Immigration patterns and policy analysis

¶ … American Dream

"Hey, Kim, do you want to throw around the pigskin?" I stared blankly at the American boy in front of me, who was easily throwing the oblong ball up and down and catching it in his hands. I looked for kindness in his eyes. I hoped that he wanted to make this strange, new classmate feel at home in the land of America, but I also saw mockery. In truth, I would not know what to do with an American football: the game was as foreign as my surroundings. Uncomfortable in my new language of English, I looked away, and although I tried to resist the feeling, I had a stab of bitter regret in my heart. Why did I follow my father to America at the age of seventeen? I was too old to full assimilate. Like so many immigrants before me, I despaired I would always be betwixt and between two worlds. I also wondered: 'does this boy assume because I am Asian that I am not good at football? I am a talented athlete, I am strong and quick, but not in this sport that is foreign to me. If only I were home, -- wherever that is, now. '

I look back on my younger self and I know now that my move to America has made me a stronger person, and I am no less an American for not having grown up cheering on the Giants or the Jets. But my introduction to American culture was not a seamless transition, and was scarred by the racism and inconsideration I experienced. My American dream is not to 'get rick quick' -- although I would like to be prosperous -- but to feel accepted, and not to be judged harshly, simply because of how I speak, how I look, and who I am. Some of my problems are due to the fact that I emigrated fairly late, and as the result of difficult, rather than joyful circumstances. I was born in Seoul, the capital city in South Korea. My early environment was bustling, and full of life. I lived with my parents, younger sister, and grandparents. My family was comfortable during my childhood, but after my father decided to become an entrepreneur, our fortunes began to falter: one of my father's business colleagues defrauded him. My family was forced to move to the countryside, where my mother was born, and tensions begin to rise between my parents. My father struggled to make a living, working with his brother-in-law, but one tragedy seemed to come on top of another. My grandmother had to live with us, because her health was failing, and eventually she was paralyzed by a stroke.

The stress of caring for my grandmother and managing the family's failing business became too much for my parents, and they divorced. After my grandmother died, my father came to the United States to begin life anew, and I joined him when I became seventeen. I came with a hopeful but heavy heart. The carefree ways of American students seemed strange to me. They tried to talk to me, but my English was unpracticed: I had never traveled to America before, so my vocabulary was relatively limited, my grammar and speech halting. I often find that when someone does not speak English as their first language, people tend to assume that they are stupid, or deaf. My heart was always full of things I wanted to say -- questions that needed answering, or opinions bubbling beneath the surface, but I no longer had words to say them. I had lost my old world, but could not gain my footing in my new land.

How I longed to be normal -- a normal Korean or a normal American, I did not care. But I knew that I was neither. My family history had aged me far beyond my years, although I had only a child's vocabulary in English. I could not go back, as my American experience soon made me different from my fellow Koreans. But my assimilation into America was imperfect. I chuckled at Gary Soto's essay "Looking for Work," about how he wished to make his American family act like the perfect families on TV, like Father Knows Best. It is hard to imagine one's family like a typical American stereotype when kimchi rather than Kool-Aid is more commonly seen on the dining room table! And like many Asian students, I felt pressured to succeed, given how much my parents had been through, and also because of the self-imposed pressures to which I subjected myself. Perhaps more so than white students, Asian students feel an added drive to achieve great things in school because the cultural stereotype suggests that they must be 'better than average' at academics. Yet I simply wanted to improve my English and feel normal when I arrived. I felt a great deal of pressure put upon me by my fellow first-generation adolescent immigrants. I was still playing catch-up, culturally and linguistically.