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Transferring midway around the globe to a brand new nation the place everybody speaks a brand new language can be a difficult expertise for nearly anybody. However for 10-year-old Zhang Ai Shi and her dad and mom, leaving Taiwan means an opportunity for a greater life in america, a spot identified in China as “the gorgeous nation.”
Within the fall of 1980, Ai Shi’s household strikes right into a cramped one-bedroom condominium on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Her dad and mom use their life financial savings to buy a fast-food restaurant, but it surely’s a battle to make their enterprise enterprise succeed. The restaurant is repeatedly vandalized, and Ai Shi’s classmates in school usually make racist feedback towards her. Ai Shi and her household all work onerous, however cash stays tight, and Ai Shi misses the buddies and traditions she left behind in Taiwan. Even her birthday and Christmas are disappointing. Will Ai Shi ever really feel at house in America?
With Within the Stunning Nation, debut writer Jane Kuo attracts on her personal expertise of immigrating to the U.S. in the course of the Eighties to create a shifting story of household, heartbreak and, in time, hope. She portrays her younger protagonist’s emotions of being torn between two cultures whereas capturing snapshots of the Zhang household’s journey and on a regular basis lives.
Free verse written from Ai Shi’s perspective strikes the proper steadiness between approachable and lyrical. As she contemplates her new life, Ai Shi wonders whether or not one thing may be ugly and exquisite on the similar time. “And an individual, / can an individual really feel two totally different feelings, / can an individual be each grateful and unhappy, / at precisely the identical time?” By embracing what they’ve, as an alternative of dwelling on what they lack, Ai Shi and her household ultimately understand that once they’re collectively, supporting each other, they’re really house.
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