The Huffington Post published a letter from an author who claimed to be the second generation of Asian immigrants, in which she said that her parents had successfully fulfilled their generation's American dream, which for her could no longer be done in the United States. The following is the author's original translation -
Author Maz do
More than 40 years ago, my father's family fled the Vietnam War and came to the United States. He left his brother and parents (who later set out alone) to settle in a refugee camp in the Midwest. He told me he would eat fish from the creek behind the camp, fish that Americans would never touch, and that even though he was sick, he kept eating because food was food. Eventually his family moved to California and were reunited under one roof. In those days, my father, his brothers, and his grandmother slept together on a mattress —I'm sure they had a lot of good dreams to do.
Later my father entered the University of California, San Diego, where he met my mother, who left Indonesia to attend college in the United States. Ten years later, they were married. In the '90s, with hard work and unexpected good fortune, they rode the wave of Silicon Valley to success. They bought a house, bought a car, became American citizens, and were ready to pass on their victory to another generation. By all accounts, they achieved that great American dream.
However, now I have to wonder if my parents would have decided to come to the United States if I had changed today.
In the United States now, every hour, Americans receive more and more crazy news. The COVID-19 pandemic has put the country in a bind. The number of new cases reported every day is a new high.
And I can clearly see what other countries are doing, and they've shown that they can keep the outbreak under control by providing as much protective equipment as possible, providing income subsidies to people in the midst of the pandemic, and having free and accessible health care systems.
A straightforward analogy goes something like this: Most of America's wounds from COVID-19 are self-inflicted. As they head into July, the U.S. sees a record death toll, while abroad they are opening restaurants, bookstores and movie theaters. Sitting in the dark cinema, holding a cold drink, eating popcorn and making a slight crunching sound... Such a harmless enjoyment, it feels like a world away.
I think I'm so lucky myself that I can even think of watching movies. I still have a place to live, I have no debts, and I have enough money to buy the necessities of life. I am a U.S. citizen, a "model minority," and a graduate of an expensive private university with no student loans. I'm 23 years old, in good health, and living in New York, which gives me an incredible opportunity. However, despite my privileges and advantages, I have found that due to the poor policy priorities of this and successive administrations, I still have problems in front of me that existed long before the pandemic.
Unlike my parents, I was thinking about immigrating from the United States to another country. They had to flee countries where even basic human rights and the right to subsistence could not be guaranteed in order to survive, and I was lucky enough to move to another country as a choice and write an article about it.
When I told my father that I was considering moving to another country, he was shocked and confused. If it wasn't to take me to a land full of opportunities to grow up, then what was all the struggle for? In order to immigrate to the United States, he was separated from his parents for many years and endured financial instability, racism in school, and later encountered racism at work. For whom did he endure that?
I don't know what it's like to be hungry for days, or what it's like to bury my thoughts and feelings deep inside from time to time. Here, or rather, the prevailing narrative is that anyone can have it all. That's the beauty of this country. Most people would never have dreamed that leaving the United States would be a good thing.
My mother thought it wasn't a bad idea. When I told her I wanted to move to Montreal, she texted me: "Yeah, with global warming, Canada isn't a bad place either?" ”
My parents were survivalists all their lives. Maybe in a sense, they passed on this trait to me; I was always waiting for the other shoe to fall. But it's entirely possible that, despite all the privileges I have, I'm blind to what I have.
A part of my heart wonders why I shouldn't stay in America and keep fighting to make this country a better place. I can participate in more protests. I can volunteer at a shelter clinic. I can keep voting, I can donate to more mutual aid organizations and bail funds. I've done these things, though it's not enough.
On the one hand, donating and helping as much as I can makes me feel better and more hopeful. On the other hand, the increasing number of insurmountable, American-specific failures repeated over and over again makes me wonder one taboo thing: whether the country is no longer irreparable.
Asians protest racial discrimination in the pandemic
Yes, other countries have a similar legacy of racism, colonialism, inequality and violence. But the way we, the police in America, cold-bloodedly murder innocent blacks shocked the world, is convincing. Our democratically elected leaders are blatantly inclined to protect men's gun rights, not children's lives. The United States is the richest country in the history of the world, with a population of 4% of the world's population, but with 25% of COVID-19 cases, which is absolutely crazy.
Moreover, that notorious clamor, that "American spirit," has been transformed into a deformed capitalization of suffering. Now, Wall Street vultures see the rising eviction rate of landlords against tenants as a "bumper harvest," a "once-in-a-lifetime real estate opportunity." Whose lifetime is this?
I don't want to stay here anymore. I realized that I was a very fortunate person to speak like this. Even so, I don't have health insurance.
My parents' expectation was that as an adult, I should be able to support myself, but the cheapest medicare option was $500 a month, and I felt like there was no choice at all. I'm afraid that if I break my ankle or get covid-19 and find potential complications, I'll have to use up my savings to save myself. I rented an apartment, but I have no illusions about owning a property.
I have my own pension plan (401k), but I doubt it's enough when I need to use it. If I lose my subsistence job, I'll have to live off unemployment benefits. For now, that appears to be an additional $600 a weekly salary on top of existing benefits, which is more than a $15-an-hour job can offer. But I would also like to point out that the extra $600 will end in two weeks, and the U.S. Congress has not yet decided whether to continue the program.
I am often subject to the wayward ideas of a government that values social media swearing more than human life. As the lucky one in America, there is still no safety net between me and the ground. In the same country, sex traffickers, war traffickers, predators and rapists are protected from impunity. These made my thoughts of leaving meaningful.
My family always reminds me that they came to the United States to make my life better. My story is not mine alone, it is based on the story of millions of first-generation immigrants in the United States.
However, our generation may be the first to see America decline and then collapse before our eyes. I am one of more than a third of young Americans who think there is a better country than the United States.
Yes, you can still find amazing success in America, but living here is a gamble, and the price of gambling and losing is one's life. Look at all of Trump's efforts to keep immigrants out — let's be honest, Trump is a symptom of decay, not rot itself — and they barely consider leaving people here. And the deep irony of all this is that most countries now deny Americans entry.
When they reopen, I think I'll look elsewhere. I want to go to a place where health care is considered a right, not a privilege, where guns are not considered more valuable than human life. There, my freedom doesn't depend on how much money I can make financially. There, true justice is not considered impossible.
By leaving the United States, I hope that I can continue my parents' American dream, which was once the typical pastime of Americans: dreams, dreams, dreams.
#Asian American Second Generation#, #Parents Fulfill the American Dream#, #美国衰败 #
Translator: Wu XVI
Editor-in-charge: Wu Sixteen