THE NEW MILLIONS: 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
🗓️ 14 January 2024
⏱️ 9 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
1876 DURHAM IRON WORKS
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everyone this is James Harkin and Anna Tashinsky two writers of the TV show |
| 0:05.2 | QI and two-fourths of the hit podcast no such thing as a fish. |
| 0:09.2 | We'd like to let you know that we've written a book it is called everything to play for the most |
| 0:14.4 | interesting things there are to know about the world of sports it's for you |
| 0:18.2 | whether you like sports or not did you know that legendary cricketer Gary Sobers scored his final century while drunk? |
| 0:25.7 | Or that games of lacrosse used to involve 100,000 players. |
| 0:31.7 | Learn that and so much more by getting everything to play for the QI Book of Sports available |
| 0:36.2 | in all bookshops and online right now. This is, CBS I on the world, I'm John Bachelor and Roya Hakakian, the author Roya Hakakian, |
| 0:50.0 | her new book, A Beginner's Guide to America for the Immigrant and the Curias. |
| 0:55.0 | Roya has arrived in America 30 years hence and she is in an English second language class. There are many of them. It's part of her introduction to America, |
| 1:07.0 | the groups that are helping her because there are many NGOs who facilitate this transformation and yet she realizes in the class or all these |
| 1:16.1 | other people from all over the world. |
| 1:18.1 | Roy I got the sense that you all of a sudden woke up to the fact that you your experiences were |
| 1:24.1 | were not unique that everybody was having the same experience but you were in a world |
| 1:28.8 | it was it was more populated than the United Nations Steminal Assembly as a sense I got. |
| 1:35.0 | Exactly. I mean years later I got on a boat at Disneyland and went into small world and I thought I've been here before it was the cell class that I attended when I first came. |
| 1:46.9 | You know it was it was truly the most |
| 1:59.8 | multi ethnic truly the most multi-ethnic experience, multi-racial place that I had ever been to. And it was staggering and it was America because nowhere else in the world such a thing could have happened |
| 2:06.6 | where I would be seated next to people from Venezuela, people from Gambia, people from, you name it. And, you know, we were 20 people, each one of us, had come from a different country. And it was a reassuring experience because we were all out of it. |
| 2:27.2 | We were all without English. We were all lost in America. So that was reassuring. |
| 2:37.9 | It was also frustrating too because you know we could look at each other and realize how much help we needed and how in fact we were. |
| 2:45.0 | I accuse you of being literary because you're now about to take us to an internal dialogue |
... |
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