Both Khaled Hosseini's novel ‘The Kite Runner’ and the short stories "Are You Different?" by Mia Francis and "Chinese Lessons" by Ivy Tseng in the anthology "Growing Up Asian In Australia" by various authors discuss the notion of being displaced. In the texts, the role of being an outsider extends from being excluded in one's own family to a large-scale elimination of the ethnic minorities. In both ‘The Kite Runner’ and ‘Growing Up Asian in Australia’, it is inferred that the idea of being the outsider causes individuals to experience pain, because the way that they perceive themselves and by the people around them as different leads them to feel voiceless, discriminated, and conflicted in a place where they should feel like they belong. …show more content…
Amir's inability to meet his father's expectations leads to a strained relationship between them. Furthermore, because of Amir's failure to meet his father's standards, this causes Baba to shift his attention towards Hassan. When Hassan gets a surgery for his cleft lip, Amir expresses his feelings of jealousy by saying, " I wished I too had some kind of scar that would beget Baba's sympathy… Hassan hadn't done anything to earn Baba's affections; he'd just been born with that stupid harelip." An irony is presented, as Amir had done everything to impress and make his father feel proud of him, yet nothing changes in their relationship. Opposingly, Hassan does not do anything to impress Baba, but he was treated in a special way by him. This causes Amir to feel excluded in his own family, and to feel like he has no power against Hassan as he is favoured more by Baba. Similarly, Ivy experiences the same sense of exclusion in her family due to her inability to speak Chinese. She does not value the time that her father spent on teaching and does not see the point of learning it. However, when Ivy understands why her father wants to teach her Chinese, she realises that it is to connect her to their culture, and …show more content…
Being a Hazara, Ali suffered the consequences of being in the minority. Ali's disability and ethnic features caused him to be mocked by the people around him which is evident in the racist taunts of "Hey Babalu, who did you eat today?...Who did you eat you flat-nosed Babalu?" which represents the everyone else's disgust towards his physical features. The Hazaras are treated as the ethnic minority, as opposed to the Shi'a muslims. Furthermore, The disregard for the Hazaras are shown when Amir describes, "School textbooks barely mentioned them and referred to their ancestry only in passing." This might be perhaps because of the Pashtuns' belief that the Hazaras are not as important. This leads the Hazaras to feel like the outsiders. Likewise, Ricky is enthralled in displacement because of his different skin colour and his different facial features. Francis discusses what Ricky had to go through. She describes, in second person, the 'school-yard taunts of 'flat-nose', 'ching-chong Chinaman' and 'dirty black nigger' which came and went throughout Ricky's years in primary school. Perhaps these taunts are meant to degrade Ricky's background because he looks different from everyone else. Because Ali and Ricky were of different backgrounds from everyone else, they were the targets of discrimination and racist taunts which may have led to them feeling like