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December 05, 2010

The Icing on the Cake

My dear colleague Míchel sent me this web page with videos of moving stories of immigrants into the USA.

You may need to find out what these words mean:
- night shift - to make ends meet
- noodles - college
- vending machine - icing on the cake
- raise /reiz/

Why does the speaker end with the expression "the icing on the cake"?
What does it mean according to you?




Listen to more experiences in StoryCorps.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

When the immigrant came to the city, she was working as babysitting , cleaning offices, all night shift.
Their brothers had to go with her to the offfice at night and she bought them the cake to allow her to finish the work.
Yhe other person was according to her because when the finised the college it was the most important to achieve their dreams .
I'm Isabel NII

Eva Grau said...

I think the story is about a daughter asking to her mother about her childwood. And a mother talking to her daughter about how they lived when she was a little girl.
As they were inmigrants, they had to do many efforts to survive, earn some money, maintain their family.
The youg woman can remember all the times she was at work with her mum and her brother. She seemed to have been happy to go with them,eating some snaks her mum gived her and picking up some candies from the offices where her mother worked, while she was cleanning.
The mother complaints about having been too much busy and having spent few time to educate and stay with her children.
But the daugter explains to her mother that she was proud to having been watching her studying. That was one of the reasons she achieved the most she desired: to go to a college and become a student.
I think the expression "the icing on the cake" means something that is not important, wich, like a piece of ice on a hot cake, can easily dissapear.
The young woman tells it meaning she was not unhappy as her mother thinks, but she learned really good things thanks to her.

Eva said...

Oh, I´m sorry. I´d like to correct my comment about this story. I forgot that "the icing of a cake" is the cream or the cover that we can put on the top of the cake.
I mean, the thing I said about "a piece of ice on a hot cake" is fairly surrealystic interpretation about this expression.
But I think the metaphorical meaning according to the story can be the same. The "icing of a cake" is not the only or the most important part of it. It´s only a decoration...

Anonymous said...

The speakers ends with the expression "the icing on the cake" because all the efforts of her parents have paid for the college of her and without it she couldn´t have get it on.It´s a reward for her, she has achieve her dream so it´s "la guinda del pastel".
Cristina Martínez

Beatriz Otero NI1 said...

She ends with the expression "the icing on the cake" because she would like to said: everything that had happened before haven´t got a matter, because she become her dream and her parents´dream, she graduated on the college.

For me this is an expression that means something like, don´t worry for the things that happened before, because we have gotten our objetives.