I grew up with my Filipino family here in Cerritos. In the meantime, it gives her a chance to explain where she’s coming from: “Well, I’m Egyptian Filipino.
As she moves through high school and college, she learns how the question is a microaggression. Ironically, it’s a question Gharib loves. The jokes are plentiful, but overall tone is tender.Ī great example is when Gharib interrogates the racially charged question so often posed to brown and Black people throughout the U.S.: “What are you?” As in, “What’s your ethnicity? Where are your parents/grandparents from? How do you identify culturally?” Her observations are witty, wry and tinged with self-deprecating humor, but she never just plays it for lolz. The logical successor to shows like “Fresh Off the Boat,” “ Never Have I Ever” and “Kim’s Convenience.”Īs someone who is simultaneously “inside” and “outside” multiple cultures, Gharib recognizes the inherent comedic potential of her highly unique circumstance. Gharib is the first-generation immigrant daughter of a Filipino Catholic mother and an Egyptian Muslim father – a situation so unique it almost sounds like it was cooked up by a room of Millennial sit-com writers. The narrative largely centers on Gharib’s confusion and social miscues as she learns how to navigate white-dominated spaces and various white people sub-cultures. I Was Their American Dream is an excellent representation of a very particular way of growing up in America that is, even in its uniqueness, absolutely relatable and universal.“I was their American Dream” is the autobiographical tale of a Third Culture Kid growing up in Cerritos, California. Even as Malaka grapples with the difficulties she encounters, she is a curious, funny, and kind protagonist who you can’t help but root for and celebrate as you read. As she came to grapple with these disparate parts of who she is, she was also an American growing up in a diverse community before she attended a homogenous, and very white, university.Īt each turn, the illustrations in this graphic memoir are filled with joy. She found herself in limbo as a pork-eating, rosary-reciting Catholic in California and a Muslim who prayed to one God and didn’t eat pork in Egypt. The cultural clash between her Catholic Filipino family and Muslim Egyptian family was a tough road to navigate, but she managed to do it with humor and grace, all of which she captures in I Was Their American Dream.įor Gharib, there was beauty in both of her ancestral cultures, but the contradictions between them were often difficult to navigate. After her parents divorced, when she was in the third grade, Malaka spent the school year with her mother in California and the summers in Egypt with her father. Growing up as a Filipino-Egyptian American, Malaka Gharib often struggled to know where she belonged.
0 kommentar(er)
