Finding myself on the San Bernardino train line.
When I found my internship in Downtown Los Angeles, my father insisted on riding the two-hour-long train commute with me from the suburbs of Rancho Cucamonga to Union Station. I was twenty years old at the time, with a driver’s license and an extra car at home for me to drive. However, the streets of LA were far too dangerous for his little girl to traverse alone—not to mention, all those crazy LA drivers! So, we rode through ten stops, transferred from the San Bernardino Rail to the Metro Purple Line, and walked uphill to a small building across FIGat7th on Figueroa Street. Unlike the quiet, unassuming sidewalks of Rancho Cucamonga lined with horse trails and bike paths, the streets in LA were bustling with workers, traffic cops, tourists, and panhandlers. We spotted a unit of policemen hanging over a group of homeless people by the metro entrance. My father hurried me into the building before I could witness an unpleasant scene unravel.
Growing up sheltered has made me cautiously rebellious against my parents. Taking this internship, instead of finding one in the same city, felt like a small hurrah towards my personal independence. Although I compromised by taking the train and following a curfew, I felt like I was stepping out for the first time. Moreover, I was enticed with prospects of improving my Mandarin and earning a certificate while interning at the mediation firm for Asians and Pacific Islanders. Most of the mediators are undergraduates like myself or law students completing their externships over the summer. Most of them are aspiring legal scholars who come from Asian American families. They probably grew up translating documents and writing emails for their parents like I have.
Walking into the firm, I noticed that the office space was shared by three different nonprofits. The community kitchen was littered with mugs and utensils indiscriminately shared between the multitudes of office workers. I hear from other workers that the grant money was less this year compared to the previous years, so it’s difficult to replace older parts of our office equipment. After my brief tour, I settled into a foldable white table fashioned with a humming Windows 7 desktop and began organizing a tedious slew of case files ranging from rental disputes to debt collection. I bent over my desk and opened the first tab on the case manager website. Immediately, several weeks of case entries appeared on the screen. Some cases have been stalling for months, even years.
My first contact was with an older Asian man from Shanghai. Mr. Lou worked for his brother for multiple years before retiring from a back injury. Originally, he received monthly Social Security Benefits before administrators discovered a business transaction he performed for his brother dating several years back. Now he doesn’t receive any benefits and lives in a mobile home with five other elderly Chinese immigrants from the same church. His previous caseworker, much like my other associates, completed her certificate and left the dimly-lit nonprofit organization for a law firm in New York. Nonetheless, Mr. Lou’s case remains stagnant like a stick in the mud. Every letter to the Social Security Administration returns with promises to “look into the matter” or requests for extraneous paperwork. When it was nearing the end of my internship, his benefits did not return. I too, made futile entries into the online database for the next misfortunate intern to pick up where I left off.
His case isn’t unique to the other case files I’ve gone through. Somehow, their situations felt familiar yet oddly foreign to me at the same time. Sometimes I’d come across an unpaid hospital bill that ballooned into a lawsuit or an immigrant who overstayed his visa. I could remember similar instances where my family navigated confusing government paperwork or heard whispers of friends who were rejected from visa renewals. These were never severe enough to be our problems because these things never happen to us. Yet finding out that people who are similar to my parents struggled to this degree allowed me to understand something that I should’ve already known. Why did I not know about this level of impoverishment in the Asian American community? More importantly, why did I ignore the glaring signs of struggle within members my own community? These thoughts would come to my mind each time I rode the train back home.
When I retell these narratives to my parents and grandparents, and they are surprised by the amount of poverty and homelessness within the Asian American community. They escaped from China to the U.S. because they believed in the American Dream. They were told that they live in a country where Asian Americans are more successful than other minorities because they work harder, save more, and put a greater stress on education; but the people I met did not fit into that mold. If I had not found myself working at this internship, I would not have believed how many members of the Asian American community struggled to access aid or how little aid came to our community. In fact, the truth is that the success story associated with the Asian American community has decreased exposure to Asian Americans who are struggling in the U.S. and to their unique set of needs. Instead, Asian Americans are viewed as a monolithic group of overachievers who have siphoned away employment opportunities from other minorities and wedged between the racial tensions within the United States.
Knowing this, I understood that I was in a position that allowed me to explore the differences between Asian American communities and the influence of socioeconomic status on global migration. I also came away from this with a clearer view of the need for compassion between Asian immigrants who don’t fit the stereotypes of the model minority myth and those who do. This vision is also impossible without building solidarity between Asian American communities and other communities of color.
From my own life and from the classes I took as an undergraduate student, I began to see the rooted history of Asian migrants in the U.S. and how labor demands changed the way Asian Americans are perceived in each historical epoch. Asian migrants were always seen as a supplemental workforce that substituted other working sectors of the economy. Each time, however, working migrants are sent back at the end of their tenure to avoid large pockets of Asian communities from growing. There is so much work to be done in order to remedy the racial and economic tensions between different communities. That is why as I’m working towards my graduation, I hope to head in a direction that fosters these connections and find paths to negotiating connections and camaraderie between different communities and cultures.
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