Look at the title of the text below. What does it mean to be grateful – and ungrateful? What do you think the text is going to be about?
The Ungrateful Refugee By Dina Nayeri Dina Nayeri grew up in in Iran. She and her family spent a brief, and for Dina, rather unhappy spell in London in the 1980s where she experienced racism and bullying for the first time from boys in her class, injuring her finger in a confrontation with them. When the family returned to Iran, Dina’s mother was threatened with execution for having converted to Christianity and the family became asylum seekers, spending two years in refugee hostels in Dubai and Rome.
spell periode execution henrettelse / avretting to mock å gjøre narr av, å herme etter / å gjere narr av, å herme etter guttural strupelyd phlegm slim
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When I was ten, we were accepted by the United States and sent to Oklahoma, just as the first Gulf War began. By the time of our arrival in the American south, the nail on my pinkie had grown back, my hair was long, and I was (according to my mother) pretty and funny and smart. The first thing I heard from my classmates, however, was a strange “ching-chongese” intended to mock my accent. I remember being confused, not at their cruelty, but at their choice of insult. A dash of racism I had expected – but I wasn’t Chinese; were these children wholly ignorant to the shape of the world outside America? If you want to mock me, I wanted to say, dig down to the guttural khs and ghs, produce some phlegm, make a camel joke; don’t