Literary Analysis: Exploring American Identity

In the poem the girl tells how she feels she is very American despite her Japanese appearance. She says things like "I have a white best friend" and "I don 't even like chop sticks" to show how she differs from the Japanese stereotype. The short story "Mericans" is told

Situational irony is the difference between what is expected to happen and what actually occurs. In the poem, a young girl wants to attend a freedom march, a type of political rally, in downtown Birmingham. Her mother fears the march isn’t a safe place for her daughter, so she sends her to church instead. The situational irony is that the mother expects that the church will provide a safe place for her daughter while the march would not. What occurs, however, is the opposite.

"Response to Executive Order 9066" by Dwight Okita is a poem about a young Japanese-American girl and how her life changed after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In the poem the narrator explains that she feels that she is more American than Japanese on the inside, but she is still Japanese, and is still seen as a threat to America. The narrator

This caused her to alienate herself since her mother asked her to keep a part of herself hidden from the world by binding her and making sure no one found out she menstruated ealy (Anzaldúa 1983, 221). This will later isolate her further but ultimately lead her to reflect on the racism that surrounds her. In addition, Anzaldúa’s identity also suffer because she denied her heritage and the traditions that with it. She mentions that she felt ashamed of her mother and her loud tendencies, it is an archetype that most Hispanic mothers are loud by nature, and the fact that her lunches, or “lonches”, consisted

In the story Where are you going, where have you been Connie, her mother and sister all have competitive relationships. Her mother says “Stop gawking at yourself.Who are you? You think you are so pretty?” to Connie after seeing Connie look at her own face maybe because her mother 's “looks were gone and that was why she was after Connie”(Oates 1). Her mother is jealous of her daughter, and because of that their relationship is weak. This is shown by the author’s choice of tone and usage of rhetorical phrases emphasizing on the point that their relationship is not family like.

Dwight Okita 's poem showed us about American identity has more to do with how you experience culture than where your family came from. Details of the texts such as the speaker describing herself as a typical teen girl, seeing that she dislikes chopsticks, something that we associate with Japanese culture, and telling us that she was the typical American meal of hot dogs. In Cisneros 's story, she tells us about the narrator 's American identity contrasts with her awful grandmother’s strong Mexican roots. But the Americans George the narrator based on her looks. Without this liked grandma of first praise for her American children and grandchildren in a barbaric country, which seems to contrast Michele, Keeks, and Juniors love of American culture, cause we can see, based on their heroes and villains game, which takes its references from popular American culture.

Growing Japanese populations, especially in the West Coast, caused Americans to kick out Japanese immigrants from their communities. Japs keep moving shows woman pointing at a sign on her porch that dismisses Japanese-Americans from her community (“Japs Keep Moving - This is a White Man’s Neighborhood”). This photo was taken in Hollywood, California and White residents from this area also founded the Hollywood Protective Association which was enacted by to “keep Hollywood White”. This picture represents nationwide hatred for Japanese-Americans and how Americans wanted to segregate them. This also shows how Americans took matters into their own hands and forced Roosevelt to enact Executive Order 9066.

Women must hide their skin, and they are taught to be ashamed of their sexuality. When Asayesh complains, “The men aren 't hot,” to a woman on the Caspian Sea’s shore, the woman’s companion is shocked. “Sister, this isn 't about men and women…this is about Islam,” she says. (188) However, that is fallacious: these rules cause Asayesh to feel ashamed and conscious of her bare skin. For example, by wearing a skimpy scarf, she risks “being accused of stepping on the blood of the martyrs who died in the war with Iraq.” (187) Paragraph 11 compares sex with Islam, “the veil masks erotic freedom, but it advocates believe hijab transcends the erotic-or expands it…where I come from, people are more likely to find delirious passion in the mosque than in the bedroom” (188).

Barbara Kingsolver in “Going to Japan” faces a similar struggle when she arrives in Japan. Kingsolver cannot communicate with the people of Japan due to her lack of understanding of the culture and language until she memorizes different “degrees of apology” to say to the victims of her transgressions (Kingsolver 122). Barbara Kingsolver did not want to stand out from the people of Japan, but unlike Antoni, she knew it was inevitable. She first learns the different ways to say she was sorry for his

However, “She soon faced difficulties fitting in. Frustrated by her lack of native English skills, and treated as a foreign by white and black classmates alike, she found herself growing homesick and pining for Japanese food unavailable in rural Arkansas” (Fackler). That’s to emphasize that through her experiences in the United States she was able to discover that she is really Japanese and according to the article, Miyamoto “has played down her African-American roots, presenting herself instead as a representative of ethnically mixed Japanese from all backgrounds” (Fackler). This leads us to argue that Miss Japan has chosen to construct and represent her