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Fast Facts
- Along with having no electricity in their little village in the mountains, Celiane and her family still used cooking stones and wood-fed fires to cook their food, a very primitive and ancient way of preparing food.
- The name of Celiane's country, Haiti, comes from the Arawak Indian word, Ayiti, which means mountainous land. The island used to be populated by Indian peoples until white settlers wiped them out. The Indians were treated with great cruelty, forced into slavery and bondage, and many died when European diseases to which they had no resistance infected their tribes.
- People in Haiti call the local buses tap taps because they tap on the side twice when they want to get off. They are colorfully painted with pictures and words by their owners, and are themselves a source of entertainment.
- Haiti is made up of nine geographical regions or "departments." People living outside of Haiti are said to be living in the tenth department. When Franck meets Celiane and her family for the first time in New York City, he says, "Welcome to the Tenth Department."
- Many families fled Haiti not just for economic reasons, but also for political reasons. During the regimes of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, many people had to flee the island or face possible death for expressing their political views.
- From 1960 to 1962, through a program called Operation San Pedro, about 14,000 Cuban children fled Cuba alone. They were placed in orphanages and foster homes all over the United States. Between 1965 and 1973, the twice-daily airlifts called the Freedom Flights evacuated more than 260,560 refugees from Cuba.
- The U.S. government set up an organization in Miami called the Cuban Refugee Emergency Center to help Cuban refugees when they first arrived in the United States. The organization was housed in a tower-like building that became known as the Freedom Tower. About 450,000 exiles were given help by the U.S. government in this building between 1962 and 1974. As a 'thank you' for this assistance, the Cuban community is raising funds to turn the Freedom Tower into a museum, research center and library that will tell the story of the Cuban exiles who fled to south Florida.
- Even in the late 1960s Cuban girls were not supposed to go out with a boy unless they were accompanied by a chaperone. Yara's sister Ileana was being very bold when she went out with a "Yankee" boy on her own.
- Yara finds it difficult getting used to writing the word "I" in her compositions for school, as one rarely does this in Spanish. She thinks it sounds "conceited" to have so many I's in her written work!
- To honor their mothers on Mother's Day, Cubans wear a red carnation on their clothes.
- Koreans use a number of hot ingredients in certain types of Korean food. They are particularly fond of cooking with chili peppers of various kinds. They do not think it is at all odd to be seen sweating heavily at the dinner table.
- During the period described in the story, which is the early 1970s, families like Jin-Han's were constantly on the move trying to find better job opportunities in different parts of the country. It was certainly not an easy time for these new arrivals to "the land of opportunity."
- In Jin-Han's family, his father talks to the children in English even though he doesn't speak it fluently. As a result, Jin-Han has a difficult time understanding his parents when they speak in rapid fire Korean. It often happens in immigrant families that parents speak mostly one language while the children predominantly speak another.
- Running a wig store was something many Korean families did, as most wigs that were sold in the United States were actually made in Korea.
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