Summary and Personal Response
“Facing Poverty with a Rich Girl’s Habit” Kim wrote the memoir “Facing Poverty with a Rich Girl’s Habit,” in 2004. Her memoir was first published in The New York Times. The purpose of her writing the memoir was to give you her point of view growing up comes from riches to rags.
Main Idea Kim’s father was a millionaire in South Korea while when she was a child. Kim talks about how she was rich growing up until she started the seventh grade. When Kim reached the seventh grade her father went bankrupt. Being that bankruptcy is punishable by law her family fled to North America. They went from living in a hilltop mansion to the upstairs of a two family home in Woodstock.
Genre
Memoirs unlike autobiographies are written to describe a momentous event that changed ones life as apposed to their whole life. That said event to Kim was when she was 13, when her father lost everything. Growing up rich she was driven to school by a chauffeur, now it poverty she had to ride public transportation for the first time. Being rich the first part of her life and all of a sudden facing poverty there was a lot that she had to become accustomed to.
Audience
Her audience seemed as if it was more so for Koreans or others from different nationalities that are in a different place for the first time in life. Not necessarily just other nationalities, but just anyone who was in a different place in life and for some reason or other had to relocate without notice.
Tone
Although she may have understood the reason for the move, Kim seemed ashamed. Like when she said “Each week, I found it humiliating to wheel our dirty clothes to a bleak place called Laundromat” (2004, p. 62). Being in North America for awhile Kim begin to come accustomed to American things. She likes to dance to Usher, watched Three’s Company to try to learn English.