Sad Life in Sad Times

I always liked the witty intelligence, humor and vulnerability of the Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of “eat, love and pray”, so today I started to listen to another one of her book “committed”. While it’s a story regarding to contemplation of her relationship and love, it hit home hard at some much more realistic and cruel part of my life. Yep, it is the pitfall of my life, as I have always complained, the immigration system of US.

Her soul mate/significant other/boyfriend/partner is a Brazilian born Australian citizen, who got detained by the department of homeland security because apparently he had been visiting her on a tourist visa too many times.  He got interrogated during border crossing for 6 hours and then was deported. They have to get married so that he could have an American green card, yet marriage is something they have been escaping from.

I am right at the start of the book where these two loving antagonists are facing with this huge dilemma, but I simply couldn’t feel sympathy for them, which the author was apparently trying to invoke. To me she was like a kid with chicken pox complaining about the horrible itch to a cancer patient.

The same system has bothered me for years, literally locking me in a job that I hated with gut and soul. Youths, dreams, talents and aspirations are ruthlessly wasted because of this immigration system, and my throat is filled with this huge lump as I write this. Just like how Elizabeth felt intimated by the “authority”, imagine the level of intimidation when I first came to US as a 20-year old Chinese girl with bright eyes and heavy accent. I was horrified at the Chicago international airport where I entered the border, where US policeman in sharp black uniforms and movie-like demeanors examine me and my intentions as if I am criminal, when I was just this young girl starting a PhD program, excited about embarking a life of adventure in the land of freedom, the “Concrete jungle where dreams are made of” and where “there is nothing you can’t do”.

Well fast-forward to the present day, I was listening to Elizabeth’s audiobook on the way home after work, which was a job that I would have never taken if I am a free person not worried about being deported. The “empire state of mind” song and all the other Hollywood movies have lied to me. Five years in the US demonstrated to give me the exact opposite of freedom – I love US for its culture, tolerance for various contrasting ideologies and eccentricities including my own. –but I am at the same time not allowed to be the person that I want to be, or to be the awesome person I could have been.

Being a foreign person in the US is like walking on thin ice. Any moment people could “pull the rug off” underneath your feet and you will just lose everything you have accumulated and earned in this country, pack up and leave. I have always labeled myself as an adventurous and free-spirited person, but I definitely am not made for this level of insecurity.

I like to read the wiki page of famous people, about how they overcome adversities and achieve great things. How their parents are dirt poor and then through sheer will, they seized the opportunities and become the great persons they are. But I also wonder about the other ones—the ones with the same level of talent, and capabilities, but was not able to do anything because of the society they were born into. My parents were vivid examples; they were born during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China and thus never had a chance to receive an education. They often tell me how lucky I am to be born in a later generation, and I often feel the same. So I grew up with a sense of endowment—that I am lucky to have all the opportunities, and I am free to make great achievements as I wish.

All that opportunities and freedom came to an abrupt and unexpected halt as I land in the US. The immigration laws limit where and when I can work, and who I can work for, or whether I am able to work at all.

I do not think that by being an immigrant in US that I am as unlucky as my parents were, but I certainly felt a level of personal tragedy, where the potential of a person is limited not by the lack of capabilities or hard-work, but from external factors such as politics and historical events and relics. It’s the first time that I felt absolutely tied down and useless in front of a system that limits the extend of how I can live my life. From then I paid a lot of attentions to personal tragedies which the person has no control over—sad lives in a sad time, such as Jewish stuck in Europe during the holocaust, or all the  people getting massacred in Rwanda during 1994 genocide, or simply the generation of my parents who weren't able to get proper education because of the whim of a dictator.

Thinking about how all the other people felt during their lives, which are surely more tragic than mine—helped me cope with my current reality. But when I encounter people who have what I don’t have, it always cuts a little. It hurts to look at my American friend who decides to quit his job and be an entrepreneur—which is something that I would love to do but unable to do because I have to maintain my visa, it hurts to listen to Elizabeth’s audiobook and hear her complain about her struggle, it hurts to think about all the travels and adventures I could have done, and it hurts to think about what I could have achieved if I was born in US, or simply allowed to work on any job I want to. In this sense, “a sad life in a sad time” is extraly sad when everyone else around you are bustling around and making a great living with the freedom they had.

Probably that’s the definition of a tragedy, a tragedy resulted from contrast, and contemplation of what one could have done if so and so. Heck the irony is that I am ashamed to talk about it because I feel my problem is "too low" in nature, who cares about an immigrant from a developing country? They are lucky enough to be here already. My tragedy is not quite sad enough like the holocaust, nor would I wish for it, but the lack of attention to the tragedy of mine and other similar people makes it extraordinarily saddening. It cuts deep, for tragedy itself and for the dismissal of it by the society. Because my life, my talents and my aspirations are all that I have and all that I am proud of, but I am cut short, and I am denied of how far I can extend myself, AND people don't care. 

I don’t know whether I will eventually overcome this adversity, and came out stronger than ever because of my struggle, I guess this is just a moment of record of my sad life in this particularly sad time.

Molly

2014-04-30 6:10pm