l advantage of the academic opportunities available here, complete my education, and then return to Indonesia, ready to apply what I had learned to a career and a family. I had learned enough about the United States to understand some of the cultural differences I would face. I was not so sheltered as Sumita, and I knew I could make many of my own choices about my future. At the end of the story, Sumita realizes she cannot go back to India because she has been changed too much by "this new, dangerous land."
I still intend to go back, but I, too, have already been changed. I will never be a fully American woman (I do not believe I want to try that transformation), but I will also never be completely Indonesian again, either. Experiencing the kind of freedom, choices, and expectations that America offers has changed me, not as profoundly as Sumita has been changed, but just as completely.
I feel a particular affinity to Cathy Song's poem, "Silk," in which she compares learning to sew with the refuge offered by
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