Book 1 Post 2

 American Like Me, edited by America Ferrera

After reading American Like Me, I felt like I gained a lot of insight and appreciation for the immigrant story and the variety of different cultures in the world. One story that stood out to me was Issa Rae's story of how she spent time in Senegal growing up. For the holiday Tabaski, people would get dressed up, do their hair, and for weeks fatten up goats or sheep that they would eat for this day. I haven't been exposed to this tradition before and it always interests me to learn how different cultures celebrate their most important holidays in comparison to American holidays. For example, Issa mentioned how her family would raise the goat, kill it themselves, and then cook it. This is definitely a big difference than the US since we just buy turkeys from the store on Thanksgiving and rarely, do we raise our own animals.

This book made me realize how different cultures are very similar as well. Roxane Gay mentioned how her parents were "deeply invested" in her and her brother's lives and almost all the stories mentioned large family celebrations. Despite the stories of parents raising children in a new culture differently, the common theme was that they did the best they could with what they believed to be right. This definitely made me appreciate my parent's efforts more since they immigrated to the United States. Specifically rules from my parents that I think are too overbearing are most likely rules that they had growing up in a completely different environment. 

Overall, I think I relate to Liza Koshy's story the most. Liza grew up in Texas and would get the reaction of "you must have had to deal with a lot of racism growing up" after telling people that. I feel like this is pretty similar to the reaction I get when I tell people I grew up in Indiana. But then Liza talks about how her friends come from different ethnicities, like white, Hispanic, mixed, and Asian, and this described my high school friends extremely accurately. Even though I grew up in a more rural area, I still was able to experience the diversity of the United States and it wasn't a huge obstacle in enjoying the "high school experience." I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is a first generation American or anyone who wants to learn about different cultures.