“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me…”
Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” 1903
(on a plaque mounted inside the Statue of Liberty)
Introduction
I have always been fascinated with family connections, relationships, and feeling attached to roots, culture, and issues of identity. I am positive this is because I am adopted, and my adoptive family’s European background was so different from mine. I am half-Asian; my biological father was from India. Not only did I not look like my fair-haired immediate or extended family members, my ethnicity and race were different enough that I often felt that I did not belong to them, even though I knew they loved me and they were vocal to me about their feelings. I craved a connection to this family that I bore no resemblance to, and also to myself and my developing conceptions of self and identity.
During my childhood, my family moved to several different geographical areas in the Midwest, one of which was made up of overwhelmingly Caucasian demographics. The region we settled in when I was ten years old was also far from any type of urban center; the nearest shopping mall was over an hour away, and an airport was a three-hour drive in one direction. There were no people of color in the area and I struggled to answer my new classmates’ questions of where I came from, and what I was. I was uncomfortable being singled out, and also did not know how to articulate my background and how I myself felt about it.
As I got older, I decided to find my biological parents, and discovered that for over a dozen years, my birth father had been living only 15 minutes from me in my new home of metropolitan New York City. Unfortunately, he had already died, but as time went on, I found out more about him from his sons, my half-siblings: He had immigrated to the United States from India to get a PhD, and was a sociology professor at various higher-learning institutions in Wisconsin and New York. Social equality meant a great deal to him; indeed, he had authored a study of and argued for the need for higher education opportunities for first-generation, low-income high school students.1 I began to wonder about his experiences as a foreigner in the United States: What biases or difficulties had he dealt with? What was it like getting a job here as an academic? What did he teach his children, all born here and therefore, automatic citizens? If I got the chance to sit down and have a conversation with him, I would want to know, among other things, what he would think about the current political climate and attitude toward immigrants, and if he thought he would be welcomed into the country today. And if he were still alive, what would he teach his students about equity for immigrants, identity, and civil rights?
I am sure these experiences and musings have impacted my decision to teach English as a Second Language (ESL), a career in which I have taught students of all ages from all over the world. I feel connected with their efforts to find the right place and sense of identity in a completely new country, with its own cultural, linguistic, behavioral, familial and social expectations and norms. As a result, as a teacher I have tried to increasingly seek out units of study and reading materials that touch on these themes and also reflect the prevailing political realities that exist for immigrants and refugees to the United States.
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