1. Group B---iraftice27

In my book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, the characters undergo significant changes as they attempt to adapt to a new lifestyle vastly different from their old one. The book follows three primary characters: Oscar, a Dominican American nerd, who adapts by escaping into sci-fi to block out the bullying. Lola, his sister, who changes by becoming a punk and running away to escape her mother's control and the strict Dominican culture, and Beli, the mother, whose childhood was destroyed by poverty, being an orphan, abuse in her relationships, and the Trujillo regime, but who adapts to all of those by using her looks. All three characters try to adapt to their new life, but the Fuke curse makes it nearly impossible for them to succeed. The Fuku is an ancient curse from Africa that has affected Dominicans. 

Oscar doesn’t choose to be isolated and feels out of place. Oscar changes dramatically after puberty when he gains weight, develops acne, and struggles to be the Dominican man his culture expects him to be, and instead of adapting successfully to the American culture or meeting Dominican expectations, he escapes into a sci-fi world where he feels more accepted. This is all caused by the curse of the Fuku that hangs over his family. Lola tries to adapt by becoming a punk and running away. The narrator explains that “each of these attempts to assert her identity failed since, for Lola, the primary goal was less to find herself and more to spite her mother.” (Diaz 89). However, when Lola is sent to Santo Domingo, she finally adapts successfully by making friends and joining the track team. She is building her own identity away from her mother's control. For Lola, the Fuku shows up as a witchy feeling she gets before major negative events affect her family. Lola's witchy feeling all began when she found a lump on her mother’s breast; the sicker her mom got, the more nasty she got, and the more Lola decided to rebel. Beli tries to change by taking control of her life when she begins working at Palacio Peking, a Chinese restaurant, using her body and looks to gain power over men. However, she fails to truly adapt when she falls for a Gangster, and becomes pregnant, then finds out the Gangster was married to the sister of the Trujillo Regime. She ends up getting kidnapped, brutally beaten, losing the baby, and forced to leave the country for her safety. In the end, not being able to successfully adapt because of the Fuku curse. 

This connects to Anna Crowe's TED Talk, The Power of an Immigrant Mindset, about immigrants “Around us, people like you and me living, working, picking up their kids from preschool, cramming for their next exam, all while caring with them the invisible weight of reinvention of being uprooted and replanted in unfamiliar soil, often without knowing the language.” All three characters try to reinvent themselves and adapt to their new circumstances; however, they carry this invisible weight of the Fuke. The Fuku makes it harder, causing difficulty to move forward.

The novel “The Sun Is Also A Star” by Nicola Yoon shows how two teenagers experience the first stages of “love at first sight” in their own unique ways. Daniel is a lot more spiritual than Natasha in the fact that he believes in fate and love. Poetry is one of the things he loves which his parents think is basically a waste of time. He is fairly different from the rest of his family, his older brother goes to Harvard and he feels the need to be like “the perfect son” and his parents are being pushy for him to go to Yale while he tries to follow in his brother’s footsteps but also trying to make his own decisions. Especially when Natasha comes into his life. Natasha is a “keep to herself” kind of person. She is scheduled to be deported back to Jamaica, but she’s nervous to go back to her old life that she’s already left behind. Being deported is not her decision, it’s the government’s decision because she is an illegal immigrant, with a false social security number, which is also not her decision. Unfortunately the day that she is set to meet about the deportation she, literally, bumps into Daniel, or “Red Tie” and starts to fall for him.

Daniel’s parents are immigrants from South Korea but he was born in New York City so he doesn’t really have to change himself to a new life, this has been his life since birth. He is not entirely “normal” as some could say because his family does have strict traditions and they still speak their language. Natasha, on the other hand, has been in New York since she was eight years old so she has had to “adapt”. I don’t think she had to adapt her personality or anything like that because she is a very independent person, she changed her mindset to “this is my home now”. She did get a fake Social Security Number to stay hidden longer, “How it feels every time I write down my fake social security number on a school form?” (Yoon 111).Since she got there at a young age she, in a way, was raised there. Her father went to N.Y. about two years before her, her mother, and her younger brother named Peter. He went there to pursue his acting career and make money before they came. When Natasha and her family got to N.Y., she noticed how her father had changed, the way he spoke was different and how he smelled was different, but she could tell he was still her father on the inside.

In my book, “Breathe and Count Back From Ten” by Natalia Sylvester Veronica has many friends. She has lived there since before she can remember so she's never had to think much about fitting in unlike her mother and father. They push her to be very perfect and do nothing wrong, but while they think it's for the best they are really taking away all her freedom and choices. Rather than her trying to fit in because of her ethnicity she has to fit in due to her hip injury; her hips are lopsided, and she just found out her parents have been keeping a huge secret from her. She thought she was finally starting to heal but the truth is the tissue around it is dying and it can fall apart at any minute. 

She has to deal with fitting in through her injury, she can’t do what most people can. She constantly has to think about covering her scar and not limping so people will just treat her like a person rather than a scared animal. She has never dealt with people treating her differently due to her race but trying to fit in caused by her own body is a daily thing. “My hip socket cracks like Pop Rocks in an open mouth, sharp but soft enough that I’m sure he doesn't hear it.” (Sylvester 11) This is showing how even while she's just walking along she's still extremely conscious of her hip and nobody notices it. In the ted talk “How a penny made me feel like a millionaire” Bazooka bubble gum is such a normal thing to most people but in this case they actually had to find money to get it,  once they get this it's kind of like the first sign of her being able to fit in. “ So we find this penny kind of fossilized on the floor, and we think that a very wealthy man must have left it there because regular people don’t just lose money.” (Luna) Her family is so poor that a single penny makes her feel more human and more like a normal person. She can actually get herself a piece of bubble gum just like other people. 

In my book Out of Nowhere by Maria Padian Tom Bouchard is a great student, a good soccer player, and a bad decision maker. One night he and his best friend went to the Maquoit school and wrote “you suck Maquoit” on their school rock. He gets in big trouble with the school and has to do like 100 hours of community service so he can walk at graduation. 

Tom is in control of his own life until his friend gets the best of him and they vandalize property, then he is forced to do community service if he will not graduate. “You’ll also have to do some community service. One hundred hours each and your graduation in the spring depends on whether you complete those hours” (Padian 37).