Chasing the American Dream as a Vietnamese immigrant

Written by Lisa Truong

When I was in high school, I took a music appreciation class. On the very first day, the teacher asked us to name our favorite singer. I answered “Taylor Swift” and there was a chorus of chuckles and disapproval in the air, even from the teacher. I was confused as to why my answer of “Taylor Swift” triggered such reactions. Then I heard what everyone else answered, and I understood – I was uncultured. Something about those side-eyes and snickers of bored teenagers with eyeliner still haunts me when I think about all the embarrassing details of my high school career. After four years of pondering, I finally have something to say to that class.

I wasn’t born here. I could only listen to what was available at the time, what was convenient, and that was Taylor Swift. I didn’t grow up listening to CDs and albums that my parents collected during their childhood. In fact, they left behind most of their belongings when they emigrated because they felt like if they had held onto something from Vietnam, America would never welcome them as their own. They sought refuge in words they didn’t understand and made a home out of broken dreams and tears.

The wave of Vietnamese immigrants to America began after the Vietnam War ended in 1975. That was the same year my mother was born. She walked barefoot to school and the blisters became scars. She carried water in buckets on her shoulders and the weights were never lifted. Her head hangs low without her knowing at times. She dares not to look up into the eyes of clients when she lifts their feet to scrub their heels free of blisters at her current job as a nail technician.The American Dream promises grand rewards for those who work hard and pay their dues. It incentivizes people to break their backs for the economy and blinds them with the light at the end of the tunnel.

They believe that this warm light will take care of them in their golden years and gives their children opportunities of a lifetime to thrive. The American Dream wants you to believe that it would only take one generation to change the course of history for someone’s family. My mother, a widow and a daughter of a thousand generations, cannot afford to retire. I, as a helpless captive to capitalism, will probably see the same fate. I cannot guarantee that my children will escape this cycle, I can only hope the system will be kinder to them.

At age 8, American children are chasing ice cream trucks and drinking from water hoses. That was the age I was uprooted from Vietnam and planted roots in the middle of a Colorado winter.

I learned your American alphabet for survival, guided by Disney princesses. I learned your grammar, I learned your vernacular, learned your slang so that I could fit into this foreign country I never asked to join. I forgot my own idioms, I forgot my own figurative language, I forgot the word for “me.” The game is designed to benefit those who know the language or have enough money to pay someone else to play the game in their place. My mother and I, unfortunately, don’t fit in either category. We’ve disintegrated our culture to the point where we no longer know what home feels like. Immigrant children are expected to lose part of our culture at a young age in order to fit in. Our parents forbid us from learning our own language out of fear that we will be rejected by our peers. That’s what happened to generations of Mexican immigrants, and it has happened to every single family from other countries seeking the American Dream.

We Vietnamese Americans absorbed your racist comments and gestures into our skin to build our armors. Microagressions can grow into systemic procedures and we’ve seen it all. You fill in who we are on narrow Mad LibsTM lines, you shove us into claustrophobic boxes we’re supposed to make houses out of, with dress codes that strip us naked of our own skin. Everything I am fits into this box. I am smart, I am kind. I am an American. I am everything you want me to be. I am not Vietnamese. I am not my mother’s daughter and I am not the daughter of a thousand generations.

Unfortunately, my stories and those like mine are never told. We’re not appreciated. You stigmatize those who are different, you make us feel like we’re the strange ones and that we should change to fit into your ideals. You hate change and we hate to disappoint you so we throw away our culture, disappointing the dwindling hopes and dreams of our ancestors. America doesn’t want to change. It’s a country built on the sacrifices of its citizens and makes other countries quiver with its greatness. We are immigrants with no tales to tell and with ladders we built from dead branches of our family trees. That’s the true American Dream.