In This Enclosed Circle

By Anonymous / Spring 2022

In the middle of 2013, my family got the news that my grandparents’ sponsorship for us to move to America was approved. With much excitement, we started packing our lives in Vietnam and moved to the States in September of 2013. At the time, I was 13 years old, which was relatively young, did not know anything besides going to school, hanging out with friends, and helping my parents out, but I was beyond excited because I got to see America! The place that my grandparents are living in, the place of all the tall and white foreigners, the place which everyone tells me is home to freedom and wealth, the American dream.

My family lived quite a comfortable life back in Vietnam. My parents opened a shop, which was like a convenience store style, where we sold almost anything that we could, while me and my brother went to school and helped them out whenever we were free. Our shop was not the biggest one, but we managed to have many longtime customers who kept us busy all the time, which made everyone surprised when we spread the news that we were selling our house and everything since we were leaving for America. At the time of moving, I heard my parents talk a lot about mine and my brother’s future as one of the biggest reasons for moving. Little did I know, most of our future in Vietnam had to deal with political perspectives. My grandfather was a policeman working for the South of Vietnam’s anti-communist government during the Vietnam war, for this reason, my mom and her siblings had to experience hatreds from their peers at school, and they also could not go to college back then because of this profile of being in an anti-communist family. Much like here in the States, if you want to work for a company, especially for the government, or anything government related, you will need to have a criminal background check, but in Vietnam, the background check is multigenerational, in which they check your background for up to three generations of your family. My grandparents would be considered the first generation, one considered to have caused the criminal acts, then my mom as the second generation, then me and my brother as the third generation that carried over the criminal. My parents always wanted us to have a brighter future, be able to go to college, be educated, get a 9am-5pm job that would provide us a wealthy life. But with our family’s history, they feared what happened to them in the past will happen to us again in the future, they ultimately decided that America, the country of freedom, will be the place for our future.

Chasing the American dream, we left behind everything we have established in the homeland, our house, business, friends, and most of our extended family members. Coming here, we thought everything will be all pink and bright. My parents thought they would be able to find a job that allows them to work from 9am to 5pm so they can spend more time with me and my brother since they were busy most of the time back in Vietnam. But I guess that is not how the American dream works. Once we got here, I started to face many struggles that I have never experienced before. We did not speak any English, my parents still do not speak English until now, I can say that I pretty much speak the language fluently now, but it took a lot of my time and effort and yet there is still a lot out there that I still must learn. Besides English being one of our biggest obstacles, my parents’ jobs, especially my mom’s, is another big struggle that did not appear in our American plan. The idea of finding a job that allowed my parents to work from 9am to 5pm like what they had imagined seemed impossible. When we got here, we realized that we are not the only ones that have big dreams. America, the melting pot, everyone here is trying to get something out of it, my family is included in that hustle as soon as we get here, minimum wage or even below that line by sometimes going under the table would not matter as long as it gives us the money. Sometimes it makes me wonder if this is really the American dream that we’re dreaming of.

Is it going to be worth it eventually or would we all have to live in this enclosed circle that we have created? To be able to reach our goals for a better future, we must sacrifice some parts of our lives, while keeping money on the top of our heads because it is what builds our dreams and senses of purpose. While I might not have experienced anything too dramatic, but to me this sequence of life that I have lived in and am still living in is a structural flaw in this society. We run away from one problem, then fall into another while seeking for a better solution, until we realize that this loop will never stop because that is the way society is structured.