45 pages • 1 hour read
I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir
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Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Gharib spends summers in Egypt with her father, her stepmother Hala, and her half-siblings. Her father is proud of having an “American daughter,” but Gharib doesn’t feel like a “real American” due to her name, skin color, accent, and eating habits.
Her dad imparts life lessons to her and talks to her about politics and history, things her Filipino family never discusses. Hala shows her how to care for her curly hair, helps her with her first period, buys her first pair of heels, and teaches her other feminine things.
In Egypt, Gharib experiences things she has never seen in California, like extreme poverty and explosions from the Second Intifada along the Gaza Strip. She thinks at the time these experiences make her a “true Egyptian,” but in adulthood she realizes she lacks the knowledge her American friends with Egyptian parents have, like how to speak Arabic or dress for Egyptian social events. When she feels disappointed in the cultural knowledge her father bestowed her, she remembers that the most important thing was getting to spend time with him.
Chapter 4 Summary
At her diverse California school Cerritos High, “what are you?” is an important question and becomes an avenue for understanding other people’s cultures. Gharib finds the question difficult to answer due to her multicultural upbringing.
Gharib loves American pop culture and wants to be like the women she sees on television, but more than that, she wants to “meet real-life white people” (69). In her freshman year of high school, she has a crush on a boy named Jorge, a fair-skinned “Mexican-Portuguese-American” who “wasn’t white, but he was close enough” (70). Gharib thinks that being white is better than being “whatever the hell” she is (71). She thinks that white people have better jobs, “normal” food, better clothes and make up, “clean, perfect, huge” houses (71), and are more attractive. She knows that she is attracted to white boys and wants them to like her because her parents taught her to emulate white people.
At the end of sophomore year, peers call Gharib “whitewashed,” which they say means she is a “poser.” This is one of many terms people at her high school use to refer to each other’s races and ethnicities. Other examples include: twinkie/banana, “Asian on the outside white on the inside” (75), or hapa, a “Hawaiian word to describe mixed-race kids” (75). Gharib doesn’t feel Filipino enough to fit in with the Filipino kids, but develops a group of friends who all love punk music and culture. At the end of senior year, she is given the yearbook superlative “Most Unique."
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
These chapters complicate Gharib’s sense of cultural identity. She has a growing feeling that she is not fully Egyptian, Filipino, or American. When she spends summers with her father, he emphasizes her Americanness. In her youth, she has a limited idea of what constitutes being a “true American,” and many of her attributes do not correspond with that definition: “I had a round, brown face. I loved Spam. I had a weird name. I spoke English with a Tagalog accent” (52). Gharib defines Americanness via white Americans. Her first name, “Malaka,” is an Arabic name that fits within the context of her Egyptian culture. Observing Whiteness as a Cultural Norm in America, she calls her name “weird,” positioning it outside the American norm.
Even though she was born in the United States, Gharib calls herself a “FOB,” which means “fresh off the boat” (52). This phrase is used to refer to immigrants to America who have not assimilated to mainstream American culture, and it can sometimes be derogatory or even a racist slur; media such as Eddie Huang’s memoir Fresh Off the Boat (2013) and ABC’s subsequent 2015 sitcom of the same name work to deconstruct and reclaim this phrase (Abad-Santos, Alex. “What ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ Means to Asian-Americans.” Vox, 16 Jan. 2015). Gharib calls herself a “FOB” to emphasize the disconnect she feels with America when her father touts his “American daughter” in Egypt.
In the summers of her early teenage years, Malaka has experiences that she thinks make her a “true Egyptian.” An older man makes advances on her romantically because of her “shameful” lack of modesty, she hears explosions from the Second Intifada on the Gaza Strip, and she sees extreme poverty and social striation. Her family has a 12-year-old maid named Negla who does their housework, eats on “special” plates in a separate room, and cannot read, write, nor spell her name. At the time, Gharib thinks Negla’s situation is “so unfair.” She does not yet have the language to describe the overlapping class and gender issues that deprive Negla of the education Malaka has and instead make her a domestic servant.
A 2017 study by Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization found that 20.1% of Egyptians were illiterate; of those 14.3 million people, 9.1 million were women “Illiteracy in Egypt Decreases, But Number Still High: Official.” Egypt Today. 12 Nov. 2019). In the 1990s, when Gharib was spending her summers in Egypt, this number was even higher. Gharib’s father is among Egypt’s upper classes, and her experiences in Egypt represent only a fraction of the lifestyles there. She feels Cultural Isolation and Assimilation acutely in adulthood when she goes to Alexandria with friends. She does not know their cultural practices, dances, or dress codes, and concludes that despite the glimpses of war and poverty she saw as a teen, she doesn’t know anything about “being Egyptian.”
Back in Cerritos, Gharib begins to strive for whiteness in the media she consumes and the boys she likes. Because Jorge is one of the “whitest” boys at Cerritos High, he “really had his pick of the litter” (70). Even though Jorge is not white, Gharib and the other girls racialize him as white. The memoir reflects how the “white-dominant culture” of the United States “operates as a social mechanism that grants advantages to white people, since they can navigate society both by feeling normal and being viewed as normal” (“Whiteness.” The National Museum of African American History and Culture. Smithsonian Institute). This view can become internalized. Gharib and the other girls have crushes on Jorge because he approximates the “normalcy” of whiteness more than they do; this is evident when Gharib says that Jorge is a desirable romantic partner because he is “close enough” to whiteness.
Even though her peers also have crushes on the “whitest” boys in school like Jorge, they accuse Gharib of being “whitewashed” and a “poser.” These words imply that they think Gharib is trying to be something she isn’t “as a way to be cool” (73). Gharib’s family taught her “from an early age that everything white people did was better” (72). She is not pursuing whiteness to be cool, but because her family has ingrained it as a social and cultural norm that one must strive for to be successful. As she moves through high school and then college, Gharib must navigate both the judgment of her peers and her own internalized sense of white superiority.
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