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Throughout history, multiple minority groups—such as people of color and women—have been oppressed and constrained by the stereotypes and biases that society has imposed on them. These biases are created by a dominating group of individuals in America, who enforces a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Although these oppressions have lessened—or hidden—over the course of history, many of the issues still persist.

Racism and sexism are two significant oppressive forces in modern society that have influenced the quality of life for those who have fallen victim to these oppressive forces. More specifically, people of color are often underrepresented and mistreated due to their culture, skin tone, and language, which have led to issues such as discrimination and police brutality. Women are often mistreated by our society since they are viewed as lesser than their male counterparts due to stereotyping, which has led to issues such as the wage gap, gender role difference, and sexism. On the other hand, these minority groups have spoken up for themselves more than ever. Sadly, speaking up has also consequently led to increasing attention among these groups, which has resulted in ongoing violence and further discrimination toward them.

In my exhibition, you are going to find the racist and sexist stereotypes that society has on people of color and women, respectively. Furthermore, it demonstrates the influence these stereotypes and attitudes have on these minority groups. Here, you are not only going to see the world through the lens of a woman of color—which are two of the most oppressed minority groups in America—but also my personal perspective and experience on the world for being an Asian American woman living in America.

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Jimmy Yang shows the need that he feels to stand up for the Asian community. As an Asian himself, he felt that Asians should stand up for their history, and for each other. He urges one to fight against the racist stereotypes of the Asian community.

Growing up as an Asian American immigrant in the U.S., it surprised me of the number of my own Asian community who do not take pride in our own culture and tradition. Many of us are intimidated and feel inferior due to the societal stereotypes one has on Asians. For instance, many of us strive to assimilate into the white community by undervaluing our own culture and people. It resonates with me because I was once that person, however, I have learned my value of being an Asian and now I can finally take pride in my own people.

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the performance challenges the cultural traditional and stereotyping of the definition of a woman.  In the past, the cultural tradition has molded the notion that women are made of “flowers,” “gossip” and “marmalade,” which impede them from being brave, determined, confident, and independent. The video was made to reject all of these stereotyping notions.

As a woman, we are often expected to be confined into certain traits, such as being submissive, delicate, and dependent. In today’s society, however, many of us strive to break those stereotypes, as we are determined to be strong, independent, and self-dedicated. The female empowerment movement has gotten more popular in our era since women realize that they should not be less than their male counterparts.

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Why This Wave of Anti-Asian Racism Feels Different

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Why This Wave of Anti-Asian Racism Feels Different

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The article describes the current crisis regarding the immense racism toward Asians, which has led to violence and aggression toward them. For instance, six innocent Asian women were killed at a massage parlor in Atlanta by a white man most likely due to his anti-Asian sentiment. Moreover, most of the anti-Asian cases were downplayed by the media.

This essay resonates with me in the sense that as an Asian American, I have personally felt the fear of walking down the street simply because I am Asian, due to the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic in China and the semantics that President Trump sets out to incite anti-Asian norm in the United States. It feels different, however, because many have outright voice their opinions and actively fight back the Anti-Asian racism in the united states, rather than acquiesces with this intolerable norm of hate crime and discrimination

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"The indignity of being Asian in this country has been underreported," the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong writes in Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. Hong, 44, is the daughter of Korean immigrants and was raised in Los Angeles. Although she has written about race in her poetry, Minor Feelings is her first nonfiction book, a blend of memoir and cultural criticism. Her essays explore the painful and often invisible racial traumas that Asian Americans experience-traumas that have become impossible to ignore over the past year, as reports of anti-Asian racism and violence have increased.

Yesterday, a gunman killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women, at massage parlors in the Atlanta area. Hong told me by email that she was grateful to see an outpouring of sympathy from people outside the Asian American community, but also expressed the concern that police and commentators would downplay the significance of the event. "I'm already seeing media trying to whitewash this incident," she wrote, "saying it's not racially motivated, taking words of the police over the stories of these women."

Earlier this year, several attacks on elderly Asians in the San Francisco Bay Area were captured on videos that went viral. One victim, 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee, died from his injuries. While authorities in many cases have not determined-or are reluctant to say-whether these attacks are racially motivated, the overall pattern of violence is stark. Since March 2020, about 3,800 racist incidents against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been reported to the group Stop AAPI Hate. Last Thursday, President Joe Biden condemned "vicious hate crimes against Asian Americans, who have been attacked, harassed, blamed, and scapegoated"-marking a contrast with his predecessor, who referred to the COVID-19 pandemic as "the Chinese virus" and "kung flu."
[Read: What it's like when racism comes for you]
Hong's work captures the peculiar spot that Asian Americans occupy in America's racial hierarchy. The political scientist Claire Jean Kim has described this dynamic as "racial triangulation": Neither Black nor white, Asians are simultaneously stereotyped as model minorities and perpetual foreigners, and thus used as a wedge between Black and white people. But with overt attacks apparently on the rise across the country, Americans of Asian descent are demanding attention to the racism they face.

I spoke with Hong in detail last week, before the Atlanta-area shootings. We discussed why reports of violence and hate have galvanized so many Asian Americans, across ethnicities, in the past year. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Morgan Ome: Racism toward Asian Americans is not new. But recently, it feels as though more Asian Americans have been speaking up and protesting. Why?

Cathy Park Hong: A few years ago, David Dao, a Vietnamese doctor, was assaulted and dragged from a United Airlines flight. I remember the media did not talk about his identity. The story was just about him being a middle-class man who was dragged out of the airplane. Whereas when I saw that, I thought, I bet he wouldn't have been treated that way if he were white. But no one was saying that. A lot has changed between then and now. It's hard to say exactly what the reasons are. Part of it is because of Donald Trump. There has been a real retrenchment of identities, and people have been much more upfront in talking about race and structural racial inequities in this country. And that has resulted in a lot of Asian Americans speaking up.

When Black Lives Matter [gained force] in 2014-after Ferguson-I saw an increase in Asian American organizing and allyship. And last summer, people really internalized the Black Lives Matter protests and the conversation about social justice. Now, because of the anti-Asian racism that's been happening, Asian Americans have been more moved to vocalize and organize-from writing commentaries in The New York Times to organizing groups to escort the elderly in Oakland's Chinatown.

Ome: Has there been a moment like this before? The closest parallel that I could think of was the killing of Vincent Chin in 1982, which led to an outcry among Chinese and Japanese Americans. Other historical examples, such as Japanese internment during World War II, didn't persuade Asians to protest on a mass scale. The damaging of Korean-owned businesses during the L.A. riots didn't result in a lot of non-Koreans speaking up for the Korean community.

Hong: It's true. You didn't see other Asians coming in to support the Korean community after the L.A. riots. The difference now is that the people who are being attacked run the gamut. Even if they are thought to be Chinese, a lot of times they are Filipino or Vietnamese or Korean. One of the symptoms of racism is that you get all lumped together.

Another historical parallel was after 9/11, when Muslims were being attacked and persecuted. Or when Trump became president, there were talks about detaining Muslims. Americans were attacking Muslims or people who vaguely looked Muslim, including Hindu Indians, Sikh Indians-whoever looked brown. I believe that did galvanize the South Asian community and the Muslim community. We're seeing that happen now. There is more aggressive activism among East Asians, Southeast Asians, and South Asians. It doesn't really matter which group is being targeted.

Ome: Do you see any similarities between what's happening now and what happened after the L.A. riots?
[Read: Looking back on the L.A. riots through five documentaries]
Hong: Similarly to the L.A. riots, there was an economic division between working-class African Americans and working-class Asian Americans. Many Black people resented Korean immigrants for coming into their neighborhood and opening stores they couldn't open themselves, because they were redlined. At the same time, these Korean immigrants were barely scraping by. They didn't have any insurance. But they were the next step up [from Black residents on the economic ladder]. There's still a lot of that resentment from the L.A. riots, and memories of Latasha Harlins, who was killed by a Korean immigrant.

What's very charged and tricky to talk about today are the optics of a Black or brown person assaulting or attacking the Asian elderly, like the Thai grandfather, Vicha Ratanapakdee. There's a huge difference between the way second-generation or younger Asian Americans think about race and the way Asian immigrants think about race. Many younger Asian Americans are very sensitive to anti-Blackness in the Asian community, and about policing. With older Asian immigrants, these crimes may reaffirm their anti-Blackness and drive them toward the right.

What I fear is that these crimes are sowing deeper divisions between Black and Asian Americans, and that white people will not hold themselves accountable. Whenever I say on social media, "These attacks are symptomatic of white supremacy," white people say, "How is it white supremacy when it's not white people committing the crimes?" Claire Jean Kim has this really great racial-triangulation theory that talks about the relationship between Black, Asian, and white people. You saw that in the L.A. riots, and I see the same kind of dynamics being played out today.

Ome: So how do we move forward?

Hong: I don't want to overcomplicate this. There are two ways of talking about this. The act of violence itself is wrong. You cannot excuse it. I think many Asian Americans have never talked about it, and so white people still don't believe that Asian Americans face racism. Because we're invisible, the racism against us has also been invisible. This is why it's important that people are speaking up to show: "Actually, this has been happening, and there's been a spike. But at the same time, this has been going on for a long time. We just haven't really talked about it. And now we're talking about it, and you have to pay attention."

But it gets really tricky when the video [of an assault] becomes viral and we start talking about solutions beyond amplifying it. Part of the reason there's a spike in anti-Asian violence is that people are angry and desperate. I'm not saying that we should excuse that. I'm just trying to think of the reasons why it's happening to Asians. Earlier today, I was having a conversation where an interviewer told me that a police officer-who is Asian-said that he doesn't believe [that recent attacks] are anti-Asian hate crimes.

Ome: The officer didn't believe they're racially motivated? What was his explanation?

Hong: Yes-that these assaults against Asians are just part of rising crime. I disagree with him. There have been plenty of incidents where the victims weren't burglarized-they were attacked for no reason at all-and called racist slurs. I know people who live in Manhattan, specifically Asian American women who live alone, who are scared to go out by themselves, because they are followed and harassed and called all kinds of racial slurs. So this is not just some kind of hallucination.

Ome: Do you think that the events of the past year have forced this country to take racism against Asian Americans more seriously?

Hong: We have far to go. This is typical of this country, to not really focus on racism unless it's sensationalized in some way, unless there's a viral video, or someone gets murdered. I wouldn't be surprised if Americans just forget and think, Onto the next news cycle. It's great that white people and other non-Asians are picking up on this, but we can't trust them to continue to train their attention on what's happening to Asian Americans. We need to continue vocalizing who we are and our role in this country.

Ome: In Minor Feelings, you wrote about the difficulty of using the pronoun we because Asian Americans are such a diverse population. Do you still think Asian American is a meaningful descriptor?

Hong: It's what we have right now.

Ome: Maybe I can clarify. The term Asian American was coined in 1968 by radical student organizers who were envisioning a pan-Asian, anti-racist, anti-imperialist movement. Is their notion of being Asian American just an ideal? Or is it a real identity-based coalition that you see forming?

Hong: People forget that history. I forget that too. Asian Americans came together because there was no term for us. Before, we were called Oriental, or by our nationalities. What created the name Asian American was the Vietnam War and the Black Power movement. Keep in mind, those Asian American organizers were second generation, maybe even third generation. They were Filipino, Chinese, Japanese. Quite a few of them had family put in internment camps. They were working-class. So they had a lot to be angry about.

It was really powerful, and it got written out of history. Part of it was because of the immigration patterns in America. After the late 1960s, there was this huge influx of Asians coming in from all different nations. We got way more diverse: Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees, Koreans. A lot of those immigrants now have children who consider themselves American, but realize that they still have secondary status as Americans because of the color of their skin and because their voices don't have the kind of reach that white people do.

Part of the new awareness and consciousness is because there are a lot more of us. And there are more of us who have been here long enough to demand that we need to be part of this country. More so than when I was in my 20s or even 30s, the younger generation is so much fiercer, so much more involved, and so much prouder of being Asian American. The rhetoric has changed from We want more Asians in Hollywood. It's not just about representational politics. It's also about confronting class inequity among Asian Americans and trying to build solidarity with other people of color.

What I like to say about Asian Americans is that if we think of Asian Americans as less of an identity, and more as a coalition, then maybe Asians will feel more comfortable identifying with it, because it allows room for all of our kind of national, economic, and regional distinctions.
[Read: What stories of racial trauma leave out]
Ome: In your book, you wrote, "Since the late sixties, when Asian American activists protested with the Black Panthers, there hasn't been a mass movement we can call our own." Why do you think that is?

Hong: Some people disputed that and said there has been a lot of activism since then. I would say that it was more fractured. But I think it's really important to build a cross-cultural community among Asian Americans, and also bridges between Asian, Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities. And right now, we're not really there yet.

If we want to fix the structural inequities, reform the criminal-justice system and the police, and have health care for all, it's very important to also talk about our racial identity, because people feel intimately close to that. You can't just say, like Andrew Yang does, that people are getting too much into identity. If white people are misusing identity or race to pit us against each other, we have to address that. In terms of getting what we want, and being proud of being [in the United States], and speaking out against violence, we need to build community. That means building an Asian American identity that's beyond loving boba tea and K-pop.

Ome: What do you think about some of the solutions that have been put forth for combatting anti-Asian violence? Last April, Andrew Yang encouraged Asian Americans to show their patriotism. This year, President Biden issued a memorandum to condemn racism and intolerance toward Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. On the community level, there are calls for neighborhood patrols and other nonpolice safety measures.

Hong: I'm not an organizer. I'm not an activist. So I don't know if I can tell you exactly what needs to be done. Maybe we should go back to what happened after the L.A. riots, and look at how people tried to rebuild, and see how it failed.

There was a campaign to funnel resources into South Central. There were Korean Americans who called for people to pay attention to the fact that most of their businesses burned down and they had no insurance. There were attempts at interracial community building. And they were abandoned. That's usually what happens: Whenever there's a crisis, the media and politicians pay attention. And then they abandon it. Right now, we need to continue amplifying these hate crimes. But I don't think policing is the answer. Asking for more policing is not going to solve anti-Asian hate crimes and bias incidents. The reason being that the police right now have all the money and are completely militarized, and [violence against Asian Americans] is still happening.

Ome: In Oakland's Chinatown, not everyone favors neighborhood patrols instead of policing. Some people want policing. So even within a community, it's hard to persuade everyone.

Hong: If you're the one who has a store or is an employee in Chinatown, and you're being harassed, and someone's telling you, "We need to defund the police as a way to protect you," that kind of language doesn't work. We have to find a way to talk to each other and with other people of color in our communities. But we also have to figure out a way to talk to our parents and listen to them, because they're the ones whose lives are most in danger.

I want to listen. That's really the policy that all of us should have right now: Listen to the stories and the hardships that Asian immigrants are going through, and also listen to the Black and Latinx people who are living in the same neighborhood.

Ome: Is there anything else you want to add?

Hong: As cynical as I sometimes sound, the fact that anti-Asian violent incidents are being documented, and that people are talking about them, is progress. Because that wasn't happening before, not when I was growing up. A lot of Asian Americans are more vocal, organized, radicalized, and progressive. And we're not going to go back.

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Why This Wave of Anti-Asian Racism Feels Different

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"The indignity of being Asian in this country has been underreported," the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong writes in Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. Hong, 44, is the daughter of Korean immigrants and was raised in Los Angeles.

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"Waking Up from the American Dream" by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

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"Waking Up from the American Dream" by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

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The essay describes the author’s experience in America as being an undocumented immigrant who climbed up the social ladder by chasing the American Dream. Facing challenges and prejudice along the way of chasing her American Dream for being an undocumented child has impeded her more than it does for her peers. Karla mentioned, "My brother and I now have a pact: neither of us can die because then the other would be stuck with our parents."

This essay resonates with me in the sense that I was once an immigrant child who was not yet a U.S. citizen. There were more challenges I had to face as compared to those who had citizenship. Furthermore, as Karla mentioned, I also feel that the idea behind the American Dream is biased since it does not provide the same opportunities for everyone.

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Growing up undocumented, I learned that the price of my innocence was the guilt of my parents.

If you are an undocumented person anywhere in America, some of the things you do to make a dignified life for yourself and your loved ones are illegal. Others require a special set of skills. The elders know some great tricks-crossing deserts in the dead of night, studying the Rio Grande for weeks to find the shallowest bend of river to cross, getting a job on their first day in the country, finding apartments that don't need a lease, learning English at public libraries, community colleges, or from "Frasier." I would not have been able to do a single thing that the elders have done. But the elders often have only one hope for survival, which we tend not to mention. I'm talking about children. And no, it's not an "anchor baby" thing. Our parents have kids for the same reasons as most people, but their sacrifice for us is impossible to articulate, and its weight is felt deep down, in the body. That is the pact between immigrants and their children in America: they give us a better life, and we spend the rest of that life figuring out how much of our flesh will pay off the debt.

I am a first-generation immigrant, undocumented for most of my life, then on DACA, now a permanent resident. But my real identity, the one that follows me around like a migraine, is that I am the daughter of immigrants. As such, I have some skills of my own.

You pick them up young. Something we always hear about, because Americans love this shit, is that immigrant children often translate for their parents. I began doing this as a little girl, because I lost my accent, dumb luck, and because I was adorable in the way that adults like, which is to say I had large, frightened eyes and a flamboyant vocabulary. As soon as doctors or teachers began talking, I felt my parents' nervous energy, and I'd either answer for them or interpret their response. It was like my little Model U.N. job. I was around seven. My career as a professional daughter of immigrants had begun.

In my teens, I began to specialize. I became a performance artist. I accompanied my parents to places where I knew they would be discriminated against, and where I could insure that their rights would be granted. If a bank teller wasn't accepting their I.D., I'd stroll in with an oversized Forever 21 blazer, red lipstick, a slicked-back bun, and fresh Stan Smiths. I brought a pleather folder and made sure my handshake broke bones. Sometimes I appealed to decency, sometimes to law, sometimes to God. Sometimes I leaned back in my chair, like a sexy gangster, and said, "So, you tell me how you want my mom to survive in this country without a bank account. You close at four, but I have all the time in the world." Then I'd wink. It was vaudeville, but it worked.

My parents came to America in their early twenties, naïve about what awaited them. Back in Ecuador, they had encountered images of a wealthy nation-the requisite flashes of Clint Eastwood and the New York City skyline-and heard stories about migrants who had done O.K. for themselves there. But my parents were not starry-eyed people. They were just kids, lost and reckless, running away from the dead ends around them.

My father is the only son of a callous mother and an absent father. My mother, the result of her mother's rape, grew up cared for by an aunt and uncle. When she married my father, it was for the reasons a lot of women marry: for love, and to escape. The day I was born, she once told me, was the happiest day of her life.

Soon after that, my parents, owners of a small auto-body business, found themselves in debt. When I was eighteen months old, they left me with family and settled in Brooklyn, hoping to work for a year and move back once they'd saved up some money. I haven't asked them much about this time-I've never felt the urge-but I know that one year became three. I also know that they began to be lured by the prospect of better opportunities for their daughter. Teachers had remarked that I was talented. My mother, especially, felt that Ecuador was not the place for me. She knew how the country would limit the woman she imagined I would become-Hillary Clinton, perhaps, or Princess Di.

My parents sent loving letters to Ecuador. They said that they were facing a range of hardships so that I could have a better life. They said that we would reunite soon, though the date was unspecified. They said that I had to behave, not walk into traffic-I seem to have developed a habit of doing this-and work hard, so they could send me little gifts and chocolates. I was a toddler, but I understood. My parents left to give me things, and I had to do other things in order to repay them. It was simple math.

They sent for me when I was just shy of five years old. I arrived at J.F.K. airport. My father, who seemed like a total stranger, ran to me and picked me up and kissed me, and my mother looked on and wept. I recall thinking she was pretty, and being embarrassed by the attention. They had brought roses, Teddy bears, and Tweety Bird balloons.

Getting to know one another was easy enough. My father liked to read and lecture, and had a bad temper. My mother was soft-spoken around him but funny and mean-like a drag queen-with me. She liked Vogue. I was enrolled in a Catholic school and quickly learned English-through immersion, but also through "Reading Rainbow" and a Franklin talking dictionary that my father bought me. It gave me a colorful vocabulary and weirdly over-enunciated diction. If I typed the right terms, it even gave me erotica.

Meanwhile, I had confirmed that my parents were not tony expats. At home, meals could be rice and a fried egg. We sometimes hid from our landlord by crouching next to my bed and drawing the blinds. My father had started out driving a cab, but after 9/11, when the governor revoked the driver's licenses of undocumented immigrants, he began working as a deliveryman, carrying meals to Wall Street executives, the plastic bags slicing into his fingers. Some of those executives forced him to ride on freight elevators. Others tipped him in spare change.

My mother worked in a factory. For seven days a week, sometimes in twelve-hour shifts, she sewed in a heat that caught in your throat like lint, while her bosses, also immigrants, hurled racist slurs at her. Some days I sat on the factory floor, making dolls with swatches of fabric, cosplaying childhood. I didn't put a lot of effort into making the dolls-I sort of just screwed around, with an eye on my mom at her sewing station, stiffening whenever her supervisor came by to see how fast she was working. What could I do to protect her? Well, murder, I guess.

Our problem appeared to be poverty, which even then, before I'd seen "Rent," seemed glamorous, or at least normal. All the protagonists in the books I read were poor. Ramona Quimby on Klickitat Street, the kids in "Five Little Peppers and How They Grew." Every fictional child was hungry, an orphan, or tubercular. But there was something else setting us apart. At school, I looked at my nonwhite classmates and wondered how their parents could be nurses, or own houses, or leave the country on vacation. It was none of my business-everyone in New York had secrets-but I cautiously gathered intel, toothpick in mouth. I finally cracked the case when I tried to apply to an essay contest and asked my parents for my Social Security number. My father was probably reading a newspaper, and I doubt he even looked up to say, "We don't have papers, so we don't have a Social."

It was not traumatic. I turned on our computer, waited for the dial-up, and searched what it meant not to have a Social Security number. "Undocumented immigrant" had not yet entered the discourse. Back then, the politically correct term, the term I saw online, was "illegal immigrant," which grated-it was hurtful in a clinical way, like having your teeth drilled. Various angry comments sections offered another option: illegal alien. I knew it was form language, legalese meant to wound me, but it didn't. It was punk as hell. We were hated, and maybe not entirely of this world. I had just discovered Kurt Cobain.

Obviously, I learned that my parents and I could be deported at any time. Was that scary? Sure. But a deportation still seemed like spy-movie stuff. And, luckily, I had an ally. My brother was born when I was ten years old. He was our family's first citizen, and he was named after a captain of the New York Yankees. Before he was old enough to appreciate art, I took him to the Met. I introduced him to "S.N.L." and "Letterman" and "Fun Home" and "Persepolis"-all the things I felt an upper-middle-class parent would do-so that he could thrive at school, get a great job, and make money. We would need to armor our parents with our success.

We moved to Queens, and I entered high school. One day, my dad heard about a new bill in Congress on Spanish radio. It was called the DREAM Act, and it proposed a path to legalization for undocumented kids who had gone to school here or served in the military. My dad guaranteed that it'd pass by the time I graduated. I never react to good news-stoicism is part of the brand-but I was optimistic. The bill was bipartisan. John McCain supported it, and I knew he had been a P.O.W., and that made me feel connected to a real American hero. Each time I saw an "R" next to a sponsor's name my heart fluttered with joy. People who were supposed to hate me had now decided to love me.

But the bill was rejected and reintroduced, again and again, for years. It never passed. And, in a distinctly American twist, its gauzy rhetoric was all that survived. Now there was a new term on the block: "Dreamers." Politicians began to use it to refer to the "good" children of immigrants, the ones who did well in school and stayed off the mean streets-the innocents. There are about a million undocumented children in America. The non-innocents, one presumes, are the ones in cages, covered in foil blankets, or lost, disappeared by the government.

I never called myself a Dreamer. The word was saccharine and dumb, and it yoked basic human rights to getting an A on a report card. Dreamers couldn't flunk out of high school, or have D.U.I.s, or work at McDonald's. Those kids lived with the pressure of needing a literal miracle in order to save their families, but the miracle didn't happen, because the odds were against them, because the odds were against all of us. And so America decided that they didn't deserve an I.D.

The Dream, it turned out, needed to demonize others in order to help the chosen few. Our parents, too, would be sacrificed. The price of our innocence was the guilt of our loved ones. Jeff Sessions, while he was Attorney General, suggested that we had been trafficked against our will. People actually pitied me because my parents brought me to America. Without even consulting me.

The irony, of course, is that the Dream was our inheritance. We were Dreamers because our parents had dreams.

It's painful to think about this. My mother, an aspiring interior designer, has gone twenty-eight years without a sick day. My dad, who loves problem-solving, has spent his life wanting a restaurant. He's a talented cook and a brilliant manager, and he often did the work of his actual managers for them. But, without papers, he could advance only so far in a job. He needed to be paid in cash; he could never receive benefits.

He often used a soccer metaphor to describe our journey in America. Our family was a team, but I scored the goals. Everything my family did was, in some sense, a pass to me. Then the American Dream could be mine, and then we could start passing to my brother. That's how my dad explained his limp every night, his feet blistered from speed-running deliveries. It's why we sometimes didn't have money for electricity or shampoo. Those were fouls. Sometimes my parents did tricky things to survive that you'll never know about. Those were nutmegs. In 2015, when the U.S. women's team won the World Cup, my dad went to the parade and sent me a selfie. "Girl power!" the text read.

My father is a passionate, diatribe-loving feminist, though his feminism often seems to exclude my mother. When I was in elementary school, he would take me to the local branch of the Queens Public Library and check out the memoir of Rosalía Arteaga Serrano, the only female President in Ecuador's history. Serrano was ousted from office, seemingly because she was a woman. My father would read aloud from the book for hours, pausing to tell me that I'd need to toughen up. He would read from dictators' speeches-not for the politics, but for the power of persuasive oratory. We went to the library nearly every weekend for thirteen years.

My mother left her factory job to give me, the anointed one, full-time academic support. She pulled all-nighters to help me make extravagant posters. She grilled me with vocabulary flash cards, struggling to pronounce the words but laughing and slapping me with pillows if I got something wrong. I aced the language portions of my PSATs and SATs, partly because of luck, and partly because of my parents' locally controversial refusal to let me do household chores, ever, because they wanted me to be reading, always reading, instead.

If this all seems strategic, it should. The American Dream doesn't just happen to cheery Pollyannas. It happens to iconoclasts with a plan and a certain amount of cunning. The first time I encountered the idea of the Dream, it was in English class, discussing "The Great Gatsby." My classmates all thought that Gatsby seemed sort of sad, a pathetic figure. I adored him. He created his own persona, made a fortune in an informal economy, and lived a quiet, paranoid, reclusive life. Most of all, he longed. He stood at the edge of Long Island Sound, longing for Daisy, and I took the train uptown to Columbia University and looked out at the campus, hoping it could one day be mine. At the time, it was functionally impossible for undocumented students to enroll at Columbia. The same held for many schools. Keep dreaming, my parents said.

I did. I was valedictorian of my class, miraculously got into Harvard, and was tapped to join a secret society that once included T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. I was the only Latina inducted, I think, and I was very chill when an English-Spanish dictionary appeared in our club bathroom after I started going to teas. When I graduated, in 2011, our country was deporting people at record rates. I knew that I needed to add even more of a golden flicker to my illegality, so that if I was deported, or if my parents were deported, we would not go in the middle of the night, in silence, anonymously, as Americans next door watched another episode of "The Bachelor." So I began writing, with the explicit aim of entering the canon. I wrote a book about undocumented immigrants, approaching them not as shadowy victims or gilded heroes but as people, flawed and complex. It was reviewed well, nominated for things. A President commended it.

But it's hard to feel anything. My parents remain poor and undocumented. I cannot protect them with prizes or grades. My father sobbed when I handed him my diploma, but it was not the piece of paper that would make it all better, no matter how heavy the stock.

By the time I was in grad school, my parents' thirty-year marriage was over. They had spent most of those years in America, with their heads down and their bodies broken; it was hard not to see the split as inevitable. My mom called me to say she'd had enough. My brother supported her decision. I talked to each parent, and helped them mutually agree on a date. On a Tuesday night, my father moved out, leaving his old parenting books behind, while my mom and brother were at church. I asked my father to text my brother that he loved him. I think he texted him exactly that. Then I collapsed onto the floor beneath an open drawer of knives, texted my partner to come help me, and convulsed in sobs.

After that, my mom became depressed. I did hours of research and found her a highly qualified, trauma-informed psychiatrist, a Spanish speaker who charged on a sliding scale I could afford. My mom got on Lexapro, which helped. She also started a job that makes her very happy. In order to find her that job, I took a Klonopin and browsed Craigslist for hours each day, e-mailing dozens of people, being vague about legal status in a clever but truthful way. I impersonated her in phone interviews, hanging off my couch, the blood rushing to my head, struggling not to do an offensive accent.

You know how, when you get a migraine, you regret how stupid you were for taking those sweet, painless days for granted? Although my days are hard, I understand that I'm living in an era of painlessness, and that a time will come when I look back and wonder why I was such a stupid, whining fool. My mom's job involves hard manual labor, sometimes in the snow or the rain. I got her a real winter coat, her first, from Eddie Bauer. I got her a pair of Hunter boots. These were things she needed, things I had seen on women her age on the subway, their hands bearing bags from Whole Foods. My mom's hands are arthritic. She sends me pictures of them covered in bandages.

My brother and I now have a pact: neither of us can die, because then the other would be stuck with our parents. My brother is twenty-two, still in college, and living with my mom. He, too, has some skills. He is gentle, kind, and excellent at deëscalating conflict. He mediated my parents' arguments for years. He has also never tried to change them, which I have, through a regimen of therapy, books, and cheesy Instagram quotes. So we've decided that, in the long term, since his goal is to get a job, get married, have kids, and stay in Queens, he'll invite Mom to move in with him, to help take care of the grandkids. He'll handle the emotional labor, since it doesn't traumatize him. And I'll handle the financial support, since it doesn't traumatize me.

I love my parents. I know I love them. But what I feel for them daily is a mixture of terror, panic, obligation, sorrow, anger, pity, and a shame so hot that I need to lie face down, in my underwear, on very cold sheets. Many Americans have vulnerable parents, and strive to succeed in order to save them. I hold those people in the highest regard. But the undocumented face a unique burden, due to scorn and a lack of support from the government. Because our parents made a choice-the choice to migrate-few people pity them, or wonder whether restitution should be made for decades of exploitation. That choice, the original sin, is why our parents were thrown out of paradise. They were tempted by curiosity and hunger, by fleshly desires.

And so we return to the debt. However my parents suffer in their final years will be related to their migration-to their toil in this country, to their lack of health care and housing support, to psychic fatigue. They were able, because of that sacrifice, to give me their version of the Dream: an education, a New York accent, a life that can better itself. But that life does not fully belong to me. My version of the American Dream is seeing them age with dignity, being able to help them retire, and keeping them from being pushed onto train tracks in a random hate crime. For us, gratitude and guilt feel almost identical. Love is difficult to separate from self-erasure. All we can give one another is ourselves.

Scholars often write about the harm that's done when children become caretakers, but they're reluctant to do so when it comes to immigrants. For us, they say, this situation is cultural. Because we grow up in tight-knit families. Because we respect our elders. In fact, it's just the means of living that's available to us. It's a survival mechanism, a mutual-aid society at the family level. There is culture, and then there is adaptation to precarity and surveillance. If we are lost in the promised land, perhaps it's because the ground has never quite seemed solid beneath our feet.

When I was a kid, my mother found a crystal heart in my father's taxi. The light that came through it was pretty, shimmering, like a gasoline spill on the road. She put it in her jewelry box, and sometimes we'd take out the box, spill the contents onto my pink twin bed, and admire what we both thought was a heart-shaped diamond. I grew up, I went to college. I often heard of kids who had inherited their grandmother's heirlooms, and I sincerely believed that there were jewels in my family, too. Then, a few years ago, my partner and I visited my mom, and she spilled out her box. She gave me a few items I cherish: a nameplate bracelet in white, yellow, and rose gold, and the thick gold hoop earrings that she wore when she first moved to Brooklyn. Everything else was costume jewelry. I couldn't find the heart.

I realized that, when my mother found the crystal, she was around the same age I am now. She had probably never held a diamond, and she probably wanted to believe that she had found one in America, a dream come true. She wanted me to believe it, and then, as we both grew up, alone, together, she stopped believing, stopped wanting to believe, and stopped me from wanting to believe. And she probably threw that shit out. I didn't ask. Some things are none of our business. ♦

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Personal History by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio: Growing up undocumented, I learned that the price of my innocence was the guilt of my parents.

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"In varying degrees, some papers and webpages announce the arrival of undocumented children like a biblical plague. Beware the locusts! They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen—these menacing, coffee-colored boys and girls, with their obsidian hair and slant eyes."

This quote is significant in the sense that it shows the prejudicial and racist attitude that Americans have toward immigrant children. While it is no longer a surprise that many of us--people of color--are striving to challenge the many racist stereotypes in America, the degrading and shameful language that the American media uses to describe immigrants, such as "illegal alien", does not help with the cause. Hence, it is important for people to realize and cease the misuse of such language.

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"I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background."

This statement serves to relay the message that person of color, such as Serena Williams, feels the most alienated and discriminated against when they are the only persons of color in a white-majority community. People of color are always self-aware of their own skin and actions when around the white community. Often, we do not fail to realize the differences between us and others, which leads to us being more self-conscious than we should be. Moreover, the sense of self-consciousness stems from the sense of inferiority we feel when around white people, due to reasons that we have been overly oppressed by society.

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The poem speaks of the underrepresentation and prejudice toward black women. It focuses on the true conflict within black women who try to define themselves outside of the societal norms. Since the unjust societal norms have confined minorities into the way they see their worth and power.

The way in which minorities view themselves is often influenced by the prejudice that society has imposed on them. Not only so, but there are a tremendous amount of biases and injustice in which minorities have to face. It is often a struggle for a minority to see their true value since these societal values are heavily instilled in them. On the other hand, however, if we free ourselves from that racial cage, we can define ourselves in ways that are not misrepresented by society.

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A Woman Speaks by Audre Lorde | Poetry Foundation

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“Brave doesn't mean you're not scared. It means you go on even though you're scared.”

This quote is significant and resonates with me in the sense that minorities have to face more challenges than others. We have to constantly fight against the racist social stereotypes that one imposes on us. Very often, when we speak up, the other party tends to retaliate. However, despite all the reoccurring violence toward minority communities after they speak up for themselves, they are still not afraid to fight for their rights and values. It shows that many minority groups in our era are resilient and brave, which will eventually lead to great changes

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The poem encourages women to be brave and emphasizes women should be proud of the decision, or “marks” she makes in life. The mother in the poem encourages her daughter to not hide things and make her decisions credible to herself.

Women are often criticized more for their decisions or thinking when compared to men. It stems from the stereotype that women are less competent than men, either intelligently or physically. Hence, this poem emphasizes that a woman should be braver and prouder for the marks they leave in life, rather than doubting herself. It is relevant to me in the sense that women often seem less competent than men in Asian culture. That mindset has instilled in me since when I was young. On the other hand, however, I have learned that women should embrace themselves and for their accomplishments, even when society says otherwise.

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The poem speaks of the defiance of a black woman against the racial oppression that society has imposed on her. It could be taken as a power statement against racism in America. Moreover, the resilient woman in the poem not only acknowledges the society has enacted violence upon her, but she remains defiant and continues to fight for her race.

The poem relates to me in the sense that I am an Asian woman who lives in America—where many racial oppressions still persist. On the other hand, however, these oppressions did not stop me from obtaining an education, working towards my goal, and being resilient. Like the author, I have faced hateful encounters solely based on my race, but I have always remained defiant and will continue to do so.

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They took my lover's tallness off to war,
Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess
What I can use an empty heart-cup for.
He won't be coming back here any more.
Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew
When he went walking grandly out that door

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Still I Rise - Discover the meaning behind Maya Angelou's inspiring poem, with an audio recording of actress Rosie Perez reading this classic work, which has been celebrated by Serena Williams, Cory Booker, and other public figures.

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Gender roles have always been stereotyped since they are heavily influenced by the traditional societal roles of each gender. The song emphasizes women's empowerment, where it indicates that women run the world and have power. Since power has always implied to be a masculine trait, the song’s emphasis on women's power fights against the stereotype of such a term.

For years, power is always associated with the male gender, where the stereotyping gender role shows that women are more submissive and do not hold as much power as men. As a woman myself, I have certainly seen the women empowerment movement has influenced the mindset of many young girls over the years, where we no longer feel confined to certain gender roles. Women in our era continue to push for equality and challenge societal stereotypes

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Beyoncé - Run the World (Girls) (Official Video)

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For many women, most of us feel underrepresented and unheard of more often than our male peers. Alicia Keys wrote this song mainly to free herself from the feminine "cage" in which she felt trapped. Through the metaphor “fire,” she insinuates that she has finally became a freed, untamed, passionate, and fearless person. The song suggests that girls or women do not need a male companion to be beacon of light that brings them hope to this world.

This piece of music is especially true in our modern era, where women are striving for equal rights, independency, and power. The song emphasizes the significance for a woman to realize the unnecessary reliance on men, and that a woman should be compassionate and fearless in her feminine self. Most of us, we have felt constricted in some ways for our femineity. It is important for us to be freed from that constraint.

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Alicia Keys - Girl on Fire (Official Video)