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What We Can Learn from Newcomers to America about Health, Happiness and Hope
Free Press
October 2011
On Sale: October 18, 2011
256 pages ISBN: 1416586822 EAN: 9781416586821 Kindle: B004IK98CO Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Do you have a relative or friend who would gladly
wait on you, hand and foot, for a full month after you had a
baby? How about someone to deliver a delicious, piping hot
home-cooked meal, just like your mother’s, right to your
front door after work? Do you know people you’d trust enough
to give several hundred dollars a month to, with no receipt,
on the simple promise that the accumulated wealth will come
back to you a year later? Not many of us can answer “yes”
to these questions. But as award-winning journalist Claudia
Kolker has discovered, each of these is one of a wide
variety of cherished customs brought to the United States by
immigrant groups, often adapted to American life by the
second generation in a distinctive blending of old and new.
Taken together, these extraordinary traditions may well
contribute to what’s known as “the immigrant paradox,” the
growing evidence that immigrants, even those from poor or
violence-wracked countries, tend to be both physically and
mentally healthier than most native-born Americans.
These customs are unfamiliar to most Americans, but
they shouldn’t be. Honed over centuries, they provide
ingenious solutions to daily challenges most of us face and
provide both social support and comfort. They range from
Vietnamese money clubs that help people save and Mexican
cuarentenas—a forty-day period of rest for new
mothers—to Korean afterschools that offer highly effective
tutoring at low cost and Jamaican multigenerational
households that help younger family members pay for college
and, eventually, their own homes. Fascinated by the
success of immigrant friends, Claudia Kolker embarked on a
journey to uncover how these customs are being carried on
and adapted by the second and third generations, and how
they can enrich all of our lives. In a beautifully written
narrative, she takes readers into the living rooms,
kitchens, and restaurants of immigrant families and
neighborhoods all across the country, exploring the sociable
street life of Chicago’s “Little Village,” a Mexican enclave
with extraordinarily low rates of asthma and heart disease;
the focused quiet of Korean afterschool tutoring centers;
and the loving, controlled chaos of a Jamaican
extended-family home. She chronicles the quests of young
Indian Americans to find spouses with the close guidance of
their parents, revealing the benefits of “assisted
marriage,” an American adaptation of arranged marriage. And
she dives with gusto into some of the customs herself,
experimenting to see how we might all fit them into our
lives. She shows us the joy, and excitement, of savoring
Vietnamese “monthly rice” meals delivered to her front door,
hiring a tutor for her two young girls, and finding a
powerful sense of community in a money-lending club she
started with friends. The Immigrant Advantage
is an adventurous exploration of little-known
traditional wisdom, and how in this nation of immigrants our
lives can be enriched by the gifts of our newest arrivals.
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