Isolation
The imagery of isolation has been shown through the main character, Gifty. After her mother’s depression and her brother’s death, she becomes a different person. She fears getting close to people and detaches from anyone who comes close to getting to know her. She does not share any personal information and only alternates between the lab and her home. “I thought about the dinner parties with Raymond five years before, the excuses I’d made to get out of them, the fights we’d had. “You spend more time with lab mice than you do with people. You know that’s not healthy, right?” When dating Raymond, she intentionally lets him down so that he can leave her alone. The same happens to her platonic friendships with Anne and Katherine. “I always got the sense that Katherine wanted to get to know me better. She was friendly and open, too open for my comfort.” When Anne proved to know a lot about her, she ends their friendship. Even in the lab with Han, she isolates herself from any personal talks and feels embarrassed every once in a while, that she shared any personal story. From these statements, we see how much she struggled to isolate herself from people.
Suffering
Suffering is depicted through the characters of Nana. Mother and Gifty. Nana sustained injuries while playing soccer and that was the beginning of his drug addiction. He struggles with addiction moving in and out of rehabilitation centers and eventually dies from a heroin overdose. Nana’s death caused a lot of suffering for his mother and sister. Her mother suffered from depression while his sister detached from people. “Whenever she woke up from the drug-induced sleep, she looked frantic, like a woman who had been dropped down onto some deserted island and told that she had only an hour to find water. Her eyes were wild. The pupils darted around, searching, searching.” This description shows how her physique had changed due to stress and grief. She refused to eat and would not go to church either. Nana’s death was too much for her to handle.
Immigrant Experience
The immigrant experience was both positive and negative as seen through Gifty’s family. America has always been a continent full of opportunities and every African would apply for a green card to be allowed to live and work in America. Their mother won her green card and moved to America in search of a better life for her family. There are some characters like Katherine and Gifty that lived the American dream. On the contrary, Nana and his father formed part of the statistics that faced discrimination because of their color. “The Chin Chin Man had a harder time finding a job. The home health service had hired him, but too many people complained once they saw him walk in the door. “I think people were afraid of him,” my mother once told me, but she wouldn’t tell me why she’d come to that conclusion. She almost never admitted to racism.” Their father struggled with staying in America and eventually went back to Ghana. These statements show the negative side of the immigrant’s experience that led to them going back home where they felt they belonged. It is visible that however lucrative going to America sounded, not all who went there had a good experience. Everybody had their own story about the experience.
