Asian American Writers' Contribution To Understanding Immigration and Identity

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is especially difficult for Indian women in America because the choice for them is not simply between the old and the new but between family and self and freedom and subservience. Each of the women in her stories creates a different balance from this complex set of circumstances.

2. Compare Toshio Mori's "Slant-Eyed Americans" and Cherylene Lee's "Safe".

Mori and Lee's stories appear on the surface to be about very different things, but a closer reading suggests that they are both at some level about the struggle that many Asian-Americans have between balancing family expectations and their own personal desires. In each case - although of course especially with Lee's characters - we see the conflict that develops in the children and grandchildren of immigrants who expect to choose their own professions and their parents who believe that their children should make choices based primarily on what is good for their families.
This is, of course, a dynamic in many ...

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life in their new country more seriously.
But Milagros shows us how sympathetic we should be to the younger generation of immigrants, those who are caught so clearly between worlds. Unlike her parents, Milagros has no say in whether or not she wishes to immigrate; she is simply taken from one world and thrust into another and she does the best that she can in trying to find a new set of bearings.
One of the most interesting aspects of this story is that it addresses the experiences of a group - Filipino-Americans - who are rarely heard from and helps us see how immigrating from the Philippines to the United States can be especially dislocating because the historical connection ...

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