Against the backdrop of an infantile administration, a politicized pandemic, and longstanding, historical racial tensions, the story of America is tearing itself apart.
The stories we tell about ourselves shape who we are. This is true for individuals, families, and whole countries. In the summer of 2020, Americans are seeing more clearly than ever that the story we thought we knew about our country is flawed, to say the least. We need to see each person as the lead of their own complex internal story, collectively making up the fabric of this country. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has so eloquently expressed, to believe in a single story for an individual or country is dangerous.
One of the earliest and most prevalent stories making up America’s identity is that of the nation’s immigrants. Today’s modern wave of immigration began after the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act — passed in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Since then, over 59 million people have immigrated to the United States and, for the first time, the majority of immigrants have come from Latin American and Asian countries. This new act emphasized family status, with preference given to relatives of immigrants who obtained American citizenship or permanent residency. Obtaining American citizenship is a long and complicated process taking up to a year or longer. Today’s requirements include legally living in the United States for five consecutive years as a lawful permanent resident, paying a $725 fee, and completing an interview on your character, understanding of the U.S. Constitution, and civics questions that many Americans born here would not know the answer to (i.e. What is one thing Benjamin Franklin is famous for? Hint: it’s not electricity).
While the 1965 Act removed the old national-origins quota system, it still placed an annual cap of 170,000 visas for immigrants in the Eastern Hemisphere, 120,000 visas from the Western Hemisphere, and specific per-country visa caps as well. People waited for years with their name on a list for the chance at something more in an unknown place.
The 1965 Act put in motion a narrative for millions of immigrants that would play out over decades, shaping America’s culture and policy. Now, the children of these immigrants are coming of age and beginning to better understand the story, the myth, the dream, that uprooted our parents and placed each of us and our hyphenated identities in to the middle of a 400 year old country still figuring out its own self. A generation of children of immigrants have a reconciliation to go through between the immigrant story that our parents lived and whatever story we chose for ourselves, moving forward in an ever-changing world demanding social justice. The shadow from our parent’s choices touch on everything, and stepping aside from that shadow is stepping aside from a part of ourselves. But it may be necessary.
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In the 1970s and 1980s, the people on the early wave of modern immigration were my parents. My aunt. My uncle. My grandparents. That was nearly 40 years ago, and the story of America that swooped my dad up from the crowded, screaming streets of Guangzhou, China and dropped him off on the West Coast — denim jacket, English phrases and all — is moving him into a new story. He was a twenty-something-year-old with a hustle for money and a hunger for something big. Now, he’s a man contemplating retirement, happily not passing down the family business, and annoying his children to no end on marriage and grandchildren.
My dad and my aunt — with the support from their parents, respective spouses, and the Asian-American community — owned and managed a number of Chinese-American restaurants in the Pacific Northwest. The businesses did modestly well. At least, my childhood gave no indication of the contrary. For me, growing up mean painstaking hours waiting for my mom to get off work at the restaurant. I would draw on scrap pieces of paper in a sticky red booth by the servers’ station and sip on free glasses of Sprite. Sometimes the cook would come out and bring me a plate of sliced BBQ pork or egg rolls (my favorite). Sometimes I would help bus a table after the customers left, and the waitress would let me keep the one or two dollar tip. Other times I was recruited to the back of the restaurant to stock vegetable shelves or count money before following my mother to another painstaking wait at the bank to make a deposit. I wonder how many hours I’ve spent under those dimly lit lights playing with the waving paw of a lucky cat greeting you for dinner while the swinging kitchen door released shouts from the back scenes of American multiculturalism. Each swing a window into the sound of another language, and the smells of ginger and garlic from a much older country left behind for better opportunity.
Because that was the American Dream, wasn’t it? Or some version of it. A place where if you worked hard, you could get by and be happy. But at what cost? For the person immigrating, you shed a part of yourself, leaving a country like that. You leave behind familiar streets, family dinners, and late-night laughter with childhood friends. You leave behind love, dreams, and another version of yourself. All to come to a foreign country with nothing but a dream and a promise of another story. For years, my father worked long, odd hours. He’d stay up late to close the bar and come home at two, three in the morning. I saw him for a few hours on the weekend, and maybe for ten or twenty minutes in the afternoon before he left for work again. Eventually, my father got us in to a nice house in a nice neighborhood. His children spoke English, and they each made it to college.
I don’t know what my father would’ve been like had he stayed in China, but maybe I would’ve seen him more growing up. Maybe I could explain to him in one language without Google Translator what I do in my job, why I dress the way I dress, what kind of future I want for myself, or any of the other millions of little and big things daughters tell their fathers when they are not both learning the same new social constructs while starting their understanding of the world from opposite sides of an ocean. Because while we always talk about what our parents gave up, this is what we gave up. This is the shadow from our parent’s decision that marked our lives and our stories.
Most children of immigrants leave childhood early. They translate for parents at the doctor’s offices or for younger siblings at school. They navigate finances in a system where they may know just as much about home loans and financial aid as their parents. The role-reversal in the parent-child relationship and the cultural gap between each generation brings with it a heavy difference in emotional, intellectual, and physical language and support. As kids turning into teens turning into young adults, we didn’t talk much of anything about our feelings or mental health, a practically taboo topic. Expressions of love at home were different from what I learned in school, the media, or from friends. And at times there was hot friction between the constant pressure to be a quiet, obedient, feminine Chinese girl in an American world that values individuality, the outspoken, and increasingly allows for freedom in gender-roles.
It was always a given that my family went through these experiences in order for me to go to a good college and find a stable, secure, well-paying job so that I wouldn’t have to peel shrimp for eight hours a day, seven days a week. This was what millions of people around the world wanted. What we went to community classes in English for all those years ago, and what we worked through every Thanksgiving and Christmas for. But the shadow of this narrative gripped me into a story that I was a secondary character to, leaving me to chase the definitions of success and happiness from a country I was not born in to. It left me resentfully navigating public school systems, colleges, jobs, and relationships on my own without a support system that I saw buoyed my peers. It was constantly reminding me that my parents gave up a part of their life for me to have this one and feeling that my singular life held with it the weight of that oceanic journey from decades ago. That I could not risk this American life because we came here on a visa.
In the end, I was around 18 when I fully realized that the person I was did not fit easily into my parent’s worldview, and in many ways never will.
There’s a kind of acceptance that naturally comes from your parents, and another from your country. When both are lacking, you have to make your own kind of acceptance. You have to define your own sense of success, happiness, and belonging amidst a larger national conversation that often leaves behind your kind of representation.
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Across the nation, a generation of children doing homework in the restaurant or translating tax documents for their parents are growing up. We are seeing more clearly what our story is within the country, our families, and ourselves. The shadow of a choice from before we were born is slowly fading, and we are beginning to see what is in its place.
For some, it is a story of mental illness and estrangement. For others, it is a reaction to organize and help: on Instagram, @browngirltherapy has nearly 80k followers focused on mental health for children of immigrants. And in mainstream media, you now find stories of college graduates leaving behind their degrees and transforming their narratives to Marvel superheroes, ex-dirtbag Oscar-winners, and political comedic commentators challenging everything from Saudi Arabia to student loan debt. While many of us were able to step aside from our parent’s story earlier, it is no easy thing to challenge your parents, your family, and the story you told yourself to reconcile the experiences you went through.
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I write this during the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement. Black and African-American history in the United States is undoubtedly complex, and in one small corner of that history is the intersection of Asian Americans. Whether our parents know it or not, we owe many of our civil rights, including the legal right to immigrate to the United States, to the work of Black & African-Americans during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
Across the country, millions of people are now asking what their voice is and what they will do with it — if they hadn’t before. The idea that you can change the world is, in many ways, ingrained in not just today’s youth but within the character of America. Asking ourselves to advocate for social justice is unquestionably the right thing to do. It is inevitably made all the harder in a severely unjust world, when our internal stories are in conflict with each other, and when the systemic racism overflowing in this country leaves no community dry, including our own parents and family. However, we are always a part of a larger narrative, and for children of immigrants it is important to recognize our story and to take and leave from it what we may. While we may have lost a generation of defiant, creative, risky, changemaking talent under the shadow of a narrative from decades ago, there is ultimately no timeline for stepping aside from the immigrant children’s shadow and making a risk for something that matters.
