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Poem Analysis: Inside Out And Back Again

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Poem Analysis: Inside Out And Back Again
In the novel Inside Out and Back Again, there’s this girl named Ha who is 10 years old who lives with 3 older brothers and her mother. She lives peacefully in her hometown in Saigon. Now the Vietnam War has reached her home, so Ha and her family are forced to flee home as Saigon falls to the Communists. Ha moves to Alabama where she will soon faced a lot of challenges because she is a refugee, but will soon overcome these challenges. Ha was a girl who was stubborn and sneaky. When she was still in Vietnam, she did lots of things that she wasn’t supposed to do like placing her big toe on the floor on Tet or secretly buying things she wasn’t supposed to buy. A refugee’s transition to another country is hard, because they can’t speak the language …show more content…
The lives of refugees are turned inside out when they faced discrimination and getting bullied. In the poem “ Inside Out and Back Again ” Ha says “ A pink boy with white hair on his head and white eyebrow and white eyelashes pulls my arm hair. Laughter. It's true my arm hair grows so long and black.”(pg. 187/188) This demonstrates that Ha’s life is turned inside out when she got bullied by her long black arm hair, because she is getting bullied just because she looks different from the rest of her peers. Even though the bullies didn’t know Ha very well, they still bullied her and they take pleasure out of bullying Ha. Lots of refugees faced this problem of discrimination and discrimination causes them to have no self-esteem. In the article “ Refugee Children In Canada: Searching for Identity ” discusses that both refugees and immigrant children may encounter society discrimination and racism, and both have to accomplish the central task of childhood and adolescence. This shows that refugee lives are turned inside out when they faced discrimination and racism because of how they look and their culture like how Ha was bullied by her looks. People judge refugees by their

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