Special Treatment for Immigrants

This week we started the book clubs and I was assigned "The Leavers". The story is based around an Asian American family that was separated multiple times. As I read through the book, I noticed that each character is always involved in 2 or 3 time periods; each chapter jumps between those time periods which makes the start of chapters more interesting. So for my note page, I decided to focus on individual characters and how they were affected or involved in different time periods. I wrote down many characteristics that each character shows throughout the story such as Deming's resistance to the white culture during his childhood, Angel, Jim, and Elaine's ignorance of other cultures, Polly's love for Deming.

Interestingly, the more I wrote about the Chinese characters the more I understood their thoughts because I have experienced some similar things. For example, there was a passage that described the return of Jing from the US that actually represented what the situation is like in China. Jing acted like he is better than everyone else by pretending to not recognize Peilan and building a mansion in a poor village to flex his wealth from America when in reality, he did not really even do anything other than working in a restaurant and finding a legal Asian American wife. People also treat immigrants so differently in China; the second they find out you are an immigrant, they treat you like you are a new species and ask you all kinds of questions about the US. So each year when I go back to China to visit my relatives, I actually try to not say that I'm an immigrant when I go out to prevent the same questions from being asked a million times.

Another example of an accurate representation of immigrants in China is when Polly was deported because of her debt. While many Chinese people immigrate to the US in search of more opportunities and wealth, a lot of them did not successfully reach their goals and end up returning to China and getting decent jobs and lives despite their failure in the US. In Polly's case, she worked as an English teacher and married a company owner after being deported back to China. She was able to achieve this by lying about her past and abusing the new treatment that people give immigrants when they return. This is very common in China right now where people returning from foreign countries are getting more advantages in getting jobs when many of them returned because their debt in the US is too high.

Personally, I think this special treatment for immigrants are actually hurting China's jobs because these immigrants are using these treatments to clear up their debts quickly to go back to the US while actual Chinese citizens are suffering because those high paying jobs are all taken by immigrants that are not even planning to stay in China.