In “American Street” by Ibi Zoboi, the main character is a young Haitian illegal immigrant named Fabiola. Upon entering the U.S. , her mother and grandmother were both caught, with her grandma being deported and Fabiola last seeing her mother being detained. They were trying to get to Detroit to live with her Aunt Jo and her three daughters, Chantal, Pri, and Donna. Fabiola is hit by a massive culture shock in Detroit, and her imagined reality of the “American Dream” begins to break apart. She struggles to continue life in this new place without her mother for guidance, torn between a new place, new people, a boy she likes, and her cousins, she tries to persist in the streets of Detroit. The second part of the book continues to up the ante, and Fabiola faces many more challenges. She gets with her man, Kasim, and immediately they face hardship. He is friends with Donna’s boyfriend, Dray, and this becomes a dilemma when Fabiola is recruited by a detective to trace the death of a young girl via drug lacing back to Dray. Through her investigations she unveils a deep rooted drug ring, and discovers that it was her cousins, not Dray, that sold the drugs that killed the girl. Through this, she must worry about her mother in captivity, and how she either sells Dray out (or rather her cousins she finds out later) and loses her boyfriend, but gets her mom back, or she leaves her mother in captivity, keeps her boyfriend and family, and faces possible consequences from the government for not helping the detective. She spends her free time wishing her mother was there to advise her.
A very similar thing happens in “The need for family reunification - to make families whole again” by Elizabeth Zion. Zion talks about her experience growing up without ever meeting her dad due to Ireland’s strict immigration policies. She recounts how she felt empty and horrible when thinking about how her father hasn’t gotten to see any of her accomplishments or milestones. She takes the subject and uses it to make a narrative pushing for a better immigration and customs system to prevent other families from being split as she and her father were. This connects when in the ted talk, Zion talks about how she wonders what it would be like to have her father there to help her, something that Fabiola mentions constantly throughout the book. They both show remorse that they can’t be with their family repeated, like in the book when Fabiola reminisces for Haiti, “I miss the hot sun and sweating all day and the beach and eating cold fresco with my friends and long walks up and down hills and Cola Lakay and deep-fried beef patties. I miss my mother.” (Zoboi 192) Or in the Talk when Zion wonders what it would be like to have her father for the first of many times, “And so I often imagine how different life would be if my father was here.” (Zion 1)
So just like these characters, How do characters in your novel face separation from their family or friends? How do they handle this hardship? If they don’t face separation, how does their family support them in their lives?
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