What is the narrator point of view in the memoir, The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You?

For the most part, the narrative unfolds from a first-person, past-tense narrative perspective. Occasionally, the author utilizes first-person, present-tense perspective to describe events that took place more recently in the author’s life. For the most part, though, past-tense narration reinforces a repeated motif, or repeated stylistic element, that is the essential foundation of the book. This is the idea that for the author, the past is very much an experience of the past, and that she keeps it there deliberately. She treats her childhood, her journey, her settling into her new life, and the search for identity that accompanied it all as being very much part of who she was. The separate-chapter stories of other refugees that she integrates into the narrative are likewise recounted in past-tense, giving the sense that who they were was in their past but also have echoes of the author’s past. This is a contrast to the stories of refugees that she encounters during her present-tense journeys through the refugee camps, stories that are integrated into her own narrative rather than given separate chapters. This second set of refugee stories is recounted in present-tense, as part of the author’s more present-day explorations of how, or whether, contemporary refugees have experiences comparable to her own.