Summary

In Chapter 3 of Part 4, the author begins by using past-tense narration to describe her attendance at a 2018 demonstration protesting the treatment of refugee and immigrant women, and moves into describing a class training those sorts of women in both feminist history and ways of functioning in the present. She describes the many stories of degradation told by those women, commenting that for them and for other refugees, “when you have no rights, everyone has power over you” (305). She discusses the need for developing self-reliance as part of the process of assimilation and living a new life, comparing the process to her own experience of becoming a new, exhausted, pained, and frustrated mother. “The body knows how to change,” she says. “That doesn’t stop it from resisting” (307). She then goes on to say that “the former me, the one who wasn’t a...