Word: menial
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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From the day his village was destroyed, Deng never stopped looking for a safe, peaceful home. He finally made it to the U.S.--the promised land for many Sudanese--but in America he found new and confusing challenges: menial jobs, discrimination, endless seriocomic misunderstandings. In his first apartment he didn't realize he could turn off the air conditioning and spent a week sleeping with all his clothes on. The loudness and lewdness of the preshow festivities at an NBA game seemed to him "perfectly designed to drive people insane." The book is framed by Deng's experience of being...
...showed me that he doesn't want me to be a run-of-the-mill person," he explains. He demanded to know what the dealership's top salesmen made--and got the job. Banishing all doubt--"You can't sell a $40,000-to-$50,000 car with menial thoughts"--Adams took four days to retail his first vehicle, a Ford F-150 Lariat with leather interior. He knew that many fellow salesmen don't notch their first score until their second week. "Right now, I'm above average!" he exclaims. "It's a new day God has given...
...with a foreign teaching fellow who had hardly mastered conversational English, let alone the ability to express the rich and intricate arrangements of the great playwright. I’ve shivered in snow, rain, and even the occasional burst of sunshine after sitting through mind-numbing physics labs where menial and tedious tasks such as tracing lines on electrode-conducting paper have doubled as deepening my understanding of electromagnetism. Not quite. I’ve even laughed dry cackles of skepticism after emerging from hour-long lectures of incomprehensible professorial conjecture, knowing all the while that the test would...
...promising naval officer, Holman lost his sight at age 25 after a mysterious illness. That was, to say the least, a calamity. Braille had not been invented yet. The blind were institutionalized and infantilized, expected to lead celibate lives mooching or begging or doing menial work. None of which appealed to our hero. Seeking a cure (not only for his blindness but also for agonizing rheumatism), he set off alone for southern France...
...Following the discovery of gold in California, some 150,000 Chinese sail to the U.S. A few find fortune in the mines?San Francisco is still known as "Old Gold Mountain" in Chinese?but discrimination relegates most to menial labor, including construction of the transcontinental railroad...