9781422277508

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Getting Here

Words to Understand emigration to leave one’s birth country and live somewhere else (compare to immigration, which means to go to a country) exclusion to keep someone out or deny them access presentation here, the style in which food is plated and served K aoKaliaYangwas just six years oldwhen she immigrated toAmericawithher family. She and her older sister were both born in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in Thailand. Everything about their new lives seemed strange at first—from the smells to the food, from the tall streetlights along roads to the “click, click” sound of women’s high heels on hard floors. Even sleeping in a multistory building was foreign to young Kao, but it was also exciting. “The idea of sleeping on air . . .” she wrote later, “felt like something magical.” Adjusting to a new country would not be easy for the Yang family. But even so, Kao was eager to embrace whatever lay ahead. “America was before me,” she recalled. “My mother and father were close by me, and the world was open.”

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