As I read this chapter, I was immediately drawn in. Unlike the other books that we read, this book starts out with more of a personal approach. Although the facts were interesting, I felt that the personal accounts which were strategically placed throughout the chapter had a stronger impact on me. I was somewhat reminded of Guadalupe in New York when we were able to learn more about the individual struggles over the immigrant group as a whole. The firsthand account definitely produces more of an emotional and empathetic reaction from the reader than just reading about the experiences or just reading facts.
Reading this once again reminded me of how much of a struggle some immgrants will go through just to get to America. The amount of money these immigrants paid- from 25,000 to 50,000 seems to be a bit much for the hard, long journey that they had coming over, lacking food and under the control of angry snakeheads. -But I guess that when this is their only method of getting here, when it has to be illegally, that the price they can get is what they will take.
While I was interested in all of the stories, some parts of them really stood out to me. In the second story, a young woman who came to America was saying how even her uncle would ask her for “special favors” that he would pay her for, in her demonstration of how women immigrants were taken advantage of. If I interpreted that correctly, I was kind of shocked that a family member would do that. The last story also stood out to me a lot. I felt so bad when I read that the man was crying because he had to send his 70-day old baby back to China because he could not afford to take care of her in America. I can’t imagine how upsetting it would be to have to send my young baby halfway around the world because I could not afford to take care of it. Finally, the story about how the man was beat when he got off the boat because the snakeheads did not believe he would pay, was very engaging. I believe that his story about how he was praying to God, and how that helped him heal later on, will be somewhat of an introduction to the rest of the book and how religion has had a strong influence on helping the Chinese immigrants, many of whom probably have these terrible stories of their journeys and beginning of life in America. I’m interested to keep reading and hope that there will be more personal accounts throughout the book.
(I dont have the book with me right now to put in the names of these people, so I’ll edit this post later just to clarify who I’m talking about for anyone who reads this)
