration Literature

If we examine two short stories by minority women, we see how immigrants often face challenges of assimilation, expression of identity, and survival upon arriving in new countries. In the case of Etsu Sugimoto, we see how the distinct differences between her neighbor and she provide her with a fuller understanding of the similarities between her own Japanese culture and American culture. In Tillie Olsen's story, we do not get as heavily accentuated a tale regarding immigrants and/or minorities. While Olsen is Jewish and her daughter suffers from internalized cultural ideals of external beauty, the experiences in this story actually demonstrate the universal experiences of all human beings despite their being experienced by an immigrant minority women.

In Sugimoto's A Daughter of the Samurai we see the experiences of a Japanese girl whose neighbors' questions regarding her native culture provide her with greater insights into her own and its similarity to American culture. For instance, we see that Miss Helen is shocked to discover there are women in Japanese culture like Molly Pitchers but even more so to discover there are entire Japanese societies where men maintain the domestic sphere while women labor in the work force. As she tells Miss Helen, "A genuine woman's-rights woman is not one who wants her rights, but one who has them" (Sugimoto 251). Still, despite similarities to American culture like the one above, there are many diff

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ee, also, that a mother often anguishes over her inability to have raised her children in the true manner she would have liked had other circumstances been the case. For example, much like Langston Hughes' poem A Dream Deferred, we see that because of little income or wherewithal other than to make a living and survive, the narrator understands her daughter's potential talent was left untapped, "You ought to do something about her with a gift like that�but without money or knowing how, what does one do? We have left it all to her, and the gift has as often eddied inside, clogged and clotted, as been used and growing" (Olsen 185). In this, we can see that immigrants and minorities often face single parenthood and poverty in an effort to make a living in a new land. Yet, the universal human quality of wishing one could do more to support her child is something that transcends minority or immigrant status. Despite the fact that I Stand Here Ironing reads more like a feminist, mother-daughter bonding tract than the tale of a struggling immigrant to make it as a single mother, there are some significant elements in the story that are designed to demonstrate how difficult it is for minorities to assimilate into a mainstream culture

Category: Literature - I