Is Free Food for Millionaires an immigrant story?
I suppose it is, because it features first and second generation characters, and I think it is essentially an American story because unlike any other country in this world, America has this generative quality due to its immigration policies and early colonial history. I was a history major in college, and my senior essay was about the colonization of the 18th century American mind. Quite a mouthful. My argument then was that original American colonists from England and the generations which followed felt profoundly inferior intellectually and culturally to Europeans and those back home in their motherland. That idea has affected how I see my own challenges in America as an immigrant. I am not legally colonized—far from it—but an immigrant is like a early colonist (a word currently out of favor), that is, a person who has come from somewhere else, learns to adapt to her new land with all its attendant complexities with an overall wish to acquire new “territory”. It is an interesting pos
