Adult immigrants are invaluable assets to our society as they bring along their cultural capital across borders. However, little is known about how their rich life histories reflect and refract their plights as ESL learners. This study is an investigation of three adult immigrants' English learning in an immigration center in the Midwest. The researcher spent six months at the immigration center for prolonged observation. She collected artifacts, videotaped the ESL classes, and conducted interviews with the participants in 2009. Bakhtin's chronotopic approach was employed as a means for representing and mapping the participants' life histories. The findings contribute to the research base by furthering our understanding of the discursive relationships between life histories and ESL learning among these adult immigrants.