In Suki Kim’s “Facing Poverty with a Rich Girl’s Habits”, the author depicts what life was like for her as she dealt with the transition of being a young girl from a wealthy family in South Korea to a young girl from a poor family in the United States. Suki Kim tells how the language barrier in the United States altered her relationships with fellow Korean-American citizens. Kim’s essay was written for the New York Times, and so her audience would have been readers of the New York Times, which could have included a lot of people who were immigrants or had come from a family of immigrants who were familiar with the difficulties of coming to a new country. The United States has been viewed as the land of opportunity where a person’s dream could come to fruition and where the poor is able to gain financial security through hard-work, but Suki Kim’s immigration to the United States seemed more as a digression than a progression. Kim’s mother went from being a woman of status in South …show more content…
The home was described as being a “crammed, ugly place” as opposed to the mansion in South Korea that sat on the hillside with a beautiful view she had grown accustomed to for thirteen years. Kim describes the difference in lifestyles more in-depth in Paragraph 3 of her essay as she took public transportation instead of being driven to school, did homework alone as opposed to having someone helping her, and how noticeable the home was without maids to clean it. Kim also dealt with the idea of knowing that, instead of being known as Korean, she was classified as Asian. The standards of respect in South Korean schools were different from American schools. As Kim described in Paragraph 5 of her essay, she experienced no paying the teacher any attention and the walls being covered by