Beginning of Essay
"Hey, Sabrina, are you Japanese or Chinese?" I asked. Her reply, as it seems to be for a lot of minority groups, is, "Neither, I'm Chinese-American." So, besides her American accent and a hyphenated ending on her answer to the SAT questionnaire about her ethnic ba ....

Middle of Essay
.... mothers grew up during perilous times in China. They all were taught "to desire nothing, to swallow other people's misery, to eat [their] own bitterness." (p. 241) Though not many of them grew up terribly poor, they all had a certain respect for their elders, and for life itself. These Chinese mothers were all taught to be honorable, to the point of sacrificing their own lives to keep any family members' promise. Instead of their daughters, who "can promise to come to dinner, but if she wants to watch a favorite movie on TV, she no longer has a promise" (p. 42), "To Chinese people, fourteen carats isn't real gold . . . [my bracelets] must be twenty ....