by Thuy Vo Dang

Immigrant Guilt
I’ve been interviewing young Vietnamese Americans these past several months for a professor’s research project and a recurring theme I discovered is “guilt.” I’m going to call it Immigrant Guilt because I don’t think this is specific to Vietnamese. Hey, I’m not saying non-immigrants don’t have guilt, but this is a particular brand of guilt associated with one’s family which I believe is a phenomenon that arose out of migration and displacement. Because my interviews are confidential, I’ll give examples from my personal experience.

How do I know about Immigrant Guilt? For starters, I’ve lived with it for 20-something years. It’s what motivates me to drive back to Riverside from San Diego practically every weekend despite the soaring gas prices and sometimes unbearable dessert heat in the I.E. (Inland Empire for those who aren’t familiar with the acronym for my neck of the woods). It’s what makes me assume weird roles such as paper owner of a house that I never truly owned and hold assets that I don’t actually have. (The upside is that this only makes me even more desirable in the eyes of creditors).

Immigrant Guilt has caused me and my husband to be co-sponsors of a woman and three children from Viet Nam who have no family relationship to us whatsoever. Our automatic “wife and kids” waiting to be sponsored from Viet Nam are tied to us in the vaguest way imaginable. My parents know this young couple who they now regard as their own children—“con nuoi” as we Vietnamese call it. The man has a brother, who in turn has the wife and kids in Viet Nam, but his income is not high enough above the poverty level to assume full sponsorship. The brother cannot help as he has his own wife and kid and a new business which he declared a loss for in his last tax return. That’s where my husband and I come in.

My parents see my husband and I as the ideal sponsors because 1) we are without children (but that’s about to change!); 2) we do not have a mortgage; and 3) we are quite dependable. My dad asked me to do this as a favor to his con nuoi and to him. Well, I figure if this white-haired old man who carried me across the oceans and continents (along with seven siblings and two cousins) asked me to give up my right arm, I would have to do it. This is no big thing.

Now, the deadline is pending to get all the sponsorship paperwork done and the wife in Viet Nam has an interview date with immigration officials there. The attorney’s office has been calling to hurry our end of the paperwork, but my husband has been overwhelmed at work and we have only recently settled into our new apartment in La Jolla. I actually have very little to do with the paperwork since my husband has the steady income to sponsor the family and he has to appear in person for notarizing purposes, etc., etc. But I am stuck as the middle-person: the one my dad calls a zillion times to remind about deadlines and duties; the one my pseudo-brother calls to request, ever so politely but urgently, to nudge her husband a little harder; and, of course, I am the one my husband loses patience with because he did not ask to be a sponsor in the first place and is only doing it because he is good and kind.

So, Immigrant Guilt is the only way I can explain it. I have to do these things because I’ve learned from my parents that good karma is about being selfless (not selfish as American culture teaches us to be). I have to do these things even when I don’t understand, even when I object, even when I fear that the INS or the IRS or some other scary-sounding government bureau with a three letter acronym will come after me for some kind of fraud that I didn’t even realize I committed.

Of course this makes me wonder: how do I use Immigrant Guilt to get MY children to do what I want later on?

In the Public Library

I forget how nice it is to sit in a public library and get lost in my own world while others around me are busy doing homework, reading magazines, newspapers and novels. I’ve been going to bookstores and coffee shops for so long I forgot about public libraries—a place where you don’t have to feel guilty about not buying a latte or be bothered by obnoxious people talking loudly on their cell phones. I went to Linda Vista library the other day to do my work and wait for my sister to get off work so we could go shopping together. Her work is down the street at Linda Vista’s Bayside Community Center.