My father is an immigrant from Germany, he moved to the United States fresh out of college to pursue his dreams of being a chef. I am the child of an immigrant. Yet it never really feels like that and I often forget it. Even when talking to my friend on the subway, who asked about my parents voting, I completely forgot that my dad can’t vote. My dad had been here for more than twenty years, he has worked at the same place for twenty years, lived in the same neighborhood. Yet like him, many immigrants don’t get to be a ‘full’ member of society because they weren’t born here.
We don’t speak German at home and all my relatives live in Germany, so I’m not constantly reminded of my background, like how I think many are. When I think about being an immigrant or an immigrant’s child, there is always some stereotypical idea that I think of. For me, one of these is being raised with very strict parents that will hit you with a belt if you don’t do something correctly. Everyone I know laughs about this and it seems like such a commonality between so many people. I know this is stereotypical, yet so many people relate to this. However, I don’t, I missed the piece of that story that interwove the pages of many stories. I didn’t grow up in a household where they would spank or hit me as punishment, which believes me I’m fine with. Yet oftentimes in my head I think I see myself as an “in-valid” child of an immigrant. My life has been really privileged in a lot of ways and I’m very thankful for that, but sometimes I feel like I don’t have a very strong sense of my culture and even the stuff I do have is falling away. Even when my father and I go to Germany to visit my family I feel so alone and separated from everyone in my family. I don’t speak German because I never learned successfully when I was little and as the years went on, it there never seemed to be time. I sit there in silence as they talk around me and laugh and I have no clue what's going on, I look clueless to not just to everyone else but also to myself. As I have become older it seems almost silly to try and learn German or to understand this language that I was locked out of. I feel like I have lost a sense of my culture, yet there never seems time to find it. I’m so busy with what's going on in school or other aspects of my life, I never have time to do things that are important to me, like learning German. Although New York is supposed to be a place of great diversity and the celebration of many cultures, I think in some ways it’s driven me further away from mine. I know this is not just true for me too, however in other ways people are literally being told their culture is not welcome, nor are they. The world is so busy shutting people out, they lose sight of how great it is and how important it is to welcome people in. The one thing I have learned lately is that there is no right way to be an immigrant or a child of one. I think because of my race everyone assumes I’m a through-bread American, and sometimes I forget that I’m not. When you look around the room all you see is faces, yet they all have some hidden meaning inside them. Being an immigrant is something powerful and something to rejoice about, and it’s a pity that some don’t see it that way. Kailey '22 (BHSEC Queens)
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