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Macaulay Honors College
at Baruch, Spring 2011Professor Els de Graauw
ITF Emily Sherwood -
Authors
▪ Alyssa Alicino
▪ Brandon Baksh
▪ Ru Xiao Chen
▪ Belinda Chiu
▪ Els de Graauw
▪ Becca Glickman
▪ Elisabeth Greenberg
▪ Doris Hu
▪ Peky Huang
▪ Toby Joseph
▪ Haesol Jun
▪ Nika Kartvelishvili
▪ Farrukh Khan
▪ Holly Kiang
▪ Julian Kipnis
▪ Kar Yi Lim
▪ Yang Lin
▪ Cait McCarthy
▪ Sofya Moshkovich
▪ Mariya Tuchinskaya
▪ Ying Zhang Login
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Regrets
Anna immigrated to the United States from China. She is now forty 49 years old and has been in the country for approximately 25 years.
If I was in China, I wouldn’t have what I have. But is there anything I regret? Lots of things. I left my husband and two baby children in China to come here and make a future. […] You know, my heart was in the right place, but… I just… didn’t get to be a good wife and mother. I missed out on the first 12 years of my children’s lives. I missed out on everything that I was supposed to be there for. […] I missed them so much… I missed them. But I couldn’t go back to see them because I never had the time off from work. I… I owe them. I’ll always be sorry for that.”
The Greener Side
Anna immigrated to the United States from China. She is now 49 years old and has been in the country for approximately 25 years. In her mind, the United States offered her a better life than what she could have in China:
It’s hard out here and there’s a lot of stuff that you have to work with, but life is definitely better here. I have my own apartment, my kids are now here in America with me, and both my husband and I have stable jobs. It’s not easy, but it’s better than what we have in China. We can afford to buy things now, even things like food.”
Not Enough Hours In a Day
Anna immigrated to the United States from China. She is now 49 years old and has been in the country for approximately 25 years. She commented that she because she had to work so much she didn’t have the time to learn English:
You hear so many stories about immigrants learning English and passing the citizenship test. […] There was no time for me to do anything besides work. Every day, wake up, eat, go to work, come home, eat, then sleep. That was how life was every day since I got out from that [immigration] prison. I had a few friends who got into these programs that taught them English, but that was during the weekends. I had to work. There was just no time to do it.”
Always Looking for a Job
Anna immigrated to the United States from China. She is now 49 years old and has been in the country for approximately 25 years. Here, she comments all the different kinds of jobs she worked upon arrival in New York City:
I did everything I could get. I first worked in a factory and helped piece together clothes at the sewing machine. The hours were really long and the factory was in a bad shape and they closed it down. Then I got a job taking care of someone’s baby. […] After that, I went to a job search place and they introduced me to a job in Illinois, working in a restaurant. I didn’t want to go away, but I went anyway because the pay was a little bit better. […] I picked up a little English on the way, but I didn’t know enough to talk to anyone else. I remember when I first started out I mixed up the orders a lot. […] I couldn’t take it anymore, so when I came back, […] I sold phone cards on Grand Street.”
The Difference Between Them and Us
Anna immigrated to the United States from China. She is now 49 years old and has been in the country for approximately 25 years. Here, she explains how she feels discriminated against because she is Chinese:
People look down on you here. We’re Chinese people and we’re different. […] The white people, they look at you differently. Some of them are friendly, but no one wanted to be friends with the Chinese people. They didn’t want us here. Black people, too. They make fun of us. They say mean things. They pick on us and they make us scared. […] My brother told me that life was hard here. I didn’t believe him, but I began to saw that people do treat each other differently. It was different from China. No one counted on each other. Only the immigrants stuck together, to help one another out.”
Apprehended and Locked Away
Anna immigrated to the United States from China. She is now 49 years old and has been in the country for approximately 25 years. When she first tried to enter the United States, Anna learned the hard way that her fraudulent immigration papers could not get her into the country:
[Immigration officials] asked me questions like where I came from, my birth date, my name, and stuff that was on the papers. I don’t know what happened, but they saw something wrong and these guards came and took me to a smaller room. […] I kept on saying that I was innocent, that I did nothing wrong, but he wouldn’t listen to me. […] We were taken to a long bus. It had bars on the windows, like we were convicts or something. It was dark outside, but I didn’t know English anyway, so I couldn’t read the sign or understand what the uniformed people were saying. […] We were taken to a large building. It looked so scary from the outside, like there was no happiness that existed there.”
An Emotional Rollercoaster
Anna immigrated to the United States from China. She is now 49 years old and has been in the country for approximately 25 years. Here, she talks about the emotional and financial toll that the process of applying for a visa took on her and her family:
Every day that passed by without hearing from the firm, we grew more and more anxious. We were risking everything. My brother had to give to me all of his life savings and borrow money to pay for it. I didn’t have enough money to cover the expenses, but he said he would take care of it. I felt so bad. If things went wrong, my brother’s life would be over. He wasn’t living very well here either, but he did it anyway.”
Buried Under Paperwork
Anna immigrated to the United States from China. She is now 49 years old and has been in the country for approximately 25 years. Here, she remembers all the paperwork she had to complete in order to immigrate to the United States:
The only thing that comes to my mind when I think of immigrating here are papers. There are papers for everything. I had to travel to the big city to get the papers and every time there were new documents I had to travel and get someone to help me fill them out. They asked for everything. I felt like I was pouring my life out to a bunch of random strangers I didn’t know. And they were all important too! I was so scared that if I had written something wrong, my application would be denied.”
