Reflection 7

Esther Ho

Section A02

Reading Reflection #7

In response to: "I am a man with a heart" - Andrew Thi

Andrew Thi fled to the United States with his parents at the age of six as refugees from Cambodia. In this article, Andrew talks about his journey of an individual that was an honor roll student on one side, but an individual that gets into trouble for stealing and other things on the other side. At the end, after multiple crime reports and other convictions, he was a candidate of deportation. This was due to the law that was passed in 1996 by Congress that "subjected legal immigrants to immediate deportation or removal status for committing felony."

What stood out to me in this article is that Andrew was a smart individual. As seen in his acceptance to the Stanford Youth Science Medical Program, he is capable of having a bright future ahead of him. But he was just lost and made some conscious decisions of bad choices. Is the conscious choice of making those decisions a reflection of an underlying issue? Why is it that he would throw away all his potential to commit such crimes repeatedly?

The other part that stood out to me was the deportation issue. When he mentioned that to the US, “we all looked the same, we were all Asian” and that when he presented all the recommendation letters (used to build a positive image) to the federal officers, they only see that he is a violent man, selectively seeing what they believe. Like Andrew said, no matter how many good things you do, one bad thing will just mask it all. Also, the mentioning of race and how Asians are under one classification raises a controversy as to what contributes to this deportation decision. 

Why do you think that Andrew committed those crimes? Does it reflect an underlying conflict?