The story appears on

Page A7

April 24, 2014

GET this page in PDF

Free for subscribers

View shopping cart

Related News

Home » Opinion » Foreign Views

Asians seeking American Dream face complexities

ON Monday seven runners from Boston University ran the Boston Marathon in honor of Lu Lingzi, the 23-year-old student who died a year earlier from the terrorist bombings that killed three people and injured 264.

Lu had loved America. A graduate of Boston University, she was reportedly looking forward to a new life in her new country. “She felt in love with Boston,” Helen Zhao, her aunt told news reporters. “The food, the culture. She once told me that every corner you turn is a picture. She loved Boston.”

It is doubtful that Lu’s vision of America as the land of milk and honey, her American Dream version, ever entailed a narrative that ended in blood and gore.

But such is the contradiction of America, a country that continues to project conflicting images of itself.

Think of the bald eagle emblem chosen by Thomas Jefferson to represent the US. It clasps an olive branch in one claw and in the other, a cluster of arrows.

For Lingzi and many other students from Asia, America represents opportunities of the highest order. In America they hope to become filmmakers, businesswomen, high-tech firm owners, engineers. They are rarely prepared for the violence, for the milk and honey to go sour.

I am under no illusion about this place. Freedom, after all, is never free. One must always practice prudence and fight hard to stay free and safe.

I remember over two decades ago when a Japanese foreign student was shot and killed on Halloween night in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when he rang the wrong doorbell.

Or more recently, there was the story of two USC graduate students from China who were shot to death while sitting in their car in what police suspected to be a carjacking incident in Los Angeles.

Fear of gun culture

So much violence has occurred to our visitors that John Kerry recently postulated that the number of foreign students have dropped due to fear of our gun culture.

Two decades ago an entrepreneurial friend of mine started to sell T-shirts that said, “I Survived America” to tourists after two Japanese students were killed in a carjacking.

So it came to pass at the Boston Marathon last year that Lu Lingzi’s golden dream ended in blood. But America remains alluring, seductive. Many are still coming, dreaming of the golden transformation.

So if I were to sell T-shirts to newcomers today, I would sell those that say, “Welcome to America. Enter at your own risk.”

Andrew Lam is New America editor and the author of “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres” and “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora.” His book of short stories, “Birds of Paradise Lost,” was published last year.




 

Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.

沪公网安备 31010602000204号

Email this to your friend