Daryl McDowell
“Facing poverty with a rich girl’s habits” by Kim
Mrs. Shannon O’Stricker
ENG115
4/14/2012

In “Facing Poverty with a Rich Girl’s Habits” by Suki Kim, Suki talks about how a Korean girl went from being wealthy to her family going bankrupt. I think that her most important point is that she is now a Korean-American who once lived wealthy in Korea and then moved to the big city of Queens, New York in the 1980’s. Dealing with economic hardship, Kim had to adapt to the situation. The audience is anybody who reads her story. I think that her life story is for everyone of all ages. Because of her tone, I felt she was composed about the situation. I feel that she seemed to adjust very well in her new environment. For the first time Kim had to do her own laundry and take public transportation to school.
After her father loses his shipping company, mining business and hotels, things started to fall apart. The author, Suki Kim is being described in this essay. This is her life story. The most important change in her life came when she started middle school; her father went bankrupt and lost everything that mattered to the family. Because bankruptcy was punishable by a jail term, she was then moved from her hilltop mansion with an orchard, pond and peacocks to Queens New York.
Suki had difficulty adjusting to the American culture. At age 13, instead of being driven by a chauffeur she took public transportation to school for the first time. She never had homework without a tutor helping her, or having to do her own laundry. Unlike Korean schools, students were taught to bow to teachers. Kim quickly realized that things were much different at her current school in New York. Kim had stated that she preferred her Hello Kitty backpack to the ones with pictures of the Menudo boys and cried for weeks because her parents would not allow her to get her ear pierced. She didn’t know a thing about how to speak English. Kim stated that, she watched Three’s Company in an attempt to learn English.
Since she is no longer rich, I feel that she is now experiencing being a middle class teenager. She has to do her own chores and ride a bus back and forth to school everyday. She describes herself as being 1.5 generation. I feel the author had to have been a strong person to tolerate being called F.O.B, but she didn’t understand what it meant because she has flown Korean Air to Kennedy Airport. As a youth, it’s hard to understand social labels. But, she overcame the problems she had to go through as an immigrant who now had to learn English. I thought that Suki Kim’s “Facing Poverty with a Rich Girl’s Habits” was successful in defining an identity. She talks about having an identity in Korea and having to discover a new identity for herself in Queens. I personally enjoyed reading about her experience with immigration. I thought Suki Kim’s essay was the most excellent.