Arc of '72

By May, ASPIRE (Asian Students Promoting Immigrant Rights through Education) Member

In honor of National Coming Out Week: Undocumented and Unafraid we are featuring stories of API dreamers.  The DREAM Act would provide undocumented students that arrived before the age of 16 in the US a pathway to legalization.

I am undocumented. There, I wrote it. I have proclaimed it. And although those are just three simple words, the devastating thought behind them has been instilling fear and anxiety in my life ever since I was small. Until now.

I can get into the details of my family’s past, about how my PhD neurosurgeon and eastern medicine practitioner “Dr. Dad” survived his first few months in the United States as a dishwasher, about how after only one year he made enough to send the rest of his family, including his wife and twin daughters, to his new home in Oakland, CA, and about how my parents became entrepreneurs opening business after business only five years after immigrating, but I won’t get into it. That story has been repeated to no avail.

I can also get into the details of my own personal past, about how I learned enough English through ESL and watching TV from first grade that by the middle of second grade, I had no trouble getting A’s in all my classes, about how I took AP everything I can get my hands on in high school, about getting accepted into a prestigious university, and about how people ask me why I don’t have an accent or why aren’t I getting my driver’s license, but many people whom have the same dilemma as I do have the same experiences which they have already shared.

What I want to share are my experiences about planning my future and staying positive about the present. At this point in our immigration situation, I feel that I have nothing to lose and so I share.

Currently, I am in my 3^rd year at UC Berkeley studying biology and am on the pre-med pathway. I cannot wait until I graduate! I hope to go to a healthcare vocational school afterward, maybe medical or physician’s assistant or an EMT/Paramedic. After that I hope to get a job doing what I have been training in school for a couple of years. Then I want to go into the Peace Corp. Maybe after that, I’ll apply to medical school (UCSF!) if I still think it’s the path I want to take. This is my ideal future. But this is the future I face. After graduating, I will have a BA degree from a prestigious university but I cannot get a job because I am not permitted to work in the US. Even if I do go to a vocational school, I cannot get a job afterward. The only things I can do are become a babysitter, or a nanny, or a tutor, or even a maid. Hopefully I can, at best, become a personal assistant. The Peace Corp is out of my reach because one has to be a US citizen in order to join. Medical school is just too expensive without any financial assistance and my parents have paid enough as it is for my undergraduate education.

Another aspiration I have is to get married to the man I love. I met him in my 2^nd year of high school and it’s now been five years. He knows everything about me, including my status, and loves me anyway. It took me three years to finally tell him and ever since then, he has been supportive. We went to prom together, helped each other on college applications, fought and made up, taken care of each other when we were sick, distracted each other from homework, and everything else that all loving, young couples do. I want to get married because we truly and honestly love each other. But this is what the law automatically thinks. I want to get married because it’s a way for me to get my status changed from undocumented to legal. I am a fraud and our love is a lie. In order to prove that a marriage between us is real, we have to get a lawyer, go through an extensive interview process where family and friends are questioned about our relationship, we are questioned about intimate details like what kind of shampoo I use or what kind of razor he shaves with, have inspections of our home to make sure that we live together, and other fantastic ways that breach invasion of privacy. After all this, I will still have a three year probation period where I am issued temporary legalization. If we fail at any of these tasks, our love and marriage is deemed fake and I will be deported. I want to get married for love, but they will always assume that it’s a lie.

So how do I stay sane and even positive when my future looks so bleak? After years of lying to friends, avoiding conversations, and staying quiet I finally have had enough. I decided that even though my undocumented status is the most negative thing in my life, I will not let it take over. I will live the life I want, the life I and my family have been working hard for and will not take no for an answer. I have the mind and am just stubborn enough to keep trying. I can be sad and angry about it, but I would rather join ASPIRE and fight for what is right for all the other undocumented students who have worked just as hard and suffered just as much as I did. I have hope that something good will happen out of all this bad and all of our combined anger can generate enough noise to wake up the government to do the right thing. And when my love and marriage is investigated, I will comply with dignified anger the whole way through.