I never got to say goodbye to my friends in Macau. I was seven years old when my mother told me we were “going to Disneyland”. She told me it was a secret, but I couldn’t hide it from some of my closest friends. I remember playing chess with one of them at night. “I’m not allowed to tell you, but I am going to Disneyland!” I said. I was so excited. A few days later, we were flying to America. I never came back.



When we landed in New York’s JFK airport, we went straight to Chinatown in Manhattan. Our new home was a cramped, sixth-floor walk-up that we shared with two other families. There were 10 of us in total.



My mother worked in a garment factory. My brother, sister and I used to help with work. We would button-up men’s shirts, fold them into perfect squares and place them in plastic wrappers. We enjoyed it. And all the workers, who we called aunties and uncles, liked having us there. I remember vividly hiding in cells whenever inspectors came to make a visit. We hid in tiny rooms with cat-size rats.



It wasn’t long before my parents signed me up to a local elementary school. There wasn’t too much paper work, and now that I’m older, I know that it’s because we didn’t have any. I was told to never tell anyone about my “status” and if someone asks, just tell him or her I don’t know.



My parents didn’t speak a word of English. I grew up being the translator for my family. I dreaded all the times I had to call a customer service hotline because our phone wasn’t working, or when our bills were higher than usual. I was on the verge of crying every single time.

I remember being deathly afraid of speaking English because people would always make fun of my accent. For the next couple of years, I watched every American television show on TV and read all the books I could find until I became virtually accent-free. To my surprise, it didn’t change much. I was bullied and it wasn’t because I didn’t speak like them, it was because I wasn’t born here.

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But as I grew older, I realized that my accent wasn’t the real obstacle: my immigration status was.

When it was time to apply for college, I sat through a meeting about my various options. All of them were out of reach for me. “I’m not supposed to be here,” I told the school’s principal. To my surprise, I was not the only one in school who was undocumented. Knowing that I wasn’t alone made me feel empowered. They too had been pretending that they belonged. Like me, they felt sadness every time they had to throw away another set of beautifully printed scholarship and financial aid brochures.

I eventually tried my luck. I applied to a well-respected scholarship program, which I qualified for thanks to my grades and SAT scores. It was a weekend morning when I received their phone call – I remember that day clearly.

The staff told me I did not get into the program, but they were willing to take me in for another full-ride scholarship opportunity for next-generation teachers because of my high SAT math score. All they needed was my social security number. I didn’t have one. He was quiet when I told him that. After a pause, he said apologetically that there was nothing he could do without it.

“Why don’t you ask your mom to see if she can find it, maybe you just lost it,” he offered, before wishing me a good day and hanging up.

I dropped the phone and slammed into my pillow. I’ve never felt so disappointed. Tears rolled down my face. All my pretense of having a “normal” life vanished into thin air.

Thanks to the help of a friend, I found another solution. Since I was not eligible for financial assistant programs, I opted to apply for City University and worked random part-time jobs throughout my entire career to pay for my tuition. It’s been three years since I’ve graduated college, and like my high school experience, my extracurricular activities and leadership opportunities taught me a lifetime’s worth of lessons, and blessed me with invaluable friends and mentors.

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I now know never to underestimate the love of immigrant parents for their children. My status has brought them much pain. I know they will always question whether they did the right thing, and whether we will ever blame them. I have, but I’m also grateful to have never had success handed to me. It made me resilient and gave me the courage to overcome any challenge.

I remain undocumented to this day. My status is like a wall that stretches out in the horizon before me. When the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Act (Daca) was announced, that wall got further away. But it’s still there to this day.

I will never know if today’s the last day I can walk into my corporate job. I want to use the skills I’ve learned and give back to the world, but being an undocumented immigrant has hindered me in so many ways. I can’t travel; I’ve never studied abroad or been to another country. Still, I refuse to impose self-inflicted barriers. Every time I walk through the glass doors of my office, I am proud that I made it this far, and I know my parents are, too.

I’ve still never been to Disneyland. But my American dream is just fine without it.