Moresi 1
Samuel Moresi
English 1001
Dr. Alice Blackwell
October 4, 18
“The Good Immigrant Student”
In the short story “The Good Immigrant Student,”Bich Minh Nguyen gives readers a glimpse into what life was like for her immigrant family in Grand Rapids, Michigan during the 1980’s. Nguyen and her family moved to the area during the mid 70’s as refugees escaping from the effects brought upon by the Vietnam War. At the age of three, her father married a woman who went by the name of Rosa. Rosa was very dedicated in introducing English about in the family. Rosa, who was Latin American herself, understood just how hard it was for immigrant families to keep their culture intact. Rosa slowly watched the “americanization” of both Nguyen and her older sister Anh.
Rosa recalls an instance where the two would recite lines right from the TV in perfect English, but as soon as the show ended, they would revert back to Vietnamese. When the time came for the girls to enter elementary school, Rosa urged them to take the longer bus ride all the way to Sherwood Elementary because she heard they had an excellent bilingual education program. During their time at Sherwood, the girls faced many challenges. They were judged and mocked by their peers because of their race, and they were harassed at the playground and called names like, “Ching-Chong”. Nothing seemed to be going right for them, not even the bilingual education. The bilingual program was designed so that students would spend half of the day in traditional classes and the other in special ESL classes. This made the girls stick out even more because they had to be manly taken out walked to the there designated classroom while in the class room the students would look over photo copied english phrases and asked the recite them and giving the meaning. The girls breezed through this part the only thing that would give them trouble would be vietnamese. Since this was an all inclusive ESL class all of the course work was assigned in vietnamese. After a few weeks of failing to complete test and assignments Anh fesses up to Rosa and tells her the truth that the two no longer need to attend the bilingual program at Sherwood. and want to go to school closer to home at Ken-O-Sha Elementary hoping they will have more sense of belonging while Ken-O-Sha had a wider diversity of students from different types of econoic backgrounds the school like the rest of the town was still lacking in racial diversity this lead Nguyen overtime to become an introvert and only outlook to gain approval was threw school work Anh was almost completely the opposite she began smoking and taking the car out past curfew The two felt a lot of social pressure Nguyen looked to exceeded the systems standards while Anh looked to rebel against them. Even with Nguyen’s high academic marks her teachers never treated her the same After she won the spelling bee she her overheard comments from Teachers saying “Can you believe it?….A foreigner winning our spelling bee! It was not until after high school when the sisters fully recovered from the systematic prejudice that was placed on to them and ever since them Nguyen has made it her goal to reform the way foreign students are seen in the class room she took her situation and used it to make a model of what other schools need to follow. While Nguyen admits that the treatment of immigrant / foreign students is much better today she states that the problem is still a relevant issue. “Such good, good kids,” Nguyen quotes “immigrant, foreigner, their eyes watchful and waiting for whatever judgment will occur”