What This Fourth of July Means to a Child of Immigrants

Celebrating America Turning 250 In a Place of Belonging

This year, America turns 250. It feels like both a long time and a short time in human history, especially when I compare it to the storied civilizations my parents came from, ones that span thousands of years.

My parents told me growing up that I was a bicentennial baby since I was born in 1976. I didn’t quite understand it as a kid, but they said it with pride. They were naturalized US citizens, and they were excited that I got to be born during such a moment of celebration for their chosen country.

Two Suitcases and a Few Hundred Dollars

My parents came to the United States in the early 1960s to attend college, arriving alone with a couple of suitcases and a few hundred dollars each. They knew almost nothing about the country they were landing in.

For nearly eight decades before that, under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, people who looked like them had been barred from entering this country at all, and those already here couldn’t become citizens. The law wasn’t fully repealed until 1943, and even then, the annual quota was capped at 105 people. It wasn’t until 1965, just before my parents’ generation came of age, that the door opened wide enough for people like them to walk through it.

They walked through it with almost nothing. When they arrived, each of them was asked to choose an “American name” that would be easier for people to pronounce. My mother became Audrey. My father became William.

They both grew up in Hong Kong, on similar paths, but never met there. Instead, they found each other years later in the melting pot of New York City, working as waiters at a resort in the Catskills. When they wrote home to say they were getting married, they discovered their families had lived only a few streets apart the whole time.

There was no calling home to check in, no video chatting on a hard day. Communication was letters and the occasional long-distance phone call, timed to the minute because it cost more per minute than most people made in an hour.

When they married, few relatives could make the trip, so my mother’s godparents stood in as witnesses at a small church. She sewed her own wedding gown. Afterward, my parents helped clean up the church themselves, then drove to a town near Niagara Falls because that was what they could afford for a honeymoon.

They built a life from there, joining the millions of immigrants who came here dreaming of something new.

The Cost Underneath the Gratitude

My parents were deeply grateful for what America gave them. They said so, often and sincerely. They loved this country and wanted every future generation of our family to be part of its story.

And even in the midst of that gratitude, they were told, in ways large and small, that they didn’t quite belong. Gratitude and grievance lived in the same house in our family, and it took me most of my life to understand that both were true at once.

My father was an engineer, but the company he worked for in New York refused to recognize his degree. They kept him on as a technician, at a fraction of the pay, and he suspected it was because he was one of the only Asian employees there.

Rather than fight it, he took a job with the federal government in South Carolina, a place he had never visited. An Indian-American friend had made the same move and told him the government didn’t discriminate the way private companies did. In 1982, my parents packed up our family and moved us from Queens, one of the most diverse places in the country, to a small Southern town where the Asian population was well under one percent.

Being the Forever Foreigner

At age six, I did not understand what it cost them to make that trade. I only understood that I was one of the only Asian kids in my town, and that people constantly reminded us we didn’t belong.

Strangers shouted at our family, “Go back to where you came from.” I was bullied for how I looked, what I ate, and how my parents sounded. I wanted more than anything to disappear into the background.

For years, I resented my parents for the move. My sister and I begged to go back to New York. It took me decades to understand why they made the choice they did. They had walked away from one place only to land somewhere with almost no built-in community. So they built one themselves.

I used to think being grateful meant not complaining. I know now that the two aren’t in conflict. You can love a country and still name the ways it made things harder than they needed to be. My parents did both, quietly, for their entire lives. I am only now learning to do it out loud.

What They Taught Me About Being American

America is a promise, not a guarantee. My parents didn’t come here because everything was going to be easy. They came here because of the promise of what they could build for future generations. When I was at Ancestry, one of the things that struck me most was the stories of people who boarded a ship for America knowing they might never see home again, who sailed a one-way trip into an unknown land and simply prayed things would work out. The country they arrived in didn’t always welcome them, but they persisted, and they became the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of the people who are here today. My parents made that same bet, one generation later.

Ship manifest for my uncle, who sailed from India to the US after WWII

Belonging is built, not given. My parents were told, more than once, that they weren’t wanted. A church they hoped to join turned them away when they applied for membership, even though it actively supported missionaries in Asia. They didn’t argue. They found another church that welcomed them, and stayed there for the rest of their lives. They never waited for permission to belong somewhere. They kept looking until they found a place that would let them build a life, then built more places alongside it. They helped launch a Chinese school. They started a Chinese Bible study. They found their place within the local Chinese restaurant community. All the while, they stayed active members of our church, our neighborhood, and our local school.

Frugality was never really about money. It was about respect for what had been given to them and what it took to get it. My father never let food go to waste at our table, because he remembered what it was like to eat milk over rice as his only meal, back when that was all he could afford. Every dollar my parents saved was a small act of faith that the sacrifice would be worth it for the next generation. They bought a home, road-tripped across the country, and lived their version of the American Dream.

The dream compounds. It doesn’t just transfer. My parents left behind more than their homeland. They gave us a country to love and a place to call home. They toiled to build something lasting, the same way so many immigrants before them had. Every generation in an immigrant family inherits both an opportunity and an obligation. You don’t get to just enjoy what was built. You’re expected to add to it for the next generation.

From the Eyes of a Native-Born American

My sister and I are the culmination of the dreams my parents carried with them. We graduated from college, went on to successful careers, and raised American children of our own. My kids never grew up feeling that lack of belonging, partly because we live in a place where we are not outliers, but an unexceptional part of the community.

When I was a kid growing up in South Carolina, I loved the Fourth of July: the fireworks, hot dogs, picnics, the whole nine yards. But I always felt a bit out of place, not because I didn’t feel American inside, but because people felt the need to remind me that I was a forever foreigner.

I am watching my children grow up differently, in a community where they have always felt like they belong, where no one asks them where they are really from. They are inheriting an American Dream that two people, with a couple of suitcases and a few hundred dollars, decided to bet everything on, eight decades after their families were told they weren’t wanted here at all.

I feel a version of that inheritance too, watching the fireworks now instead of quietly wondering if they were meant for someone else. Not because anything was handed to me, but because two people refused to let a closed door stay closed.

America’s Story Is Still Being Written

This year, on the 250th anniversary, I keep thinking about how young this country still is next to the civilizations my parents came from, and how much has been rewritten and re-earned in that short time. The exclusion laws that kept my parents’ families out for generations are gone. That we are here, and thriving, is proof of it.

I was born in America’s two hundredth year, less than a decade after immigration laws still could have kept people who looked like my parents out of the country entirely.

For as long as we have had civilization, humans have migrated in search of freedom, opportunity, and safety, always longing for a place to call home. That longing, and what it costs to answer it, is what it means to be a child of immigrants.

What does the Fourth of July mean to you this year? Whether your family has been here for ten generations or one, the story of those who came to these shores is part of what makes America a place we can all call home.