Firoozeh Dumas Hot Dogs And Wild Geese Analysis

Excuse me, where is the elbow grease? When it comes to immigrating, simply learning the language is not enough. In order to assimilate into a new country, one must not only learn the language and culture, but also be capable of translating the culture back into language. So is the story of a young girl who immigrated with her family to the United States when she was just seven years old. In her essay “Hot Dogs and Wild Geese,” Firoozeh Dumas illustrates the challenges she and her family struggled with through her approach to anecdotal humor when they first moved to the United States from Iran. For an immigrant, learning English is already challenging enough. Moreover, when one does not learn the culture, even the most eager can get lost in …show more content…
Dumas uses humor the most, likely because with humor a reader stays engaged in the storytelling. When first describing her father, she uses imagery, calling him her own private Rosetta Stone. However, this proved to be baseless due to his lack of understanding American colloquial speech. She points out Kazem must be speaking a version of English not yet shared with the rest of America because of the bewildered looks from store cashiers, gas station attendants and waiters, In this, Dumas uses hyperbole. Later, when describing her father’s speech when talking about vectors, surface tension and fluid mechanics, he was Fred Astaire with words, but outside of petroleum engineering he had two left tongues, Dumas employs the use of juxtaposition illustrating how the one statement negates the other. Over the course of 30 years, Kazem learned much of the culture, but he still had his issues. Dumas speaks of her father’s improper of jargon when she tells of a compliment her father paid to his friend’s daughter, calling her homely, meaning she would make a great housewife; or when he complained about drivers constantly honking as being horny. Clearly, Kazem has much yet to