Over the years, I’ve hosted a dozen different newly arrived immigrants in my residences. Some came from Eastern Europe, some from Africa, some from Asia, with different experiences of modernity. But all these bewildered immigrants were FOB — fresh off the boat, and overwhelmed. They didn’t know all the thousands of tiny but critical every-day bits of knowledge it takes to survive in the US. Like how to write a personal check (an almost unique American system), how to get a credit card, how to file a tax return, what to bring to a party, how to rent a place, how to apply for a job, how to get a SS#, how to properly greet people, how to decipher a drug prescription, and so on. These are all things that you know but you don’t even know you know.<\/p>\n
So over the years I’ve handed new visitors the most current edition of this book. It’s the best of a number of American cultural survival books. It requires good English comprehension (not as much as some of the other guides); if the new arrival does not read English well, you can use this book as your guide to convey to them the invisible systems in the US. Often immigrants will pick up this kind of info from older immigrants of their same background — if there are any nearby — but that friendly info is not always correct or the best.<\/p>\n
I’ve often thought a version of this book, slightly modified, would be great for teenagers about to head off on their own. That kind of guide would seem obvious to most of us, since it would be full of stuff that “everyone knows.” Meaning we weren’t explicitly taught it. But mastering the complexity of modern life should be taught and is taught pretty well in Hello! USA.<\/p>\n
America is a nation built on the incoming flow of immigrants. There will be more coming. This is a good tool if you have the occasion to help a new arrival.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Best cultural introduction<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12972"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12972"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13242,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12972\/revisions\/13242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}