3. Group G--bdubuc26

In My book Out Of Nowhere by Maria Padian Tom Bouchrad is a native kid who becomes friends with a Somali immigrant named Saeed. He then becomes friends with more of the Somali immigrants. He begins to see how they struggle daily with racism and other ways of being hated. At the end a picture of Tom Hugging Samira who is a Somali immigrant which starts a lot of controversy with Tom's life and the Somali community. Tom realizes there is no simple solution to racism and the other problems that immigrants face every single day. His relationships with Saeed and Samira leave an impact on him. The soccer team ends up losing when they have internal issues with racism. Also, Saeed was not eligible due to poor grades. A quote that shows how Saeed struggles is, “Same day as Saeed’s fake birthday. Hell, same day as every Somali kid's birthday” (Padian 326). This shows how Saeed and most other immigrants don’t even know their birthday. 

Out Of Nowhere by Maria Padian is about a high school senior named Tom Bouchard who befriends a Somali refugee named Yusuf. Over time Tom begins to notice just how hard life is for Yusuf as he tries to adapt to a new country. Yusuf faced many problems like he was very good at soccer which eventually caused the other teams coach to question his age and get his eligibility questioned, a picture of his sister hugging tom was used to cyberbully her, and he had to learn how to properly read,write, and speak in english. Eventually both him and his sister end up moving away without warning because of the racist taunts they were getting. one thing he struggled with were the overall racist remarks to all of the Somali kids. one example of this is when people spray painted the bathroom for the immigrants to go back to Africa."Kids spray paint 'go back to Africa!' in the bathroom."(Padian 187) these actions and the things kids were saying eventually led to them having to move away.

In The Namesake, Ashima and Ashoke from Calcutta got married and moved to America. They had a son named Gogol and as the novel goes on, it gives us the story of him growing up. He went to Yale for college and later created a life in New York. 

In the Novel, Gogol struggles with fitting in because he’s an Indian American in the U.S. Later he even changed his name to Nikhil because he felt like Gogol was unusual and meaningless to him when he lived in America.He wants to feel like he’s not any different from the people around him.

A quote that tells us he didn’t want to feel different is “ ‘Lovely to meet you, Nikhil,’ she says, smiling brightly, and though she looks at him with interest, she does not pause in her work or offer to shake his hand.” (Lahiri 131).

So I would say that’s what he struggles with the most.

Do you think changing his name helped him feel more accepted? Is there anything else he could do to fit in better?