Unit 1: Vocabulary from Readings 6

We dressed alike, in saris; we expressed identical views on politics, social issues, love and marriage in the same Calcutta convent-school accent.

By choosing a husband who was not my father's selection, I was opting for fluidity, self-invention, blue jeans and T-shirts, and renouncing 3,000 years (at least) of caste-observant, “pure culture” marriage in the Mukherjee family.

By choosing a husband who was not my father's selection, I was opting for fluidity, self-invention, blue jeans and T-shirts, and renouncing 3,000 years (at least) of caste -observant, “pure culture” marriage in the Mukherjee family.

In our regular Sunday morning conversations, we are unguardedly affectionate.

I, for the narrowness of her perspective, her uninvolvement with the mythic depths or the superficial pop culture of this society.

But, now, with the scapegoating of “aliens” (documented or illegal) on the increase, and the targeting of long-term legal immigrants like Mira for new scrutiny and new self-consciousness, she and I find ourselves unable to maintain the same polite discretion.

But, now, with the scapegoating of “aliens” (documented or illegal) on the increase, and the targeting of long-term legal immigrants like Mira for new scrutiny and new self-consciousness, she and I find ourselves unable to maintain the same polite discretion.

But, now, with the scapegoating of “aliens” (documented or illegal) on the increase, and the targeting of long-term legal immigrants like Mira for new scrutiny and new self-consciousness, she and I find ourselves unable to maintain the same polite discretion.

“I feel used,” Mira raged on the phone the other night. “I feel manipulated and discarded..."

If America wants to make new rules curtailing benefits of legal immigrants, they should apply only to immigrants who arrive after those rules are already in place.

Have we the right to demand, and to expect, that we be loved? (That, to me, is the subtext of the arguments by immigration advocates.)

In one family, from two sisters alike as peas in a pod, there could not be a wider divergence of immigrant experience.

America spoke to me—I married it—I embraced the demotion from expatriate aristocrat to immigrant nobody, surrendering those thousands of years of “pure culture,” the saris, the delightfully accented English.

Then, through a Green Paper that invited a national referendum on the unwanted side effects of “nontraditional” immigration, the Government officially turned against its immigrant communities, particularly those from South Asia.