I was truly amazed at how closely the political rhetoric we read about in Schlund-Vials utopian and Dystopian Citizenships meshes so well with the political rhetoric we heard in the 2016 election. The wording that was used in the New York Times review of the immigration problem entitled "does the pot melt it" I found to be truly shocking. I couldn’t believe that a person that is supposed to be bipartisan in their writing as a reporter should be could spew such drivel about the men and women who immigrated to our country seeking better lives. The article in the New York Times went so far as to suggest that the flood of immigration into America would cause a national calamity (S-V P3). Stating that the newly arriving immigrants to American soil are largely literate and have trouble …show more content…
In this novel, Jens tells the story of a second-generation Chinese-American Mona Chang. Mona is a young teen who is struggling with the racial and ethnic changes going on with the civil rights movements in the 1960s and 70s, I say struggling because Mona’s trying to find herself as an American while still having her parents try to install their traditional Chinese values that Mona finds to be backwards are un-American. Mona seems to resent her parent's thinly veiled attempts to assimilate their new American identities through purchasing material items or their obsession with their children getting into Harvard which in the book seems to represent the pinnacle of the American experience. In her quest to disassociate herself from her parent's more traditional Chinese way of thinking Mona decides to convert to the Jewish religion which she calls the model minority due to the Jewish community’s ability to Americanize themselves to the norms of American society. I found one of the most derogatory racial slurs in this book was when Mona’s Jewish friends began referring to her as ‘ Changowitz” (Jen