Unit 5: Part 3 Vocabulary

In fifth grade, I vowed I would get interested in fractions, the presidents of the United States, Mesopotamia; I would learn my English.

One day toward the end of the summer, my mother summoned my sisters and me.

The desperate look in her eyes did not allow for contradiction.

My notions of baseball and America
Growing fuzzier each time I whiffed.

I watched it closing in
Clean and untouched, transfixed
By its easy arc before it hit
My forehead with a thud.

And dropped from laughter, and there we were,
All of us writhing on the ground for one reason
Or another.

My mother greeted her warmly but I just held out my hand and said, “Hello, Mrs. Barrett,” which I thought was adequate.

"I'll be okay," I said, sniffing back fake tears. Sometimes it’s necessary to deceive your parents if you love them, and I did love mine.

I decided that American children were ignorant. Didn’t their teachers teach them anything?

With little to go on, Byron set out to decipher his father’s story.

To avoid the scrutiny of Angel Island, Byron’s father had sailed through Boston.

The lengthy interrogation made Byron suspect that his father was in fact a paper son.

And Butler Street is a hundred per cent subscribed except for you. Now will you give us a dime, Monaghan?

SHEEAN. [Peeved] All right, then. Come along.

It’s a swindle, is all it is.

The two daughters are fluent in both their native and their adopted languages, but the youngest child, a son, a close friend of my two boys, speaks almost no Spanish.

The old immigrants are suspicious of the new ones. The new ones think the old ones are bigots.

Two years later two of the men were dead, one had moved in with his married daughter in the suburbs, and the three remaining sat and watched dolefully as people waited each night for a table in the restaurant.