the hardships
Immigration is the act of coming to a foreign country to live. Most people find it very hard to pull up roots in their native land and move to a strange country. But throughout history, countless millions of people have done so. People forsake their homeland and move to another country for various reasons. There are others who were brought against their will. Upon immigrating to their newfound homelands, the majority face many hardships on the way. Even those who have made it to their new place of residence, face many hardships in their new homeland. Among those who have written about their struggle to get to America are Vo Thi Tam in “A Boat Person’s Story” and Miguel Torres in “Crossing the Boarder”. Both of these writers are trying to find a congenial home in their new countries. Both deal with different struggles that people face in trying to escape from their homelands. There are other stories in which people have written about their struggles to survive in their new country, among these are “The Promised Land” by Mary Antin and “Fifth Chinese Daughter” by Jade Snow Wong. Both of these writers have found a congenial home in America. I have interviewed a newcomer to this country named Premicio Gonzalez whose story adds to our knowledge of today’s immigrant struggles. The “Boat Person’s Story” is an interview with Vo Thi Tam describing her escape from Vietnam in 1979. Vo Thi Tam was married to a former officer in the Santana 2 South Vietnamese air force, who was sent to a concentration camp after the fall of the government in 1975. The idea of the concentration camp was to provide “reeducation”. After being let out of the concentration camp they were forced to live out in the jungle and fend for themselves: cultivating bad land, building their housing, and organizing it. They were only given tools and little food, everything else was on them. Tam stated that, “It was impossible for us to live there”, so they invested with some other families and bought a thirty-five foot long fishing boat. (Tam 87) After buying the boat they had to hide it in a harbor in the Mekong Delta, where many people who made their living fishing kept their boats. The Communist authorities would suspect something if the boat did not move, so they would bring the boat around the harbor as if they were fishing or selling things. This boat was to be their escape way to a better living. In order to afford to buy gasoline and other stuff on the black market, Tam and the other families sold their jewelry and radios in which they still had from when they living a comfortable lifestyle. They also bought a smaller boat to transport the things that they would buy on the black-market to the bigger boat.