IN THE NEW TIME OF CLOSING DOORS. 2/4: A Beginner's Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious by Roya Hakakian
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 29 June 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Beginners-Guide-America-Immigrant-Curious/dp/0525656065/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1622853677&sr=1-1
A stirring, witty, and poignant glimpse into the bewildering American immigrant experience from someone who has lived it. Also, a mirror held up to America.
Into the maelstrom of unprecedented contemporary debates about immigrants in the United States, this perfectly timed book gives us a portrait of what the new immigrant experience in America is really like. Written as a "guide" for the newly arrived, and providing "practical information and advice," Roya Hakakian, an immigrant herself, reveals what those who settle here love about the country, what they miss about their homes, the cruelty of some Americans, and the unceasing generosity of others. She captures the texture of life in a new place in all its complexity, laying bare both its beauty and its darkness as she discusses race, sex, love, death, consumerism, and what it is like to be from a country that is in America's crosshairs. Her tenderly perceptive and surprisingly humorous account invites us to see ourselves as we appear to others, making it possible for us to rediscover our many American gifts through the perspective of the outsider. In shattering myths and embracing painful contradictions that are unique to this place,A Beginner's Guide to America is Hakakian's candid love letter to America.
1829 FIVE POINTS NYC
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Wingstops doing what they do best, taking flavor to the next level. |
| 0:05.1 | So when chicken sandwiches only came to spicy and plain, Wingstaff said, nah, make it 12 flavors. |
| 0:12.1 | Lemon pepper chicken sandwich. |
| 0:14.0 | O.G. Hot. Mango, habanero. You get the picture. |
| 0:17.9 | Every famous Wingstop flavor. Now on a new Wingstop chicken sandwich. |
| 0:23.1 | Try all 12 and find your favorite at Wingstop, where flavor gets its wings. |
| 0:28.7 | Huh. |
| 0:35.0 | This is CBS. I on the World. |
| 0:37.0 | I'm John Batchel. And Roya Hakakian, the author Roya Hakakian, |
| 0:41.4 | her new book, A Beginner's Guide to America for the Immigrant and the Curious. |
| 0:45.8 | Roya has arrived in America 30 years hence, and she is in an English second language class. |
| 0:53.6 | There are many of them. |
| 0:54.7 | It's part of her introduction to America, the groups that are helping her, because there are many NGOs who facilitate this transformation. |
| 1:04.2 | And yet she realizes in the class or all these other people from all over the world. |
| 1:08.8 | Roy, I got the sense that you all of a sudden woke up to the fact that your experiences |
| 1:14.1 | were not unique, that everybody was having the same experience. |
| 1:18.1 | But you were in a world, it was more populated than the United Nations General Assembly |
| 1:24.0 | is the sense I got. |
| 1:26.1 | Exactly. |
| 1:27.2 | I mean, years later, I got on a boat at Disneyland and went into Small World, and I thought, |
| 1:32.6 | I've been here before. |
| 1:33.8 | It was the ESL class that I attended when I first came. |
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