~ Alexander Luo, Class of 2024

How Reading Leads to Insight

 “Learning is a lifelong process,”

~ Peter Drucker

Thoughts are the beginnings of everything, and American Street by Ibi Zoboi led me to contemplate the themes of this book in a deeper and more complete way.  The deeper meaning behind every sentence in this book brought me to a new understanding of the challenges of immigration, and pushed me into considering the importance of family and religion.

American Street about a 16-year-old Haiti immigrant named Fabiola who’s mother, Manman, gets detained by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement when they’re trying to escape from Haiti to New York in present-day Detroit. When she gets to New York, she lives and goes to school with her three cousins, Chantal, Primadonna, and Princess, and her aunt, Matant Jo. In the beginning, Fabiola mentions that, “Never could I have imagined being in a house full of family and still feeling lonely,” and we explore her journey to conquer this feeling and see how it disappears in the end. We also follow Fabiola’s battles with the sketchy business her cousins are involved in, and how she balances it with her love for family and religion. 

Unfortunately, as with all school-assigned books, American Street started out boring for me; I mean, who’s interested in books they didn’t even pick? Luckily, Fabiola, her cousins, and her mother grew on me, and I started enjoying the hour-long reading sessions I’d have every night and every English class. One of the reasons this happened was because I can relate to Fabiola’s feelings of being unfit where you lived, as I’ve moved several times and I have felt this same loneliness before. 

Overall, this book was rather simple and easy to understand, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t the gate to a different path of thought for me. The simple words had a deeper meaning that conveyed Fabiola’s out-of-place feelings and it gave me further insight into the struggle of Houthi immigrants which is helping me on my IFSI capstone project about Houthi immigrants. I’m lucky to have been assigned to read American Street.

If you asked me about how every Houthi immigrant feels two months ago, I would’ve clenched my jaw and looked side to side in panic. I would’ve had no idea! But now, after reading American Street, I can tell you that, although there’s still a lot for me to learn, I have a deeper understanding of the loneliness and out-of-place-ness that Houthi immigrants feel.