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USANews版 - The Privileged Immigrant
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1
Berkeley, Calif. — “Girls,” Mrs. Danilewitz called to her daughters, “
Girls, I want you to meet this extraordinary lady!” My mother stood
unsuspecting in the foyer, hardly taller than the two children who gazed at
her now. I’d been studying for a biology test with their older brother,
Justin. “Did you know,” Mrs. D. went on, “that this lady arrived in this
country with no more than $6 in her pocket? And look what she’s made of
herself today!” She clasped my mother’s hand. “Nimmu, what an inspiration
!”
Halfway down the drive, my mother reached up and wrenched my ear. “Why did
you tell her that? Six dollars?”
Because it’s what I knew. Or thought I knew. On long car rides, against the
drone of NPR, my parents told me stories of their pasts, and of pasts that
reached further back than their own, of stingy uncles and Kerala riverboats
and letters written from sanitariums.
They told me so many stories, so many times, that the facts of their lives
became the facts of mine: mine to pick at my convenience, mine to trample
with invention.
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Continue reading the main story
From somewhere in this field of fact and fiction, I’d plucked the story of
my mom and dad, newly married, arriving at Kennedy Airport with only $12 in
cash between them.
“We had $16,” my mom said. “That’s what the Indian government let us
take out.” In 1965, $16 was worth about $120 now — not a huge sum, but
more than paupers’ crumbs. Also, my dad had a friend with a car waiting at
the airport. And a furnished apartment. And a job as a medical intern at an
Albany hospital.
Now my parents live in the Berkeley hills with an edge-of-the-world view of
the San Francisco Bay. They have a timeshare in Lake Tahoe. My mom ran a
pediatrics practice, my dad a urology practice. They raised three children.
Hard work, economy, wise investment, humility: the values of the great
immigrant equation.
In the wake of the election of Donald J. Trump, as I read about an increase
in abuse against immigrants and the appointment of Stephen K. Bannon,
formerly of the anti-immigrant Breitbart News, as a senior adviser, I’ve
been thinking a lot about my family’s immigrant story. There’s something
luxuriant in my mishandling of the facts. It speaks to the security of
knowing that yes, my parents came to this country with very little, but the
details don’t matter, not when they’ve come so far.
Indian immigrants have done well for themselves, but their success doesn’t
spring from some inherent well of virtue. Nor should it be used as a cudgel
against other immigrant groups. We didn’t succeed because we’re better, we
succeeded because we had a path.
“They took my gardener!” My neighbor waved me down one morning a few
months ago. “My gardener hasn’t shown up for three weeks,” she panted. “
He was so dependable! They’ve probably sent him away, you know? Picked him
up? But what can you do?”
She gazed at my sidewalk planter, ripe now with succulents. “But who’s
your little man? The one who does your yard?”
Our little man? My neighbor was talking about Mario, the man who created our
garden after I myself had installed a collection of expensive plants and,
through assiduous research and care, killed them.
Mario planted a new mélange. He also painted our rooms, laid carpet, built
a storage shed and fixed most everything we found ourselves breaking. But he
hadn’t been to our home in over two years. He’d gotten a job at a
warehouse — better work than the day-labor circuit.
Mario told me that it took him two tries to cross the border. The first time
, he was caught and forced to turn back. The second time, he was kidnapped
by smugglers and held in a hotel room for ransom until someone could pay his
way out.
Then he managed to secure a ride through the border. He traveled in the
trunk, folded like an ironing board against two other people, one of whom,
Mario once told us with a laugh loosened by time, had recently stepped in
dog excrement.
The last time Mario worked for us, he painted our breakfast room. I’d
chosen a color called limesicle for the walls, minced onion for the trim. An
ominous combination.
I asked Mario how his daughters were — one was in high school back in
Mexico, the other in college. He hadn’t seen them in person in 10 years.
My parents went through similar droughts of contact with their families. In
the days before Skype or FaceTime, when people interfaced by faded blue
aerogramme, they went for years seeing nobody they loved, except for each
other and their children.
As of 1960, five years before my parents arrived, there were only about 12,
000 Indian immigrants in the United States. Lifelong friendships formed in
grocery stores. “My dad looked through the entire phone book and called
every person with an Indian name,” a friend once told me.
Recently, I asked my dad about his first years here. He was part of the
first wave of foreign medical graduates — F.M.G.s — recruited to serve
America’s growing hospital network. Between 1965 and 1974, a total of 75,
000 foreign physicians would migrate to the States.
“So, um, did you face any discrimination when you started your training? In
the hospital?”
He shrugged. “Well,” he said, “there was the system.”
“The system?”
“The system in the hospital. The hours we worked, the jobs they gave us. It
discriminated against foreign medical graduates. Is that what you mean?”
Frankly, no. I’d imagined gangs of tall white surgeons, cool and cruel in
their green scrubs, elbowing past my short brown dad. “So there was nothing
… personal?”
“Personal? We didn’t have time for personal.”
Foreign medical graduates spent grueling hours doing the scut work of
hospitals. But they had this: the legal right to live and work in the United
States.
When people talk about Indians in America, they talk about success. How,
they muse, has a relatively new immigrant group managed to find its way to
the final rounds of spelling bees, to the Ivy League, to Silicon Valley,
where 16 percent of start-ups are co-founded by Indians?
From this vantage point, the impulse among Indian immigrants and their
children, when faced with the plight of the undocumented, underpaid and
downtrodden, is to shake our heads and sigh. Poor them, lucky us. The well
intentioned call this empathy.
Here’s the problem with empathy: It lets us feel good about ourselves.
Empathy allows me to shut out a founding truth of success. My American life
is held aloft by Mario’s American life, by the lives and labor of workers
who process poultry for my aunt’s fiery curries and pick strawberries for
my summer salads; by domestic workers who watch our children, who keep our
neighborhoods beautiful and our property values high. My immigrant family’s
comfort is built, in part, on the hard work of other immigrants.
Not all Indians are documented tech workers and doctors. Not all Mexicans
are undocumented laborers. This isn’t about Indians and Mexicans, but about
the documented and undocumented, and the gulf of privilege that lies
between them. This privilege builds on itself, from visa application to
employment to finance to homeownership to education to the next generation.
Once, during his first year of training, my dad fainted from exhaustion.
When he came to, he still had a job, he still had a visa.
Eventually he moved on to a residency, a fellowship, his own practice. The
journey was backbreaking, but he could take each step knowing that the earth
beneath him would not fall away.
The last time I saw Mario, he was walking down busy Shattuck Avenue. I
pulled over and asked if he needed a ride. “No, thank you,” he called back
and waved and went on walking, each step an act of faith.
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