The topic of migration and immigration had always captured my interest ever since high school; perhaps it was due to the fact that my parents were also immigrants. Textbooks had educated me on the discrimination and hatred that the migrants of the Great Migration received, I actually did not know that the rates of work force participation, marriage and others were better than those who had originally resided in the North. This goes to show that reading textbook facts about historical events in comparison to Isabel Wilkerson’s second hand account does differ a lot in respect to the amount and type of information gathered.

 

Isabel stated something that I found quite poetic – “These millions of people, and what they did, would seep into nearly every realm of American culture, into the words of Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison…the poetry and music of Langston Hughes and B.B. King..” It was quite representative of many immigrants in America. These millions of people came to escape the oppression that they were originally under, and although America at the time had tried so hard to suppress, in a sense, their existence, these people were actually the ones to create huge milestones in American history and culture. I feel strongly about the impact made because I wish for Asian Americans to do the same.

Although New York City itself is a wonderful melting pot of different cultures and is also a wonderful canvas to lay down art, there has yet to be a significant movement made by Asians in America. Similar to how blues and jazz originated from the South, I hope for Eastern culture to leave its imprint on the United States in the form of something else other than General Tsao’s chicken.