Read 6
Bridget Read
Professor Callahan
English 2291
23 April 2014
Encourages Citizens to Improve the Nation
One text that encourages citizens to improve the nation would be "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian." This text should want citizens to improve our nation because we still treat immigrants just as bad as she was treated in her own story. When she was just a little girl, she started to experience what it was like to be "Chinese" just by little things to major issues. Americans would whisper about her mother being Chinese and when she went to go tell her mother, the American nurse tells her mother "Little Miss Sui is a story-teller," and her mother slaps her daughter punishing her for making what she heard up. Parents even would act or say things in front of their own children about her own race. For example, "I wouldn't speak to Sui if I were you.
Her mamma is Chinese" show that we treated the Chinese as if they were not just like us. This made citizens want to improve the nation because this looks bad on their part, why would they want to be the land of the free and greatness so they tried to accept different cultures.
Even children and the city itself took part in this shameful era that caused the Chinese to hurt, and feel as they were not supposed to be in America. In the city they had stores run by Chinese that made them think of do we look like that, are we poor, do we wear clothes like they do. The Chinese children would be called name such as, "Chinky, Chinky, Chinaman, yellow-face, pigtail, rat-eater" (Eaton 848). This racism or racial slurs caused a big fight that tore the children's clothes,