Analyse af 'Who is Irish?' af Gish Jen

Integration is a lifelong journey. A journey that can and will be incredibly rough. When such a simple wish as wanting a decent life, gets turned into a worldwide argument, immigrants must stick together. They are all in the same boat, with the same problems and the same wish. Sticking together and standing up for each other sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? However, in the short story “Who is Irish?” written in 1999, by the American writer Gish Jen, puts focus on how immigrants’ differences, can create a diversity that will end up doing a lot of harm, all because of cultural differences.

The author has a lot of grammatical mistakes throughout her short story. By doing this we see that the main character is an immigrant, who struggles with issues that others might not even think twice about. Already from the begging, we encounter this problem; “I am work hard my whole life, and fierce besides” (page 1, line 3) In this quote we see the grammatical errors that occur quite often. However, it is not necessarily a bad thing. This only underlines the fact that she is an immigrant who does not speak fluent English. In this quote, we are already told a lot about the main character. It is brought to our attention that the main character works hard, and always has been. We also get the impression that she is confident and stubborn.