My parents had just gotten married, and their small auto body business was not doing well. The story, as far as I know it, goes something like this. And I never pressed them for more details because I don't want to apply pressure on a bruise. It's that the answer isn't as morally satisfying as most people's answers are- a decapitated family member, famine. It's not that I haven't asked them why they came to the United States. I don't know much about my parents' decision to choose New York, or even the United States, as a destination. They've lived in New York since they left Ecuador in 1991. If you ask them if they feel American, because you're a little narc who wants to prove your blood runs red, white, and blue, they're going to say no, we feel like New Yorkers. If you ask my father where he's from, he will definitely say Ecuador, because he is sentimental about the country for reasons he's working out in therapy.īut if you push them, I mean really push them, they're both going to say they're from New York. Plus, there are no world famous Ecuadorians to speak of other than the fool who housed Julian Assange at the embassy in London and Christina Aguilera's father, who she said was a domestic abuser. And our military dictatorship never reached the mythical status of a Pinochet or a Videla. Magical realism basically skipped over it. If you ask my mother where she's from, she's 100% going to say, she's from the kingdom of god, because she does not like to say that she's from Ecuador, Ecuador being one of the few South American countries that has not especially outdone itself on the international stage. I wanted to write about my parents, and that's the story I'm going to tell here, the story of my parents. I wanted to write for everybody who wants to step away from the buzzwords in immigration- the talking heads, the Dreamers in graduation caps and gowns- and read about the people underground, not heroes, randoms, people. I did not want to write anything inspirational. And you certainly can't be enamored by America, not still.
#Shamyla this american life full
Because if you're going to write about undocumented immigrants in America, tell the story, the full story, you have to be a little bit crazy. I thought I could write something better, and I thought I was the best person to do it. I couldn't see my family in them, because I saw my parents as more than laborers, as more than sufferers or dreamers. Shit, I told my partner, they're trying to Anne Frank me.īy this point, I had read lots of books about migrants. And the emails, essentially, were offers to hide me in their second houses in Vermont or stay in their basements. That morning, I received a bunch of emails from people who are really freaked out about Trump winning. I was the first person who wrote him on the morning of November 9th, 2016. The guy who eventually ended up becoming my agent respected that, did not find an interchangeable immigrant to publish a sad book, read everything I would write over the next seven years, and we kept in touch. And I didn't want my first book to be a rueful tale about being a sickly Victorian orphan with tuberculosis who didn't have a social security number, which is what the agents all wanted. I had been writing professionally since I was 15 but only about music.
The essay got me some attention, and agents wrote me asking if I wanted to write a memoir. This was in 2011, before DACA, and I was one of the first undocumented students to graduate Harvard. When I was a senior in college, I wrote an anonymous essay for The Daily Beast about what they wanted to call my dirty little secret, that I was undocumented. Demola and the rest of her family are in London. We'd rather sidestep the scariest possibilities for as long as possible.īut in their daily talks, there's still new information passing between them than they usually share. I'm guessing, with no evidence at all here, that most of us are more like Bim and Demola. All the ways that nurse, Elise Barrett, is so direct, imagining every possible terrible outcome one by one and discussing it, Bim and Demola are not into that.
And these conversations are totally different than that nurse's video. He's been sick with COVID-19 for over a week now. My co-worker, Bim, has been having these daily conversations with her brother, Demola. You just want to tint the colors in the picture of you two a little bit, this way or that. But when there's a crisis, it's important to say certain things- practical stuff, information and instructions. When you know somebody so well, what can you possibly say that's going to be news to them about who you are or what you think? I'm guessing nothing in this video was a huge surprise to this nurse's husband.
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