United States

The United States is the Kingsley family’s refuge, workplace, and home, but never a secure one: after years of building a life there, the family faces deportation because they are undocumented immigrants. For Natasha Kingsley, who came from Jamaica at eight, the country is the place where her childhood, friendships, education, and imagined future have taken shape. The threat of removal exposes the difference between living in a place and being allowed to remain there.

Migration and the Making of Home

The family’s move begins with Min Soo Bae and Dae Hyun Bae, whose migration from South Korea follows the promise of help from a cousin doing well in New York City. Their choice is described as an act of faith: leaving behind language, people, and history for a destination whose stories of safety and prosperity might not prove true. Some promises are fulfilled. The cousin helps, the couple adapts as much as they can, and they prosper. Their experience gives the United States a real, material promise of opportunity, even as it does not guarantee that every newcomer will be welcomed.

That migration also becomes part of the family’s identity. Min Soo weighs American names against Korean naming traditions and chooses both: Charles Jae Won Bae and Daniel Jae Ho Bae each receive an American first name, a Korean personal name, and the family name. The arrangement makes the names a map of origin as well as a compromise between cultures. The family’s place in the United States does not erase where they came from; it gives that history a new setting.

The Kingsleys’ route is different. Samuel Kingsley spends two years in the United States before Patricia Kingsley and Natasha join him. Natasha remembers the flight from Jamaica and, as a child, wonders how the plane will pass through the clouds. At the airport, Samuel recognizes and embraces them. His Jamaican patois sounds familiar, although he smells of American soap, clothes, and food. The reunion makes the new country a place of family connection, but the family must still establish the ordinary conditions of a life there.

Work, Neighborhood, and Cultural Difference

After the family reunites, Samuel finds security-guard work in a Wall Street building and rents a one-bedroom apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn. He chooses a graveyard shift so he can audition during the day, pursuing an acting career while supporting his family. But he is tired, parts do not come, and his accent does not disappear despite his efforts. Patricia and Natasha continue speaking with Jamaican accents, even as Samuel tries to teach them what he regards as proper American pronunciation. In this account, the United States offers work and possibility, but not an easy passage into the professional life Samuel wants.

Natasha’s Brooklyn is marked by crowded, working-class streets and businesses: Jamaican jerk restaurants, Chinese restaurants and liquor stores with bulletproofing, discount clothing stores, beauty salons, delis, and check-cashing shops. When she walks there with Daniel, the contrast with Midtown Manhattan makes the neighborhood’s relative poverty more visible to her. She feels ashamed that she wants the darkness to hide how run-down it looks, then ashamed of that reaction. The neighborhood is not simply a backdrop: it is home, viewed both through Natasha’s familiarity and through the social comparison prompted by Daniel’s presence.

Race and cultural power also shape the local landscape. Natasha recognizes the familiar tension around Korean ownership of Black hair-care businesses. At Black Hair Care, sun-faded posters show smiling Black women with chemically treated hairstyles; their narrow image of professional appearance contrasts with Natasha’s own choice to wear a large Afro. Her mother has considered that style unprofessional, while Natasha values having the choice between natural and relaxed hair. The scene situates the United States as a place where identity is negotiated not only across national origins but also through racialized ideas about appearance and respectability.

Immigration Status and the Threat of Removal

The family’s undocumented status makes the United States precarious even after years of residence. On the day Natasha seeks help at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services building in downtown Manhattan, she believes the family will be deported that night. She describes the visit as her last chance to persuade someone—or fate—to let her stay, while acknowledging that desperation, rather than belief in fate, drives the appeal. The government building represents a possible avenue for help, but the urgency of the visit shows how little control she feels she has over the outcome.

The legal process also makes her father’s conduct consequential for the whole family. When an attorney refers to Samuel’s DUI, Natasha insists that it is his problem and asks why she should pay for his mistake. She traces the chain as she understands it: his night of fame led to the DUI, which led to the family being discovered, and then to the loss of the only place she calls home. After Samuel’s arrest, the family receives a Notice to Appear from Homeland Security. An individual act thus enters an immigration process whose consequences reach children who did not commit it.

For Natasha, departure threatens the life she has assembled. She has lived in the United States since she was eight, has friends and a senior year to finish, and hopes to attend college. Her mother has saved for two years to travel to Florida and obtain a stolen Social Security number she believes can pass background checks and college applications. Natasha is preparing an application to Brooklyn College and imagines financial aid and a scholarship might make SUNY Binghamton or another in-state school possible. These plans make removal concrete: it interrupts not an abstract aspiration but a particular route through school and into adulthood.

Departure, Return, and Uneven Belonging

The country’s meaning changes sharply when Natasha is made to leave. Jamaica is her birthplace, but she says she does not know the place or the family there as she believes she should, and does not have a Jamaican accent. Deportation therefore cannot function as a simple return to a familiar home. The place she has grown up in is being taken from her, while the destination is both hers by origin and unfamiliar through separation.

After arriving in Kingston, Natasha enrolls in school, where her class is called Sixth Form rather than senior year. University requires preparation for Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Exams and A-level exams; because money is scarce, she waitresses to help her family. She adopts a Jamaican accent until it becomes real, finds a family of friends, and gradually learns to like and love the country of her birth. The adjustment is neither immediate nor a negation of her life in the United States. It shows belonging developing through practice, work, relationships, and time.

Distance also reshapes Natasha’s relationship with Daniel. She does not let him go because she wants to, but because she cannot live in two worlds at once, with her heart in one place and her body in another. Daniel, still in the United States, declines Yale, works two jobs, and attends Hunter College part-time; even his poems that are not about Natasha remain connected to her. His hearing of her new accent as a cadence of her slipping away makes language a measure of separation. The United States remains the place from which their shared life was interrupted, even as each of them builds a different life across the distance.

Narrative Significance

The United States is presented through competing scales: the family’s migration hopes, a Brooklyn apartment and its surrounding businesses, school and college plans, and the power of immigration proceedings to undo years of ordinary life. Its opportunities are not false—the Baes prosper, Samuel finds work, and Natasha imagines higher education—but access and security are uneven. The same country that becomes home through family, neighborhood, and growing up can classify a family as removable.

For Natasha, the decisive conflict is not simply between two national cultures. It is between the lived fact of belonging in the United States and the legal vulnerability that makes continued residence impossible. Her later adaptation in Jamaica complicates the idea that home is fixed by birthplace or guaranteed by residence: she grows into a renewed connection with Jamaica while the United States remains the place of her lost plans and formative relationships. The country’s significance lies in that unresolved double meaning—home made through life, and home withheld through law.