Family Stories as Secret Text for Immigrants
Clockwise from top left: Angela Wu Cen, China; Ilirjan Gjonbalaj, Montenegro; Kanushree Jain, India; Sameer Khan, Pakistan.
Angela Wu Cen, 19, knew many details about her parents’ 13-year migration from China to Panama to New York. But she had never known much about a more intimate aspect of her parents’ lives: their courtship.
So when Ms. Wu, who was born in Panama and was 12 when the family came to the United States, sat down to interview her mother for an honors seminar at Hunter College last month, she was surprised to learn that her parents’ marriage had not been the fruit of a long romance, as she had assumed, but had come about in a matter of weeks.
The two had been introduced by a mutual acquaintance of their families’. They lived in separate towns, saw each other a few times and then decided to marry, Ms. Wu said.
“So they really didn’t know each other,” she added, sounding amused. “How can they get married?”
Though children of immigrants may generally know the broad arc of their parents’ lives, the details — of lives lived before America, of hardships in leaving and struggles to adapt — are frequently lost in the rush of assimilation, a time of forging ahead rather than looking back.
And so it is that each year, when Nancy Foner, a professor of sociology at Hunter, requires the students in her course “The Peopling of New York” to interview a close relative about the family’s recent history, the discoveries are often startling, to the students as well as to their classmates.
In a class where most of the students are either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants, the assignment is not simply an exercise in historical inquiry but also an intense exploration into their own lives and the sacrifices of their forebears.
This year, Aleksandr Akulov, 19, found out that his mother had given up a promising career in mechanical engineering in her native Russia to move to New York, where she found work at a laundromat. Ilirjan Gjonbalaj, 18, discovered that his Albanian parents were smuggled into the country from their home in Montenegro. And Kanushree Jain, 19, learned that her parents were treated with outright hostility in New York by their fellow immigrants from India because they were new arrivals and could not speak English.
“There’s kind of an image of immigrant kids born and raised in America as being kind of ashamed of their parents,” said Dr. Foner, who has written widely about immigrants in New York. “But these students are proud of their parents and their parents’ experiences. In some ways, the proudest students are those who had the most difficult time.”
On a recent Thursday, 20 of her students presented their oral histories. In class discussion and follow-up interviews, the students described what they had learned.
Mr. Gjonbalaj’s parents moved into a windowless basement apartment in the Bronx with 10 relatives in the mid-1980s, and Mr. Gjonbalaj’s father got a job as a busboy. But in 1992, while running an errand, his father died in a traffic accident. The family was forced to go on welfare because strict Albanian mores forbade Mr. Gjonbalaj’s mother from working.
But after several years, his mother grew frustrated with that cultural restriction and started working as a cleaning lady for a family on the Upper East Side. Later she found work as a maid at the St. Regis Hotel and as a coat checker at the Metropolitan Opera.
In the course of interviewing his mother, Mr. Gjonbalaj said, she revealed that both she and his father were smuggled into the United States. His father had come first, settled in the Bronx, then sent for his mother several months later.
“It opened my eyes a lot,” Mr. Gjonbalaj said in an interview. “I was kind of shocked, kind of confused. I started asking: How did they do it?”
But his mother was short on details. “She didn’t really want me to know what kind of things they had to go through,” he said.
Ms. Jain was born in India and moved to the United States when she was 2. She said the transition was particularly rough on her mother, who was not welcomed by neighbors. With Ms. Jain’s father at work most of the day, her mother had to learn the ropes on her own.
“It was hard to make friends with other ethnicities because we didn’t know English,” she told the class. “And our Indian neighbors, a lot of them, they tend to make fun of other struggling Indians — I guess to make themselves feel better because they were also struggling at one point.”
Before interviewing his parents, Mr. Akulov had known that his mother had studied engineering in Russia, but, he said, “I hadn’t given it much thought.” As a child in Russia, he was far more aware of his father’s career as a doctor than his mother’s work, he said.
“At the time when we came to America, I wasn’t even sure what engineers did,” Mr. Akulov said in an interview.
When the family arrived in New York in 1998, Mr. Akulov’s parents both found work at a Russian-owned laundromat in the Bronx where they were paid less than minimum wage. His father made extra money delivering newspapers.
“I don’t know how they could take it psychologically,” he told the class. “That’s crazy sacrifice.” Mr. Akulov’s mother now works as an accountant for the Y.M.C.A., and his father is a clinical researcher at a nonprofit AIDS research organization.
Like Mr. Akulov, many students said they learned about the depth of his parents’ commitment to provide a better life for their children.
“Growing up, I thought I knew everything about my parents,” Sameer Khan, 18, a Pakistani-American, said in an interview. “What I found writing this story was that I felt I had ignored their struggles.”
Mr. Khan was born in Lubbock, Tex., while his father, an agronomist from India, was pursuing a Ph.D. in agriculture at Texas Tech University. His parents struggled financially and were living paycheck to paycheck as their family grew to four children. But once his father completed his doctorate, prejudice and discrimination blocked job opportunities, Mr. Khan said.
The family moved back to Pakistan for a year, then to New York, where Mr. Khan’s father shelved his agronomy career, taking a job as an assistant manager in a gas station and later as the manager of a discount store in Queens.
Mr. Khan said he was surprised to learn the degree of pressure his parents felt to create an entirely new life for their family. “I just didn’t know about it,” he confessed. “I feel stupid ignoring it my whole life.”
Danilo Rojas, 19, was struck by his father’s drive to make a better life: fleeing poverty in his native Honduras, sneaking across the Mexican border into the United States and working as a dishwasher in a restaurant, a building superintendent and a construction worker.
Mr. Rojas’s father met his mother in New York. They had Danilo and two other children and, in a picture of upward mobility, eventually bought apartments in East New York and Coney Island in Brooklyn.
“My dad, he went through a lot and basically he didn’t spend any money on himself,” Mr. Rojas said in an interview. “He never thought about himself. He thought about making things better for his family. I think most young people today don’t think about more than themselves. It’s hard to be that selfless, especially in today’s world.”
“I’m 19 right now, and I can’t even imagine having children in two years,” Mr. Rojas said. “He had to grow up a lot faster.”
The interview changed the way he looks at the vast underclass of immigrants toiling on the margins of society, like street vendors and busboys and day laborers. “I wonder about how hard they’re working,” he said, “and how hard they’re trying to make it.”
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