American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures by America Ferrara: Research Guide

Sometimes during assemblies at Public School 160, in South Brooklyn, the principal, Margaret Russo, will ask, ''Who was born in another country?'' Many hands will go up.

Then Ms. Russo will ask, ''Who has parents who were born in another country?''At that, she says, ''the whole assembly's hands go up, including the teachers.''''Because that's the story of this country,'' she continued...

What's it like to feel like an outsider in your own country?

First Person writers tell their stories One of my earliest memories is doing times tables in Cantonese while in the bathtub, my mom's firm but gentle fingers kneading my scalp with shampoo.

In the United States, bilingual education continues to provoke fierce debate. It seems that nearly everyone—from educators to policymakers to parents with school-age children to those without children—has a strong opinion on whether children with little fluency in English should be taught academic content in their home language as they learn English.

The America that received my family in the mid-70s was not an America that could have imagined a Pacific Rim future. It was an America which had retreated from the Far East, traumatized by its latest adventure abroad. Vietnamese living in America had little access to Vietnam. It was the height of the Cold War. It took six months, if at all, for a letter to reach that country. We were cut off from our homeland in the United States. We adjusted quickly to life in America because of it.