“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 amostafa@dailycal.org.

Correction(s):
A previous version of this column incorrectly misspelled Sudha Patel’s first name.

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I have a dream. Gatsby has a dream. So does Xi Jinping.

While watching “The Great Gatsby,” I couldn’t help but think about the ideal of the American Dream, that marvelous little cloud that hangs above us all. For a long time, however, that cloud was known to rest above our heads and our heads only. Now, China too wants to be under our sky.

As early as last November, Xi Jinping, the new head of the Communist Party of China, started to popularize a slogan called the China Dream. Thanks to social media and Xi’s unfailing persistence to rehash that phrase, the China Dream has began to stick.

As if the name was not obvious enough, Xi precisely defined the China Dream as the act of “realizing the great renewal of the Chinese nation.” This is not about the people’s welfare; it’s about the state’s (i.e., the CCP’s and the CCP leaders’) welfare.

Although the similarity is undeniable, the lack of focus in the individual makes the China Dream quite different from the American Dream. In “The Epic of America,” James Adams defined the American Dream as “a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.” Going back to the roots, the American Dream encompasses our fathers’ belief in that “all men are created equal … with certain inalienable Rights,” including “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” In short, it is a dream that prioritizes the individuals and their rights to a good life, regardless of their backgrounds.

In contrast, the China Dream’s origin is dangerously nationalistic. Back in 2010, a Chinese colonel, Liu Mingfu, published “China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era,” urging China to overtake the United States’ position as the top military power. Though popular, “China Dream” was pulled from the shelves due to its controversial nature. After Xi mentioned the term, however, the book was promptly restored to the “Recommended” section. As if the connection between Mingfu’s book and Xi’s dream wasn’t clear enough, the latter directly associated that dream with the armed forces in December: “To achieve the great revival of the Chinese nation, we must ensure there is unison between a prosperous country and strong military.”

Furthermore, definitive words like “renewal” and “revival” are highly problematic. By evoking national victimhood, the China Dream stirs up collective emotions that could very well turn vengeful and belligerent. Already, many Chinese bloggers are asking the government to use force against Japan to settle the dispute over the Senkaku and Diaoyu islands. At the moment, China is engaged in three-front conflicts with India, Japan and the Philippines. A resurgent nation is an emotional nation, and an emotional nation is a pernicious nation.

Arguably, Gatsby’s hamartia is his desire to change the past. This desire deviates from the American Dream, that undulating cloud of hope that promises us an opportunity to break from and rise above our past (e.g., the lives of Ben Franklin, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama). If Xi truly wants to empower his people, then he should learn from Gatsby’s mistake. Instead of beating “ceaselessly back into the past” of an ancient empire, he should think of what matters most now and forevermore for China: the Chinese people.

Anh Thai ponders about insidious world problems in her Tuesday blog. Contact Anh Thai at athai@dailycal.org

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Daily Cal opinion blogger Anh Thai asks students and employees on campus what the China Dream means and how the China Dream compares with the American Dream.

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On Wednesday April 4 there was an economic inequality conference in Lewis Hall on UC Berkeley’s campus.

The post Video: UC Berkeley Labor Center teach-in focuses on economic inequality appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Michael Tao/Staff

A teach-in hosted by the UC Berkeley Labor Center Wednesday entitled “Economic Inequality Teach In: Causes, Consequences and Solutions,” featured some of the campus’s prominent economic and political thinkers and social justice activists analyzing the causes and consequences of injustices that continue to exist.

Solutions to growing economic inequality include raising taxes on the wealthy, increasing the income tax subsidy and investing in education starting with early childhood, campus public policy professor and former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich said in his keynote speech.

“There needs to be a political force, movements don’t happen overnight,” Reich said. “People in America suffer from attention deficit movement disorder; we expect everything to happen quickly and if we don’t see something happen in six months we say it is not going to happen, which is not true.”

Reich and the other speakers referenced the Occupy Wall Street movement as an instrument of change.

A mixed crowd of local adults, academics, students and professors attended the teach-in and gave generally positive responses to the keynote speakers’ liberal economic ideas.

In his speech, UC Berkeley economics professor and Director of the Center for Equitable Growth Emmanuel Saez said the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans have increased their income by 58 percent between 1993 to 2010, while the bottom 99 percent has only had an income increase of just over 6 percent in the same period.

When the economy started to recover in 2009-10, the increased profit was captured by the 1 percent at the expense of the 99 percent, Saez said.

Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist and deputy chair of the campus Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, gave a presentation called “American Dream: Fraying of the Folklore” that refuted the reality of what she characterized as the chief ideals of the American Dream: “rags to riches,” “meritocracy,” the “free market” and “government not being a solution.”

“The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it,” Allegretto said, quoting author George Carlin.

The American Dream helps create the illusion that inequality is just an economic reality of globalization, argued Paul Pierson, the campus John Gross Professor of Political Science.

“The Tea Party rewards and punishes politicians, you have to shift their incentives and that is where the Occupy movement can learn from the Tea Party movement,” Pierson said.

However, Saez said progressive taxation is necessary to bridge the disparity in income in the United States and in a globalized world will require international coordination. This taxation would only become a reality if citizens are convinced that the exuberant incomes of the 1 percent are detrimental to society, he added.

“Get on this train as it emerges from the station, because it is the most important set of issues that we face in our country today,” Reich said about fighting economic inequality.

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My uncle tends to be contrarian. He relishes being able to play devil’s advocate and goes to great lengths to prove the smallest points — I look up to him. We’ll be sitting around drinking coffee, and I swear to God Atlas is shrugging and Ayn Rand is asking for more cream. Then when I watch his truck pull out of our driveway, I notice the union stickers on the back of the F150 — he’s an electrician, part of “big labor.”

He loves to talk to me about Berkeley and the surrounding area. He knows it pretty well — better than me sometimes. One of his favorite anecdotes has to do with the homeless. Grinning from ear to ear, I’ve heard this tale a few dozen times on Christmas breaks and trips down south for the weekend.

“So there we were, walking down Telegraph, and this kid, he could have only been about 20, asks me for change.” His snaggled smile lets slip this gem: “That’s when I say, ‘Change comes from within, brother.’”

But my uncle is wrong.

For starters, the kid in the story is not his relative. And then there’s that whole social mobility myth: the American Dream. We — Berkeley students — are lucky. We are certainly living the dream, or something like it. Though the stress of finding employment post-graduation is starting to take its toll, the lot of us will be fine. But for so many others in our immediate community alone, the American Dream is more a decadent and depraved derby than it is a tangible reality.

Attitudes like “Change comes from within” place the blame solely on the individual. They come from people who don’t just miss the big picture — they come from people who deny that such a picture exists. Certainly, there is a place for personal ambition and the drive to better one’s socio-economic stature. That’s undeniable. But then so is the fact that poverty acts like a trap in the United States when it doesn’t have to.

One need not look further than our public schools. This past week, a huge rally of students and educators, concerned citizens and everyone in between convened to make their case yet again. Will our voices be heard? Who knows. But the point is that the problem is obvious: dwindling funds for public education matched by a workforce that favors longevity over output and locale over need are taking their toll.

I’m not about to attack K-12 teachers — they deserve far more credit than just a few inches in the Daily Cal could ever give them — but I am saying they, along with a lot of us, need to realize that it’s not an “us-them” binary. It’s a “we.” And it goes beyond the classroom. It speaks to an attitude that has crept over the state. An attitude of apathy. One of “I’m going to take care of mine and forget everyone else — these are tough times.” The haves and the have-nots. Despite what the information we have been given says, I think most of us can simply look around and know that the class divide has grown and continues to grow. Income inequality, stagnant wages and heavy debt all make social mobility a thing of yesteryear.

Pointing out that consumption rates between high-income and low-income houses remain fairly close and consistent is an unfair counterargument to the claim about income inequality and economic mobility; it is a facade used to maintain the status quo. Consumption in low-income houses is often augmented and aided by taking on high amounts of credit card debt. These people aren’t out running around South Coast Plaza or Westfield with their Visas in hand — they’re standing in lines at Ralphs and Safeway praying to God that they don’t face another humiliating “Sorry, ma’am, your credit card got denied” while buying necessary groceries.

And this isn’t a left or right issue — it’s simply how it is. Americans have taken on more and more debt. Sometimes it’s the individual’s own fault for buying that house or just having to have that car. But then again, it also has to be the institution’s fault. Banks are allowed to gamble, corporations are allowed to spend limitlessly on elections (if you prick them, they won’t bleed) and get to rig the game, and laissez-faire economics only encourage more of the same behavior.

So no. Change doesn’t only come from within. It comes when the forces of the status quo are finally pushed back by the winds of progress. When teachers and students are met in the classroom by adequate funding, reasonable class sizes and a system that rewards efficiency and effectiveness, not necessarily just good test-scores. It comes when apathy is overturned, when students and the community march in the street to Sacramento and when Sacramento finally takes the blinders off.

Maybe the past few generations fell asleep at the wheel, but lord knows we’re awake. And maybe, just maybe, this is it: the high-water mark, where the wave finally breaks and rolls back.

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