Week 8 Analysis: Literary Analysis of Anonymous Chinese Immigrants

The four poems of Chinese Immigrants was a very interesting read about four different outlooks on the American Dream. The literary device that I believe would fit best would have to be character. It's interesting to see how each character of the poems are completely different when it comes to their actual character as a person. Each person has a completely different outlook on their life in America and their personalities all differ based on the stuff that they are doing in the different poems. Now the theme is something that's to talk about. There are four poems with four different themes, the first one has a theme of realism, the second one has a theme of slight optimism, the third one has a pure pessimistic theme, and the last one has an incredibly optimistic theme. Let's talk about the first one, this poem had a very realistic theme in the fact that it seemed like he was appreciative of his situation but understood there was going to be some struggles. The second one had some slight optimism because it felt like she was excited to be doing some of the normal stuff that entails living in the U.S. The third story was complete pessimism, he stated "He holds the pipe as his family fortune goes down its hole. Loot at him: Soon he will be six feet underground" (Anonymous Chinese Immigrants, Poem #3, 355). This shows his outlook on life in America, the only thing I can guess is that he was working for terrible people and he hated his life. The last poem was incredibly happy, it talked about how great life was for them in the U.S. which goes to show that sometimes their previous life was way worse before they moved to America. These four stories are great examples of history because you could hear the different sides of life in California during the gold rush times. The quote I used earlier showed the negative side of living in America as an immigrant. You could tell that he probably worked manual labor doing stuff he hated and wished he was dead because of the treatment he could have gotten from people and he realized like some immigrants did as well that life in the U.S. was not as great as it seems. Overall, I feel like these four poems highlighted the different experiences immigrants had to go through.