Do you remember when you first landed in Honolulu? I was nine years old, and I saw the seasons change from the frigid Korean winter to a gentle, wet Hawaiian January. Maybe it was just a sign to show me that I, too, would be plunged into seasons of rapid change in the twenty years to come.
The nosy busybody that I am today takes root from me as a little kid who stuck his nose where it didn’t belong. I always knew that I was undocumented. To be exact, I knew that my family tried our best to adjust our immigration status through many years to no avail. And very unlike my peers for whose heartbreaks came at one moment like a giant wave that they found out that they were undocumented, my heartbreak came in pieces. Like the time we couldn’t go to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Like the time I had to leave blank the boxes on my PSAT scantron asking me what my Social Security Number was.
We came to call Bergen County, New Jersey home after realizing that the warmth of the Hawaiian sun wasn’t enough to sustain our family. By then, my father had left my mother. It was just the three of us living in a town overlooking New York City. Not understanding English, I sat gazing out into the windows wasting my days away. I’d nod off from time to time, and my teacher was fed up with me. She asked me why I kept on falling asleep in class, so I explained to her that I waited for my mom to come home from work every night - a little past 11 o’clock.
I still remember the exchange that I had with my sister when I got home. She was angry that I had told my teacher all of this. And I retorted back to her that I was proud of my mother for working six days a week to support us as a waitress. But the message was clear. We were supposed to live a life that wouldn’t raise questions.
And that much I did. Until eighth grade, when Mr. Johnson, my music teacher, pulled me aside, and asked the question in earnest, “Tony, are you gay?” It was a question that launched a thousand ships and thrust me into a spiral of questions - questions that I didn’t have the luxury to ask, and definitely questions that I couldn’t have other people asking me.
In high school, people asked me more questions. In my junior year, I was asked point blank, my back against the lockers, “Are you gay?” I remember being asked, “Tony, why don’t you drive?” on my bus rides home. And for those questions, I had to come up with answers that I wasn’t comfortable with. No, I wasn’t gay. I didn’t drive because I didn’t want to contribute to global warming and the rising gas prices. Very luckily, my high school years coincided with the spike in oil prices stemming from Katrina and the Lebanon War. (This is a sentence construction I never dreamed of writing.)
I somehow stumbled into going to college seven hundred miles away from my home, sweet home in North Jersey to the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky. It was after twelve college applications and subsequent rejections to private colleges for the reason that I could not pay the tuition, being fully aware that state schools would not provide me with aid.
When the first decade of the 2000s came to a close, several things rocked my world. First, Barack Obama was elected president — and while there is no doubt it was a historic win, that came with the accelerated deportations. Every night, I woke up breaking in cold sweat with nightmares that ICE agents were knocking down my doors to take me away. Second, with the financial crisis, my school started looking at corners to cut: specifically, me. What could I do? Third, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer - I suppose the years that she gave to waiting tables in smoke-filled restaurants and breathing in the toxic fumes in nail salons finally caught up with her.
Like a match lighting up a stick of dynamite, the DREAM Act, everything that I had been pinning my hopes and dreams upon, failed. It would have provided me with a way out of living a life where I had to run away from questions. But because six Democrats decided to vote against it, my dreams came tumbling down. I still remember clutching onto my flip-phone for dear life waiting for a text telling me that my dreams came true on that drive to Michigan.
There I was, facing a future where I could only see myself taking care of my mother, never being able to come out. I didn’t want to. I told myself, I only had the right to complain only if I tried my best. So I’m still trying my best.
There’s only so many corners you can face until you start biting back because your teeth are all you have left. I started speaking out. I started sharing my story with my friends. I didn’t know it back then, but I was organizing. I went to a conference of undocumented young people in Memphis, Tennessee. They dedicated a portion of the program to the concept of intersectionality and highlighted LGBTQ undocumented folks. At the end, they asked all the people who identified as LGBTQ to step up to the front. I don’t know what came over me, but I guess I was tired of running away from questions. For the first time in my life, I started answering questions.
In the same room, I didn’t see other Asian American faces. It left me with an appetite to see my community wasn’t left out in the shadows anymore. And maybe it’s because of that, I became the first Asian American youth to come out publicly as undocumented on the East Coast. And maybe it’s because of that I’m still speaking up.
I even ended up on the cover of TIME magazine on June 14, 2012 with a group of my peers and Jose Antonio Vargas proclaiming that we were American - just without papers. The day after, it seemed like all of our tribulations came to an end: President Obama announced Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program that provided me and 800,000 of my peers with a work permit and a reprieve from deportation.
In those five years, I’ve worked to make sure that the rest of the 11 million who weren’t covered by DACA were not left out. I worked at a community-based organization where I was pressured to keep myself in the closet so that they could continue their work without antagonizing their relationships with the heavily evangelical Korean American community. I walked 11 miles from St. Patrick’s Cathedral to Staten Island to pressure a Republican member of Congress to vote yes on immigration reform. (He didn’t.)
After Election Day 2016, I saw the world around me for what it is. A sandcastle. A house of cards. That these protections were temporary, and the focus was on the word temporary. I did what I did six years ago. I bit back.
On January 21, 2017, I helped organize one of the biggest marches in Washington, D.C. as one of the national organizers for the Women’s March on Washington. The day prior, as I took rest in my hotel room, I caught a glimpse of the inauguration coverage on the television. I cried into my bed, asking “Why do you hate us so much?” It was time for me to ask questions and get my answers.
That same night, I went on an errand to Target in Columbia Heights to purchase a printer for the march. As I stood in the checkout line, they made an announcement over the loudspeakers, saying that they were out of poster boards. I broke down and cried again: the people were with me. The next day, as a crowd of 3 million started turning out at 5 a.m. on a deserted Independence Avenue, I knew that I wasn’t alone. And that I had something to fight for.
On September 5, 2017, the decision was made. The program that breathed life into me was ended because White supremacists had the loudest voices in the White House. Nobody had asked for this except them: not the business leaders, not the evangelicals, not the grassroots. But in the end, White supremacists won the White House. They were determined to rip me and 800,000 of my peers away.
That same day, I was out in front of Trump Tower. I shouted the same chant I had been shouting for nearly seven years: undocumented, unafraid. And underneath the sunglasses, I was crying. Not for myself. I had been ready for the moment that the shaky ground gave way beneath me since November 8th. I cried because this was the future that my mother had fought for. The same future that she sacrificed her legs and one of her breasts to. And it came crumbling down like a sandcastle.
On this coming January, twenty years will have passed, and it seems like an eternity will have passed. In Korean, we have this expression that the rivers and mountains change every ten years. So by next 2018, the rivers and the mountains would have changed twice.
The Korea that I remember no longer exists. The only thing that awaits me there is a two year mandatory military service where they go on regular witch hunts to out gay men. I speak Korean well enough, but I speak it like a very intelligent middle schooler and write like a third grader. I draw my line in the sand. My life is here. The family that I have is here. Everything I am is here.
Right now, the world seems like such a precarious place with hurricanes battering the most vulnerable communities, battles to defend access to healthcare raging on every two months, and possibly a nuclear war looming over our heads. But the fact of the matter is that in about 160 days, the first batch of people will lose their DACA protections. There is nothing that stops ICE agents from storming their houses to deport DACA recipients and their families at the strike of midnight. How do we make sure that we still stay in the spotlight so that people remember us?
I still go back to that stage on January 21 in my mind all the time. This is the answer. It reminds me that I’m not alone as I, one of 800,000 and 11 million, sink into a sweet uncertainty as strings from our tethers unwind.
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