Summary Of Vesna Cremona's Paper Citizen

In Vesna Cremona’s Paper Citizen, she discusses the views that white collar immigrants have from the outside looking in on the country supposedly built by immigrants and the hostile views she and other immigrants have had to share since coming to the United States. Vesna begins her story with an example of the fear she must live in when the FBI search through her office while investigating her boss. She then goes back to her childhood as she came over to the states for her father’s work as a diplomat in Chicago. She then gets into her mid-20s when she was in the states again with her boyfriend Brandon and discusses her relationship to him and how, just like with her father, he was very controlling and tried to guide her life according to his …show more content…
The two got to the point where they finished each other’s sentences after meeting at her father’s funeral. The two knew each other for only four months before he offered to take her back to the states to live with him there. Brandon would begin to show a bit of overprotection like her parents early on however, quizzing her over and over about the United States to make sure she could pass the entrance exam to get a passport and visa. She had hated it when her parents acted like this and now her only ticket in would be acting the same way. She had come to the United States not to be scolded like a child but because she wanted to live her own life. “I wanted to live in a place where I’d be pushed to think for myself rather than merely regurgitate the groupthink of Yugoslavia’s socialist-communist regime.” (para 24) She goes on to tell how Brandon would become exactly how her father was. “Brandon was an overachiever, a caretaker, and he made everything happen” (para 25) Whenever a problem would arise regarding her status as an immigrant he would try to take care of it and take it on with a reasonable approach. He would even push her to get a job instead of following her dream of attending a fashion school. She would begin working for a phone chat service and because of how good she was, Brandon suggested they make their own phone line business …show more content…
After two years of living on her own, her lawyer hit her with a sobering message, the U.S. wanted to deport her. She had been living in the states for around eight and a half years now, but she had been assigned a court date to fight for her freedom. The fact that she had lived in the states for nearly half her life when combining her two previous living experiences here, shows how ruthless the U.S. is regarding immigrants, and how much hatred standard citizens have for immigrants. Vesna was confident however because she saw herself as more American than anything else. “Strangely, I was filled with confidence. For the first time in my life, I knew exactly who I was—American. The United States was my country; I had the history to prove that.” (para 56) After 9/11, her court date was pushed back far into the future giving Vesna more time to worry about what would happen. After finally getting her court date, she had to go before the stand and essentially tell her life story. In the end however, it would pay off and the verdict was not guilty. At the end of her story, Vesna shows that she was able to get past being an illegal immigrant even with the hate from citizens, and the overprotection from her family and loved ones. At the end of the day, she finishes her tale as an American citizen, even if it is what she’d viewed herself as from the