An Immigrant’ s love of America

Le Trung Chinh

 

 

After emphasizing that immigrants to the United States will have to undergo “severe vetting”, President Trump recently added that “we will only accept immigrants who love us”. And when asked what he would do about the surge of anti-Semitic activities since his election, he responded that “you are going to see a lot of love”…  Am I feeling the gentler and kinder side of America coming back?

Roll time back by fifty years: 1967 was the year I first landed in America, a lucky winner of a scholarship from the USAID Leadership Program launched to train young Vietnamese students for future “nation-building”. Little did I know then that the Communists would take over Vietnam a few years later, and that I would spend my professional career serving Americans rather than my people. Reality number 1: Very few humans have control of their own destiny, and refugees have even less. Swept under by historical tsunamis, we land on shores we never dreamed of, and pick up our lives again. I was very lucky and forever grateful for that chance. America has been a wonderful home for me.  Yet Vietnam and the people I left behind will always be in my heart.

But President Trump, don’t you worry! What is there not to love about America? After all, one only has to believe in the following words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.  All American school children and all immigrants live on the promises of these beautifully written words learned in their first civic class. Idealistic as they should be in a Declaration of Independence, albeit a bit utopian they would sound over the course of history. Sadly, we now know that these truths are not so self-evident, that some men are created more equal than others, and that too often, when we claim our own unalienable rights, we are likely stepping on someone else’s rights. Some lives seem to matter more than others. The four Liberties declared by FDR in 1941 and so beautifully painted by Norman Rockwell remain elusive for many in their daily struggle for survival.

And the pursuit of happiness? As my hair turned grey over the years, I realized that to pursue happiness means never to find it: by definition, when we are after something, we don’t have it. It will always be in front of us, running one step ahead of us. So I returned to the Buddhist roots of my childhood: I have to cultivate happiness within myself. I will not find it by chasing it, or by building golden towers. And certainly not by walking a path lined with consumer goods or blessed by the Prosperity Gospel. But I hope this does not make me less American, Mr. President.

Tears roll down my cheeks when I sing the lyrical words by another immigrant, Irvin Berlin: “God bless America, land that I love”. But it is the sentence that follows that resonates even more, in these challenging times: “Stand beside her, and guide her, through the night with a light from above.”

There are many ways to love America. Perhaps the best way is with the dreams and the heart of an immigrant or a refugee who knows that, unfortunately, not all lives are equally endowed with unalienable rights. Ambivalent as we may be about its harsh realities, what we love about America is that dreams are still worth living for.

Chinh Le

Corvallis, OR