finding refuge.
*alternatively titled "i am a child of refugees and i will never shut up about it"*
Everyone who knows me knows that my parents are refugees — boat people, immigrants, products of the Vietnam War. I’ll tell their little love story to anyone who will listen. It is, after all, my favorite story to tell. For those who don’t know, I’m telling it now.
My mom escaped from Vietnam by boat in 1983 with her younger brother. My mom was 16 years old. Her brother was 13. My dad escaped the same year, from a different city, alone, at 18. Escaping, by the way, wasn’t easy. You couldn’t just escape. You had to pay people to smuggle you. It was expensive; my grandparents saved up for months for my mom’s escape. If you were caught (which my mom was, once), that meant prison. Beatings. Rape. Death. And if you survived that, it meant many more months of saving. Waiting. When you could finally afford it, these smugglers would take you in the middle of the night, throw you onto a small fishing boats, crammed with upwards of 100 people, set to sail in whatever direction. Imagine being on the bottom of a fishing boat with 60-100 people. You can’t go to the top deck, because you could get caught. You’re sitting there, in other people’s vomit, piss, and feces, for days on end. At 16 years old. Think about it. What were you doing at 16? Where were you? What were you worried about?
There was no technology back then. You couldn’t just Google Maps your way to a safe country. You just went. You never knew how long it would be. My mom was on the boat for a week. My dad, two weeks. My aunts and uncles, who escaped about three or four years after my parents, were at sea for a month. If you got stranded at sea, if you died, the only people who knew were the people on the boat with you. Just [some things] you won’t learn in your white people history book.
Both of my parents ended up at a refugee camp in Malaysia, which is where they met and become friends. My parents both remember this camp as some of the best times of their lives. At first, I didn’t understand. A refugee camp? How could this have been fun? But when your entire life has been a war, when you’ve spent the past 18 years worrying about whether you’re going to live through the night, I guess a refugee camp is heaven. You’re finally safe.
The rest of this journey is also full of heartache and hardship, but it’s not necessarily the point of this blog post. Long story short, my mom was sponsored by my uncle, who had escaped previously and was already established in Gardena, CA, and after some time and soul-searching in the Philippines, my dad was sponsored by a woman in San Diego. Life happened, but somehow they reconnected. My parents married when my mom was 28 — twelve years after their initial meeting. They’ve been together ever since, and my future “HIMYM” story will never compare.
Why am I telling you this? (Because I love their story) but also because of [recent initiatives under the Trump administration], refugees are pictured in a bad light. But here’s the thing. Refugees don’t come to this country to ruin it. They’re not here to rape women, take jobs, sell drugs. They come to escape. They come because their homes are bombed; their families are dead; their countries are no longer theirs. They come because they have no other choice. Not by their own doing. Not by any fault of their own. This is what their life has become, what poor leadership and terrible people have done to them. These are common people. They can’t fix a broken country. They do what what they can — they leave.
There’s a poem called “Home” by Warsan Shire, a British-Somali writer, that details the refugee mindset beautifully. Here’s an excerpt, because the entire poem is quite long, but I do highly encourage you to [read it].
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.
“you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land”
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
Think about it. What factors would make you leave home? College? Work? Travel? New experiences. New opportunities. What if there’s a war? If your home is a war zone? What if there’s no home for you to come back to? No family or friends for you to fall back on? Your country is devastation, and the rest of the world won’t accept you. They scream at you for wanting to simply survive; they sign laws barring you from entry. When your country has taken your home; and the world has taken your hope, what would you do? Where would you go? Refugees don’t leave to travel or go to college or rape your children or whatever. They don’t travel across oceans, risk their lives, give up everything they have to go to a new place planning to, what, tear it down? To take jobs and [commit crimes] and destroy the economy of a country they don’t even know? I actually cannot process this mindset. Refugees don’t leave because they want to. They leave because they have to. Because they’re seeking safety. A refuge. Seriously, it’s literally the definition of the word.
I’m sure you’ve heard it a million times, but I’ll say it again. This country was built on immigrants. This country was built on the backs of people who left their own homes to build it. It breaks my heart and infuriates my soul to see someone try to tear this down. To pit people against one another for small differences — race, religion, home country.
My parents were lucky. But they were also welcomed. They made this country their own. They became citizens. They opened up businesses. They bought their own home, multiple times. Now, they’re building their own. From the ground up, just like their built their lives, because life comes full circle and I love it. My parents struggled, but they succeeded. They are products of the Vietnam War, but they are also products of the American Dream.
I grew up in an upper-middle class part of Los Angeles. Right on the beach. You could see the ocean from my high school. I went to bed every night with a roof above me and a family who loved me. I never had to worry about a thing. I was lucky to be born into the life that I was born into. So were many of you. But we don’t pick these lives. We don’t get to decide how we are born, to what family, what class, what country. These are things out of our control. Once we are born, only then can we control what sort of life we lead. Are we healthy? Are we safe? Are we loving? Are we accepting? Are we living our best lives?
And if we are not, what do we do to change it? Do we eat better? Do we exercise more? Do we love harder? Do we buy pepper spray? Do we move homes? Do we give it all up in hopes of something better, somewhere else?
What would you do?
“i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun”
For the time being, here's what you can do — put your life into perspective. [Educate yourself]. Open your heart. Appreciate your blessings. Watch [this] beautiful tribute of the refugee crisis by Alicia Keys.