“A dream doesn’t become reality through magic but sweat, determination, and hard work,” (Colin Powell). Dreams are ideas, thoughts, and emotions, that can be filled with happiness or hate, they can be confusing or understandable. Without dream we have nothing to go after, or no goal to reach. Dreams may not turn out how you want them to be. Dreams can affect a person’s life in a positive and negative way, they can start out positively in the beginning but also negatively in the end. Suyuan’s dream was to leave China and come to America hoping for a better life. She believed that America can bring her a better lifestyle, with wealth and success, “My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich.
You could become instantly famous” (“Tan 1”). When Suyuan came to America she didn’t want to have a better life just for herself but also her daughter. Suyuan see’s the difference in lifestyle in America and hopes by moving here that she could have a better life. Suyuan’s dream was negative because, America may bring a better life for herself but it’s not providing one for her daughter Jing-Mei. Jing-Mei was giving up hope, she said, “The tests got harder -multiplying numbers in my head, finding the queen of hearts in a deck of cards, trying to stand on my head without using my hands, predicting the daily temperatures in Los Angeles, New York, and London. One night I had to look at a page from the Bible for three minutes and then report everything I could remember.
“Now Jehoshaphat had riches and honor in abundance and…that’s all I remember, Ma,” I said. Suyuan thought she could give her daughter a better life filled with happiness and success. When Suyuan realizes that America is not as great as she thought it would be. She knows she has gotten her hopes up for no reason. She gives up on Jing-Mei because she is not working hard in school.
I think it was important to dream about living the American Dream Because it gives you something to work on and not give up. But moving did bring a negative impact upon her daughter Jing-Mei. She could not focus in school and really didn’t care too much about it. In The Scarlet Ibis, the two main characters were Brother and Doodle, Doodle was born with a physical disability and couldn’t walk. Brother wanted to teach doodle to walk because “when doodle was five years old, I was embarrassed at having a brother who couldn’t walk so I set out to teach him”.
To help Doodle learn to walk he encouraged him to get up a do things. Also he stated that he knew that Doodle wanted to be different than everyone at school and motivated him to work harder. When brother was trying to get Doodle to run from the storm “He had failed and we both knew it, so we started back home racing the storm again”. When Doodle was working hard to race out the storm, he had fallen and hurt himself badly. After Doodle had fallen Brother noticed and immediately raced back to him. He noticed cuts and bruises on his skin. Brother checked him for a pulse and he didn’t have one. Brothers dream made him realize that Doodle was beautiful no matter if he could or could not walk.
