When my parents were living together for their very first year after immigrating to the United States in 2001, they witnessed 9/11 from a city just 4 hours of a drive away from them. Although I wasn’t alive yet, I’d always absentmindedly wondered if seeing an event like 9/11 had, at least somewhat, jaded their perspectives on the country of their dreams. A place they’d given up their entire life in China for the idea of a future in, so soon terribly afflicted– trouble in paradise, as I might call it now. Their entire time in the United States has been in a post-9/11, Bush-affected era– as non-White immigrants.
When my parents moved me into my dorm at Barnard College last year, they were thrilled that I’d transferred to such an amazing school at such an amazing university. I remember my mother, age creasing in the corners of her eyes, smoothing my hair back as she smiled and told me in Chinese: “You can be whatever you want to be here. No one will stop you. Every opportunity is at this school.”
My parents were students in high school when they witnessed the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, not much younger than I was when I watched the NYPD descend upon my classmates on the Columbia University campus last spring, as they protested against the genocide in Palestine. As their first child, I know– without having to ask– that a large part of what they wanted for the future of their family was a better, freer education. One in which, I know they hoped, would allow their children to speak their mind without the fear of being silenced via arrest. As the Barnard school year began, a part of me remained hopeful that I’d made my parents proud– that I’d finally given them a glimpse of what they’d done it all for.
It almost felt surreal to watch the actions of the Columbia University administration and the NYPD last spring. I felt as though it wasn’t just my dream of being an Ivy League scholar, someone to brag about in WeChat circles, had been warped and shattered– it was also my parents’ dream, destroyed by the hands of the police force and Western administration. Would it always be within us, to know when something was wrong, and yet be faced with pushback when we tried to voice it?
I reckoned a lot, in the following days of the arrests, on not only what I had done it all for, but what they had, too. It broke my heart, in a deeply intimate manner, when I received text after text from my parents, begging me to stay away from campus and to lay low. The fears that they had about my potential arrests seemed to slice through layers leading back to what they’d seen so many years ago, in Tiananmen Square. It was disturbingly unfair, I’d thought; they’d given up so much for my education and my freedom. And, like how their American Dream began, in the States post-9/11, I saw it lay dying with the efforts to silence student voices across the nation.
My parents moved away from China because they wanted somewhere that they, and their eventual children, could speak their minds freely, even if it was a dissenting opinion against bureaucratic measures to silence them. And the actions of the police and Columbia University administration, in brutally arresting the students in the encampments and Hind’s Hall last spring, failed to break the cycle of oppression in student activism.
Editors: Joyce P., Jayden T.
Image: Unsplash