--The Land of The Free--

      Trust me, every foreigner buys into the American dream cliché. If they didn’t there would not be nearly as many immigrants in the U.S. than there is. There are other places to go, but other places do not have the Statue of Liberty inviting them there. The statue says,

Give me your tired, you poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

      And so we come, the economic refugees, the political refugees, the social refugees. The people who have come to the United States have come to escape something. Jasmine is no different. Jasmine had to escape her fate of being married to a widower with three children. She was being sold into slavery and life of misery. She knew it, her teacher and father knew it. She knew that she needed to transform her life long before she actually began her plans to leave her homeland. Mukherjee writes that Jasmine did not want to marry a man who did not speak English: “To want English is to want more than you had been given at birth, it was to want the world” (Mukherjee 68).

      When Jasmine finally reached America, she had a number of her dreams destroyed already. She had to formulate new dreams. This is a common experience among foreigners coming to America. They learn quickly America is nothing like they imagined, and for the immigrants who manage to adapt and succeed, there are millions who never fulfill the American dream, and there are many who find America to be a nightmare. Nevertheless, no matter what an immigrant experiences, they have to reinvent themselves, and for anyone who wants to transform themselves into something different, America is the right place to be.

      America is the land of transformation. Even when a person buys into the American dream they have no choice but to reinvent themselves in America. People whose ancestors immigrated generations ago wants to be something they are not. There are entire industries dedicated to changing people – dentistry, cosmetics, plastic surgery, reality shows, etc. It is as if reinvention of oneself is the true “American way”. 

      The character of Jasmine speaks for millions of immigrants and refugees when she says “We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams” (Mukherjee 29). She says that it starts with “not wearing our normal clothes” and once they let go of one thing, all the rest goes eventually “the rest goes on its own down a sinkhole” (Mukherjee 29). Jasmine saw the letting her old identity go as a positive move. She knew it before she left her home and arrived in the U.S. She had many adjustments to her dream of living in the U.S. and she made them because that is the American way – reinventing yourself until you are satisfied with yourself and your life. That is not why we come, but it is why we stay – the freedom to be anything you want is the best kind of freedom, and that is the REAL American dream.