Mira By Bharati Mukherjee Sparknotes

“Immigration is a crisis for our county. It is an open door for drugs, criminals, and potential terrorists to enter our country. It is straining our economy, adding costs to our judicial, healthcare, and education systems,”as proclaimed by American politician Timothy Murphy. As Congress continues to debate ways to address immigration, a common Immigrant’s perspective conveys focus on the realistic statistics of who actually contributes so much to the nation’s economy and culture. It’s regularly known that Immigrants leave their motherland in search for a better life elsewhere, yet an immigrant’s ability to be happy and successful in America largely depends on the opportunity to remain connected to the culture of their native country or embrace

a new one. Regarding a recent policy change affecting the benefits of a green card, an Indian immigrant herself, Bharati Mukherjee delves deep into both her and her sister’s immigration and the negative effects that followed the policy change. In the essay Two Ways to Belong in America author and UC Berkeley professor Mukherjee compares and contrasts her immigrant experience with her sister’s using varying sentence lengths, contrasting diction, and personal details to insist that Congress shouldn't take benefits away from legal immigrants simply because they choose a different approach towards immigration.
Mukherjee varies her sentence lengths to demonstrate a stark contrast between her and her sister’s immigrant experience. She appeals to the contrast in different sentence variations such as “I am moved that thousands of long-term residents are finally taking the oath of citizenship. She is not.” Mukherjee’s first sentence is long and creates a patriotic American ethos for her, while the contrasting sentence that follows highlights that this approach is not duplicated by her sister, Mira. The second sentence is short and leaves the audience wondering about why her and her sister's views on immigration differ so greatly. The structure of both sentences prepares the contrast of the two throughout the essay and sets up the different paths they will take up upon. Mukherjee also entices the dissimilarity between them through another demonstration of sentence lengths explaining their stance on the American culture, “ I embraced the denomination from expatriate aristocrat to immigrant nobody, surrendering those thousands of “pure culture,” the saris, the delightfully accented English. She retained them all.” This descriptive and lengthy catalog emphasizes the point of how different Mukherjee is with her sister. That simple sentence “She retained them all,” regarding Mira highlights the divergence of experiences the siblings had through their fondness and detachment to the American culture. In Mukherjee’s case she embraced it while Mira detached herself from it. The author’s syntactic strategies of sentence lengths creates an emphasis on the juxtaposition, she fabricates for the contrasting details that sets the audience up for their distinctive approaches to immigration.
Mukherjee uses contrasting diction to stress the difference of experiences the sisters had on immigration based solely on the conflicting life choices they made.

For example, Mukherjee’s use of “maintain” and “self-invention” are contradictory to each other, but in the context, “maintain” refers to her sister Mira, and “self-invention” is directed to Mukherjee herself. In Mira’s case, she is very attached to her Indian culture and stresses about not letting the American culture take that away from her. The author’s purpose was to highlight the tenacious mentality Mira has on her culture. In contrast, Mukherjee's use of “self-invention” regards to her loosening hold of her Indian culture; the exact opposite of Mira’s position. Another example of her contrasting diction is “clings” and “fluidity.” Mukherjee purposely chose “clings” in relation to Mira because it's implied that people don't cling onto something unless they feel they are losing it. Its evident through Mira’s constant denial of the American culture that she is still terrified of losing not only her Indian culture but in her eyes “herself” or her self identity. The author suggests that through these specific dictions, Mira gets the indication that with the new policy change she is forced to either give up her own self identity or create a new one to get citizen benefits. This implication of Mira believing she will lose her Indian culture also directly correlates to the “fluidity” Mukerjee feels about her new

self-invention that incorporates the American culture. Her decision to describe herself with “fluidity” achieves the point that she's reinventing herself through sacrificing a version of herself where she is 100% Indian centric. In comparison Mira is still gripping onto her culture in constant fear of it disappearing, while taking away the chance for her to experience an American identity simply because of the two different paths the siblings took. In result, the green card policy change only has a negative effect on Mira because of this life decision. While Mukherjee uses contrasting dictions that embrace the distinctions of the two sisters, she attempts to put a spotlight on the sacrifices each sister encountered through different reactions of immigration.
Mukherjee pulls an emotional reaction from the audience through the personal details she generates as she draws her argument of the drastic injustice the new policy affecting legal immigrants is.

She starts the essay with a detailed description of her life that led up to her and Mira’s immigration, “ When we left India, we were almost identical in appearance and attitude. We dressed alike, in saris; we expressed identical views on politics, social issues, love, and marriage in the same calcutta convent-school accent.” This detail compares how similar the siblings were and prepares the audience to the split of paths and consequences that lead to two contrasting lives.This pattern of a personal story continues though more details such as their education to even their marriages, “ Instead, Mira married an Indian student in 1962” which sets up dispersity as Mukherjee states, “I married a fellow student, an American of Canadian parentage.” Her decision to narrate the events in both of their lives from their childhood to marriages is an example of how she gained a citizenship through her husband who just happened to be an American. In contrast, Mukherjee presents that Mira married an Indian student, which points to the idea that because Mira decided to marry into her culture, she gets backlash from Congress which causes only her to get her benefits taken away, but Mukherjee doesn't get affected. Mukherjee builds this reputation of how similar they both are only to imbalance it

with little details of different paths that affected their current state regarding the green card policy change. These small details of their marriage, political views, and even appearance gives the audience an understanding of the drastic similarities and differences in the lives they have, resulting from the contrasting decisions they made that directed where their lives would end up. These descriptive details gives us insight on who they both were and demonstrates the experiences they both went through, but emphasizes on the different results they had because of the contrasting approaches they took regarding immigration.
Throughout her essay, Mukherjee finds the similarities and dissimilarities that correlate with her sister to argue that there shouldn't only be one way and path to living in America. Astonished that only her sister is being negatively affected by the change in green card policy because of the lifelong decisions that resulted to Mira being a legal immigrant and Mukherjee becoming an American citizen, she argues in favor of the idea that there isn't only one correct way to immigrate to America. She seeks to address this issue to Congress through her use of contrasting diction, personal details, and varying sentence lengths. With the use of these rhetorical tools, she effectively persuades the audience that differing life choices shouldn't affect how one path to immigration is favored and gets priority over the other.