Introduction
Reyna Grande is a writer. After two successful, award-winning novels, she decided to write a memoir, an honest story of her own life and her own experience. In all her books, Grande writes about immigration as a social issue. Nowadays, the question of illegal border crossing became a pressing problem. However, studying this issue in general, society starts to forget that it is based on the stories of real people and families. In The Distance Between Us: A Memoir, Grande focuses on real problems of immigrants: the family separation, children suffering, problems of the adaptation; she tries to make her readers feel her pain and compare her life path with their own experience.
The Reyna Grande’s life
It is important to learn more about a person’s life experience for understanding one’s qualities and the inner world. Grande’s memoirs provide an opportunity to understand her formative influences, challenges, and successes that had an impact on her personality. The author described her own experience as an example of an immigrant’s life. With the touching frankness, she described her childhood, the poverty in which her family lived, her broken house. They lived in a small town in Mexico in the 1980s, and her parents did not have a lot of opportunities to earn money and to provide for the family. The only solution that her father had found was illegal immigration to the United States. This solution was (and, probably, remains) popular for a lot of Mexican people.
At first, Grande’s father left for the United States, and later her mother followed him. Reyna remained with her siblings in the broken house with a severe grandmother who did not pay much attention to the children. The pain of separation is the first thing that a reader learns about the author. Grande badly missed her parents. She was called an orphan by other children in the town. But her parents were alive; they just were far away, in “El Otro Lado” (Grande 3), at the Other Side in the United States. Grande lived in poverty, and her childhood was not easy. However, it could be claimed that the pain of the separation from her parents was the strongest feeling during that period of her life.
Grande’s father left when she was two years old and took her and her siblings to the United States when she was already nine years old. In her book, the author described her burning desire to join her parents in “El Otro Lade”. In her imagination, the United States was the place where all her problems and challenges would disappear and where they would be a family again. However, the reality was not so perfect, as in her imagination. After the illegal border crossing, Grande became an undocumented child immigrant, and she started to feel another sort of separation – the separation from the community. In Mexico, she was at home, she was the same as other children, and she was a part of society. In the United States, she realized that she was different from other kids. At first, she did not know the language and the culture of her new parenthood and could not become a part of the community.
Grande had to learn everything by herself. She had to prove her right to belong to this country and to be a member of society. She was strong; she overcame all difficulties, got a University degree, and became a successful writer. However, how many people do not succeed in this fight? How many of them become criminals, homeless, or simply die? By her story of the adaptation, the author highlights that the government policy did not make the situation for immigrants easier and did not provide many opportunities for them to be integrated into American society.
Except for adaptation problems, Grande had to deal with some personal issues. Her family life was not so successful, as she thought it would be. Grande’s father was not able to deal with the everyday stress, and he was taking alcohol. He was strict and he punished his children for any minor fault. The author described her family life frankly, without any shame or efforts to make it look better. It could be stated that by doing this, the author was trying to introduce all the formative influences in her line. All of them are more or less connected with immigration. The borderline divided her life into two parts: before crossing it and after.
My world and her world
In my opinion, one of the reasons for writing this book was to make her readers compare their lives to the author’s path. Certainly, American people do not face such problems as do immigrants. Most of them do not even have an idea how difficult the lives of non-residents are. I spent all my life at my home, feeling the love and the support of my family. I had some ups and downs, challenges, and problems. Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes failed in dealing with them. However, I always felt the protection of my family and my country. It is rather hard to imagine how a child could grow up and become a successful personality without the love of the parents and the protection of society.
I felt compassion for the author when I was reading this book. She inspires her readers: it is possible to overcome everything. She asks her readers: please, just look around and do not be indifferent. There are a lot of people who deal with the same problems every day, in particular, a lot of immigrant children who are virtually alone and isolated in our country. The book made me wonder what I could do for these people, for these children. It is possible that they just need some help and support, which will push them to overcome all difficulties, get a profession, and become valuable members of our society.
Conclusion
The question of immigration has always been urgent for the United States. The Distance Between Us: A Memoir highlighted one important issue of this global problem: the immigrant children’s lives. In her book, the author described the distance between her and her immigrated parents and later the distance between her and other members of American society. While adult people are trying to improve their lives and playing political games, children are suffering. Their problems should not be ignored by the government. It is important to create a system that will help these children to integrate into society, learn the language and the culture, and get an education. We should provide an opportunity to develop their talents and abilities, and they will pay us back by serving society not just on the under-qualified jobs, but being valuable members of the community.
Work Cited
Grande, Reyna. The Distance Between Us: A Memoir. Simon and Schuster, 2012.