An immigrant to the United States

In this course you have read Firoozeh Dumas’ memoir Funny in Farsi in which she recounts with humor her experiences as an immigrant to the United States starting in the early 1970s. Her experiences focus on all the aspects of daily life and cultural literacy that all newcomers to any new country would face.

Choose 3 of Firoozeh Dumas’ experiences and discuss how they are representative of a newcomer’s struggle to settle in a new country. The experiences must be one from the beginning, one from the middle and one from near the end of the book. They can’t all be from the same part of the book.

You may use “I” in this essay, if you are going to make a comparison between your own experiences and Dumas’ experiences, but you may not use “I” for your entire discussion. This is NOT a first person narrative or a story. You are writing an INFORMATIVE essay which is presented in third person [s/he/it/they].

Give concrete examples from Funny in Farsi to support your choice of experiences and your discussion.

20 points–You must type your essay in correct MLA format
[includes identifying information, course, professor’s name, date]

30 points–You must have at least 3 correctly MLA formatted in-text citations
[includes anything in parentheses, quotation marks, block quotes]

40 points–You must have a correctly formatted MLA Works Cited list
[includes authors’ names, titles, dates, editions, editors’ names, access dates, source types, page numbers etc.]

45 points–You must write a minimum of 1500 words
[includes proofreading for grammar and spelling, missing words, run-on sentences, comma splices, appropriate spaces between words and paragraphs, and other typographical errors]