“My cousin came to me crying,” related Sudha Patel, owner and manager of the Downtown Berkeley Inn, as she attended to some reservations during my first encounter with her. “I think her son wanted to study film instead of medicine or engineering, and she was upset. But I told her, ‘Let him do what he wants — this isn’t our dream.’”
Growing up in an immigrant family myself — a family in which such a response would seem impractical — I was refreshed by Patel’s unique perspective.
After immigrating to the United States with her husband in 1979, Patel soon found herself a single mother of two daughters with a motel to manage on her own after her husband’s passage in 1985. Juggling a business and a family was not the only challenging part in Patel’s life. As a child, Patel grew up in a racially segregated South Africa with her parents before relocating to India and then Canada. Years later — despite relatives’ reservations regarding her business — Patel would follow through with a ground-up renovation of her hotel. All in all, Patel was no stranger to the hardships of immigration.
Yet these experiences did not stop Patel from expressing firm opinions regarding her nephew’s future when I first encountered her.
“I think (parents) have it in their minds that money is very important — and which career brings money for their children to survive without struggling,” Patel explained. “We came here into America with nothing, and we struggled to be where we are, so I think that’s why the parents have more caution about their children. And being the first generation, we are the first here, and it is important that our children have a good education and a good career to carry on (our legacy).”
The notion of this debt we owe our parents is not new, and it appears again and again across various immigrant cultures in the United States. Mexican-American author Jose Antonio Villarreal sums up this attitude in his novel “Pocho” through a mother’s entreaty to her son. The logic goes as follows:
“If you could go to the university, it would be to learn how you could make more money … So you can change our way of living somewhat, and people could see what a good son we had, and it would make us all something to respect. Then, when you married and began your family, you would have a nice home and could be assured that you would be able to afford an education for your children.”
Though the previous statement comes from a fictional novel, it echoes the values of the all-too-real American Dream embedded in many students who came from immigrant families long before their college careers began.
Coming to UC Berkeley in the fall of 2011, I was set on majoring in English literature. English has been my passion since middle school, and to me, this major was an instinctive calling. As the year went on, however, I began to feel there was something idealistic about my major. Here’s how a typical exchange would go:
Peer: “What major are you?”
Me: “I’m an English major.”
Peer: “That’s so chill! So you basically just read. What are you going to do with that?”
Thinking back to my mother putting away an unrecognized doctoral certificate and instead putting on her apron for a minimum-wage job just to provide me with a secure life, I felt that I was letting her down by pursuing my passion. I began to think I was wasting a great opportunity to make huge amounts of money by majoring in something less risky — like biology or engineering, perhaps. I couldn’t shake off the guilt that I may not be self-sufficient following my graduation and saw my pursuit of this passion as selfish and ungrateful.
Most of my friends majoring in pre-med agreed with me about this feeling and exclaimed that their parents, who also happen to be first-generation immigrants, have the same mentality as mine. They just want their kids to be guaranteed a better future, to take as little risk as possible, to only survive.
That is often the immigrant priority: survival and not self-exploration.
At least, that is what I believed until I encountered Patel, who, with a few words, distilled my notion of parents’ inflexible expectations in pursuit of an ever-receding American Dream.
Yet, as noble as this cycle of sacrifice is, it’s time that we perpetuate a new American Dream: one based on the notion of fulfillment instead of vicariously living through our hypothetical children and on the ability to consistently apply our skills toward a field that intellectually challenges us — not the one that best commodifies our health and labor.
My dilemma persists, but I take comfort in the fact that parents are not infallible and that what truly lies at the root of their fixations is a desire to see us safe and happy — not as engineers or doctors.
Amy Mostafa writes a Thursday column on cultural issues. Contact Amy Mostafa at [email protected].
Correction(s):
A previous version of this column incorrectly misspelled Sudha Patel’s first name.