Analysis: The New Colossus

Being an immigrant in the United States is not easy. Nothing but a little bit of common sense is needed to understand the struggle that leaving your natal country, starting from scratch, and abandoning your family represents. For these people being in a new country in which their all-life traditions are misunderstood, or in which their language is not even spoken, definitely complicate their daily life. Thanks to technology, society is connected more than ever, reason why we hear new stories about immigration all the time (through television, radio, or internet), but a great part of history is hidden underneath the lines of several poems from past ages. “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, “Learning to love America” by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

How do they felt during this process?. They came from different cultures, sometimes without even having a decent dominance of the English language, they abandoned their families and their whole lives. Considering this, that question seems hard to answer for someone who hasn’t actually experienced this process. “Learning to love America” by Shirley Geok-lin Lim describes the struggle and remorse that cultural transition may represent. In this poem the narrator starts by saying “because it has no pure products”, expressing the idea that no one in America is pure. She is letting us know from the first line of the poem that the place she is learning to love is full of diversity (full of people with different backgrounds) and no one in there is a pure product. In the second stanza, she expresses how safe she is feeling in America, by saying “because the water of the ocean is cold / and because land is better than the ocean”. Geok-lin Lim is creating a contrast between this “land” and how lucky she is feeling about not being in that cold “water” anymore. In the next line, Geok-lin includes herself in the "group", “because I say we rather than they”. She justifies her previous sentence by letting us know that she lives in California and eats fresh artichokes. She is doing the same things that a regular Californian does, she is one of them. Her “senses have caught up with [her] body”, she belongs now. Geok-lin Lim celebrates being able to “walk barefoot in her house”, a way to say that she is free, she can do whatever she wants (maybe she didn’t have that privilege before coming to America). In line 13, she mentions the existence of her son, who is a “strong American boy”. When she realizes that her son has an identity problem, she became aware of how particular their situation was. She feels tied to America because her son