that her writing explores the challenges of being an immigrant in America. Many of her stories explore the inner lives of women and the contrasts between life in India and North America. In most cases, it is best to keep the biographical details brief. Remember, your essay is an analysis of a piece of writing, not a biography.

Your next steps are to plan ideas and outline. A close reading of “Two Ways to Belong in America” will help you here. As you read, you will see that the essay is structured as “a tale of two sisters” from Calcutta, India. Mira and Bharati both arrived in the United States in the early 1960s and have lived in the US for 35 years. At first, they were “almost identical in appearance and attitude.” Both sisters shared similar political views as well as thoughts on love and marriage. But after their arrival, their lives took divergent paths. The substance of these different choices, their implications, and your interpretation of them will most likely form your body paragraphs. In sum, these are the “two ways to belong in America” and form the core of Mukherjee's essay.

Let’s take a moment to look at some examples of how the sisters are different. What choices did they make and what were the consequences?

Mira, who arrived in Detroit in 1960 to study child psychology, did not return home to India to marry a man of her father’s choosing. Instead, she worked hard in her career, married an Indian man, and maintained her legal residence in the United States as a resident holding a green card. After 36 years as a legal immigrant, Mira has held onto her Indian citizenship and hopes to return there upon retirement.

Bharati studied creative writing, became an author, and married a Canadian American. In this way, she became an American citizen through marriage. Unlike her sister, she married someone outside her ethnic community. This is a critical point and worth potentially quoting at length from the essay: “By choosing a husband who was not my father’s selection, I was opting for fluidity, self-invention, blue jeans, and T-shirts, and renouncing 3,000 years (at least) of caste-observant, 'pure culture marriage' in the Mukherjee family.”

As her essay continues, the author elaborates on the differences between the two sisters. What tensions do you notice in these differences, and what are the political ramifications of these choices? An exploration of this can form your own personal analysis of the essay. In this way, you can develop the idea that Mira’s “Americanization” had limits. Of critical importance is the idea that Mira was here to “maintain an identity, not to transform it.” Bharati, conversely, “married America,” because it spoke to her, allowing her to embrace the new and reject the old.

In your conclusion, you can expand on the divergence of the immigrant experiences that Mukherjee explores in her essay. Rather than asserting that there is only one voice that can properly narrate the immigrant experience in the United States, Mukherjee illustrates that there is more than one narrative, more than one storyteller. At the same time, she poses the question of whether it is best to live in America as an expatriate national of another country or as an immigrant American. As Mukherjee puts it, “the price that the immigrant willingly pays, and that the exile avoids, is the trauma of self-transformation.” As part of your conclusion, you might consider meditating on the theme of self-transformation and discussing what is at stake for those who undergo such a process.