A Story of A New Immigrant: My Father’s Journey
In the 19th century the American author Horatio Alger wrote a myriad of stories about bootblacks, news peddlers and other humble workers during the American Gilded Age who persevered through diligence and wit in order to achieve the American dream. Over the course of his life, he constructed a body of literature so expansive on this topic that many had begun to consider the valiant struggle of the working class as unremarkable, common even. Such people, however, neglect a vital fact. They disregard the fact that one who faces adversity does not diminish the hardship, or significance of that hardship, of another in his suffering. In truth, we each struggle in our own way to find the path to a better future for ourselves and, in most cases, for those who follow us. In my case, my parents have worked their entire lives to ensure that I can live a better, fuller life. As I grow older, I have come to realize that despite my preconceived notions of my family being “boring,” the journey my father has made from being a foreigner to a patriotic American citizen is remarkable and at least warrants a story worth telling.
My father was not born in the United States, a place where opportunity is said to abound if one is only willing to grasp it. Rather, he was born in a rural village called Shuhag-Pur in the minuscule country known as Bangladesh at a time when few people in the working and lower-middle class escaped the occupations of their predecessors. While my grandmother looked after the home and crops, my grandfather served the British Navy. He spent his days aboard a frigate working under British superiors who were predisposed to abusing Bengali crewmembers with spiteful remarks about “filthy natives” and “careless slips of the feet” that resulted almost exclusively in the misfortune of Bengali officers. When my grandfather finally confronted his superiors about the unjust treatment of his fellow officers, he was discharged without pension. Having only enough money to purchase three pens and a few pads of paper along with a paltry quantity of bread and vegetables changed my father’s life. My father was forced to leave high school after only a year to pursue work on the railroad. At fifteen, he had already begun laboring on the railroad side by side with men three times his age to support his family.
When the Bangladesh Liberation War broke out in 1971, my father served the Liberation Army as an escort for Bengali refugees to remote parts of the countryside and the Indian border where they could be safe. At the end of the 9-month war, he had finally accumulated enough money to immigrate to the United States. Accordingly, my father arrived in New York in August of 1974.
Upon arriving my father lived with a cousin in the Briarwood area of Queens for a short time before both moved to the predominantly African American St. Albans neighborhood. This cousin, who I refer to as my Uncle Al, was already well established in New York; he was a born New Yorker whose father was my father’s uncle and whose mother was an African American police officer native to Brooklyn. From my father’s first day in the States till the present, Uncle Al has offered my father guidance on all matters of New York life. Nonetheless, it was still my father’s responsibility to find a job, a task that would prove difficult at first due to my father’s limited English and inexperience in the New York. At this time, there were very few, if any, other South Asian immigrants in my father’s neighborhood (or in the city for that matter) and so, there were very few people he could communicate with aside from an older cousin who had immigrated at the same time as him. By a stroke of luck, however, my father befriended a German immigrant man his age at a coffee shop in Manhattan while job searching. This man, named Alfred, accompanied my father for approximately two weeks, teaching my father more English and learning at the same time before both were offered factory jobs for a pet food company. Upon finding his first job, my father quickly settled into life working multiple shifts and overtime in order to prepare for my mother’s immigration to New York in 1981. Eventually, once my mother arrived, both of my parents had begun working at the same lumber and hardware company. In coming years the number of South Asian immigrants in New York increased greatly. As my father discovered more friends in New York and the Muslim population grew in the Jamaica, Queens area, the need for some sort of community focal point was realized. The growing number of Muslims in the Jamaica area thus began opening their own groceries that carried Halal meat; at the same time plans were underway to establish a mosque (primarily funded by South Asian immigrants who were skilled workers in specialties such as medicine and pharmacy). The past two decades have thus seen a rapid rise and development in the Bangladeshi-American and Muslim community in Jamaica, Queens.
Today, at the end of nearly forty years of labor at industrial factories, steel mills and lumberyards, my father has retired. He frequently speaks of the time when new countrymen would be one in hundreds for everyone who arrived at the JFK international terminal. Ironically enough, however, the more people who arrived from our home country, the more he has assimilated into American culture. Nonetheless, he still reminisces frequently about his time in “the old country.” This is evident anytime visiting aunts and uncles from Bangladesh brings dried food goods indigenous to the country are brought over. I myself am not terribly attached to my home country, but I hope to get some time to travel there and learn more in the future. I wonder how I’ll preserve the culture for future generations; I can only hope my parents will be here long enough to leave a significant piece of culture behind.
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