Miami Regional University Two Ways to Belong to America By Bharati Mukhrejee HW My Professor says read the essay ,take good notes and then write summary of

Miami Regional University Two Ways to Belong to America By Bharati Mukhrejee HW My Professor says read the essay ,take good notes and then write summary of it . 250 words approximately -r”.
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TWO WAYS TO BELONG IN AMERICA
BHARATI MUKHERJEE
Two Ways to Belong
in America
Born in 1940 and raised in Calcutta, India, Bharati Mukherjee immigrated to the United States in 1961 and earned an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. in
literature. Mukherjee is the author of several novels, including Tiger’s
Daughter (1972) and Jasmine (1989), and short story col/ections, such
as The Middleman and Other Stories (1988). She teaches literature
and fiction writing at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Two Ways to Belong in America” first appeared in the New York
Times. It waS written to address a movement in Congress to take away
government benefits from resident aliens. Like her fiction, though, it is
also about the issues that confront all immigrants in America.
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This is a tale of two sisters from Calcutta, Mira and Bharati, who
have lived in the United States for some 35 years, but who find
themselves on different sides in the current debate over the status
of immigrants. I am an American citizen and she is not. I am
moved that thousands of long-term residents are finally taking
the oath of citizenship. She is not.
Mira arrived in Detroit in 1960 to study child psychology and
pre-school education. I followed her a year later to study creative
writing at the University of Iowa. When we left India, we were
almost identical in appearance and attitude. We dressed alike, in
saris; we expressed identical views on politics, social issues, love,
and marriage in the same Calcutta convent-school accent. We
would endure our two years in America, secure our degrees, then
return to India to marry the grooms of our father’s choosing.
Instead, Mira married an Indian student in 1962 who was getting his business administration degree at Wayne State University. They soon acquired the labor certifications necessary for the
green card of hassle-free residence and employment.
Mira still lives in Detroit, works in the Southfield, Mich., school
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system, and has become nationally recognized for her contributions in the fields of pre-school education and parent-teacher
relationships. After 36 years as a legal immigrant in this country,
she clings passionately to her Indian citizenship and hopes to go
home to India when she retires.
In Iowa City in 1963, I married a fellow student, an American
of Canadian parentage. Because of the accident of his North
Dakota birth, I bypassed labor-certification requirements and the
race-related “quota” system that favored the applicant’s country
of origin over his or her merit. I was prepared for (and even welcomed) the emotional strain that came with marrying outside my
ethnic community. In 33 years of marriage, we have lived in every
part of North America. By choosing a husband who was not my
father’s selection, I was opting for fluidity, self-invention, blue
jeans, and T-shirts, and renouncing 3,000 years (at least) of casteobservant, “pure culture” marriage in the Mukherjee family. My
books have often been read as unapologetic (and in some quarters overenthusiastic) texts for cultural and psychological “mongrelization.” It’s a word I celebrate.
Mira and I have stayed sisterly close by phone. In our regular
Sunday morning conversations, we are unguardedly affectionate.
I am her only blood relative on this continent. We expect to see
each other through the looming crises of aging and ill health
without being asked. Long before Vice President Gore’s “Citizenship U.S.A.” drive, we’d had our polite arguments over the ethics
of retaining an overseas citizenship while expecting the permanent protection and economic benefits that come with living and
working in America.
Like well-raised sisters, we never said what was really on our
minds, but we probably pitied one another. She, for the lack of
shucture in my life, the erasure of Indianness, the absence of an
unvarying daily core. I, for the narrowness of her perspective, her
uninvolvement with the mythic depths or the superficial pop culture of this society. But, now, with the scapegoatings of “aliens”
(documented or illegal) on the increase, and the targeting of longterm legal immigrants like Mira for new scrutiny and new selfconsciousness, she and I find ourselves unable to maintain the
same polite discretion. We were always unacknowledged adversaries, and we are now, more than ever, sisters.
“I feel used,” Mira raged on the phone the other night. “I feel
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TWO WAYS TO BELONG TN AMERICA
BHARATI MUKHERJEE
manipulated and discarded. This is such an unfair way to treat a
person who was invited to stay and work here because of her talent. My employer went to the LN.S. and petitioned for the labor
certification. For over 30 years, I’ve invested my creativity and
professional skills into the improvement of this country’s preschool system. I’ve obeyed all the rules, I’ve paid my taxes, I love
my work, I love my students, I love the friends I’ve made. How
dare America now change its rules in midstream? If America
wants to make new rules curtailing benefits of legal immigrants,
they should apply only to immigrants who arrive after those rules
are already in place.”
To my ears, it sounded like the description of a long-enduring,
comfortable yet loveless marriage, without risk or recklessness.
Have we the right to demand, and to expect, that we be loved?
(That, to me, is the subtext of the arguments by immigration
advocates.) My sister is an expatriate, professionally generous
and creative, socially courteous and gracious, and that’s as far as
her Americanization can go. She is here to maintain an identity,
not to transform it.
I asked her if she would follow the example of others who have
decided to become citizens because of the anti-immigration bills
in Congress. And here, she surprised me. “If America wants to
play the manipulative game, I’ll play it, too,” she snapped. “I’ll
become a U.S. citizen for now, then change back to India when
I’m ready to go home. I feel some kind of irrational attachment to
India that I don’t to America. Until all this hysteria against legal
immigrants, I was totally happy. Having my green card meant I
could visit any place in the world I wanted to and then come back
to a job that’s satisfying and that I do very well.”
In one family, from two sisters alike as peas in a pod, there
could not be a wider divergence of immigrant experience. America spoke to me-I married it-I embraced the demotion from
expatriate aristocrat to immigrant nobody, surrendering those
thousands of years of “pure culture,” the saris, the delightfully
accented English. She retained them all. Which of us is the freak?
Mira’s voice, I realize, is the voice not just of the immigrant
South Asian community but of an immigrant community of the
millions who have stayed rooted in one job, one city, one house,
one ancestral culture, one cuisine, for the entirety of their productive years. She speaks for greater numbers than I possibly
can. Only the fluency of her English and the anger, rather than
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fear, born of confidence from her education, differentiate her
from the seamstresses, the domestics, the technicians, the shop
owners, the millions of hard-working but effectively silenced
documented immigrants as well as their less fortunate “illegal”
brothers and sisters.
Nearly 20 years ago, when I was living in my husband’s ancestral homeland of Canada, I was always well-employed but never
allowed to feel part of the local Quebec or larger Canadian society. Then, through a Green Paper that invited a national referendum on the unwanted side effects of “nontraditional” immigration, the government officially turned against its immigrant
communities, particularly those from South Asia.
I felt then the same sense of betrayal that Mira feels now. I will
never forget the pain of that sudden turning, and the casual racist
outbursts the Green Paper elicited. That sense of betrayal had its
desired effect and drove me, and thousands like me, from the
country.
Mira and I differ, however, in the ways in which we hope to
interact with the country that we have chosen to live in. She is
happier to live in America as expatriate Indian than as an immigrant American. I need to feel like a part of the community I have
adopted (as I tried to feel in Canada as well). I need to put roots
down, to vote and make the difference that I can. The price that
the immigrant willingly pays, and that the exile avoids, is the
trauma of self-transformation.
For Discussion and Writing
1. Make a list of specific qualities, behaviors, and beliefs for each of the
two sisters. What similarities and differences are evident?
2. Mukherjee spends much of this essay comparing herself to her sister.
What larger comparison does this analysis support?
3. Mukherjee’s essay contains a lot of background information (about
politics and history), which she skillfully weaves into the story she
tells about herself and her sister. Compare the way she incorporates
information to the method used by Stephen Jay Gould in “Women’s
Brains” (p. 130).
4. Think of a sibling or mend with whom you disagree vehemently over
some issue or idea. Describe your arguments about it. Are they
“polite,” as Mukherjee says hers are with her sister?
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