A part of growing up is changing and accepting yourself for who you are. Although transferring to a new school may be inevitable how you handle this experience is what counts in the end. Everyone goes through a series of events that either change your life in a favorable way or unacceptable way when being apart of two cultures. In this case Junior and Jin must both battle with many different problems because they are trying to find an identity while being apart of two different cultures. This affects their lives in several aspects. Ultimately leads to major changes in their relationships throughout the course of the novels. Junior from The Absolutely True Diary of A American Born Indian by Sherman Alexie (ATD) and Jin from …show more content…
An internal conflict begins because he begins to feel lost living a double part of him is on reservation and his other half of him is at Reardan. For instance ‘“My name is Junior,” I said. “And my name is Arnold. I’m Junior and Arnold. I’m both.”I felt like two different people inside of one body” (Chapter 8). He does not fit in anywhere and starts to feel unwanted on the reservation and unaccepted at his fancy white school Reardan.Junior is on a search for a new identity at the same time Jin is look for a new identity in a different way .On other hand Jin Wang finds himself having to live a double life as well. Jin Wang is divided between two different cultures, Chinese which is the culture that he was know most of his life and the culture of the students at his new school. Wang stays far away from all of the Chinese in hopes that he will be able to blend in. Junior does not want to pull away from his culture to find a new identity. Whereas Jin does not like his identity so he prefers to refuses his culture so that he can assimilating to American …show more content…
Considering that in his Chinese culture he was not raised to wear deodorant. He tries to get rid of the smell and from him sweating from the bike ride so he goes to the bathroom and puts loads of soap under his armpits, which then got bubbles all over Amelia shoulder. This time he got lucky because she had not noticed it. On the contrary Arnold begins to face some hardships in his relationship with Penelope. He is fortune to be dating one of the popular girls, which comes with certain responsibilities. She [Penelope] ask him to go to the dance, where he he wears his dad 's old suit and the other students like it and now he is popular as well. There 's one problem Penelope wants to attend another dance but he does not have the finances to buy a new suit being that he is poor. As an illustration from the novel he says “It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you’re poor because you’re stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you’re stupid and ugly because you’re Indian. And because you’re Indian you start believing you’re destined to be poor. It’s an ugly circle and there’s nothing you can do about it.”(53 Alexie). We start to see how being an Indian and poor start to make Arnold feel think harmful thoughts