Instantly, journalism became not just a passion but the driving force in my life. Everything, and everyone, took a backseat to my work. Getting good grades at school took a backseat to my being a reporter. If it didn’t have anything to do with furthering my career in journalism, I didn’t do it. The myopia energized me, giving me the chutzpah (a word I first learned from Rosie’s show) to advocate for myself. After returning from the “minority” summer camp of mostly Latino and black high school students, I cold-called the Mountain View Voice, my local weekly community newspaper, and talked my way into an unpaid internship. I was desperate to get this internship. For a few weeks, all the job entailed was answering the phones and buying coffee for the top editor, an overworked man named Rufus Jeffris. But when a fire erupted three blocks from where I lived and there were no other reporters to cover it, the editor sent me. My first-ever front-page story was about a fire on Farley Street, where I grew up.
“Blackened scraps of clothing carefully piled on a corner of the front lawn were the only items that Mitch and Linda Radisich were able to salvage from their home at 1151 Farley Street after a fire gutted the residence on June 16,” read the “lede” (the opening sentence) of the news story, which took up a third of the entire front page. I was proud of that lede, especially of the verbs “salvage” and “gutted.” News writing, especially breaking news writing, I learned early on, depended on verbs. It was all about action.
“Anong ginagawa mo?” (“What are you doing?”) Lolo exclaimed when he saw my byline on the front page of the Voice.
“Bakit nasa diyaryo ang pangalan mo?” (“Why is your name in the newspaper?”)
The angrier Lolo became, the more independent I felt. I didn’t need his approval. Even if I did, he couldn’t give it. Lolo had to ask me what “blackened” meant.
“Masyado ka nang nagiging sosyal,” Lolo said. “You’re getting fancy now.”
Fancy or not, I made a concerted effort to stay as busy as possible. The busier my schedule was, the more activities I committed to, the less time I had to spend at home. Being at home reminded me of my limitations. Being at school opened up possibilities. In addition to writing for both the Voice and Oracle, I sang in choir, competed in speech and debate tournaments, acted and directed in plays and musicals, and was elected by the student government to represent their interests to the school board. I was so omnipresent at school that teachers, administrators, and parents of my classmates took notice. I neglected to tell Lolo and Lola about parent-teacher nights and open houses at school.
I went alone and represented myself. It was easier that way.
“Don’t you ever go home?” Pat Hyland, the school principal, asked me one night after speech and debate practice. Because I was probably the busiest student at school who did not drive, classmates and school staff gave me rides, including Pat. Short-haired and quick-witted, Pat was the earliest member of a bighearted community of strangers who, over time, would occupy essential roles in my life. Whenever she drove me home, we stopped and got some lattes at Starbucks on El Camino Real Road.
El Camino Real is the artery that runs through the peninsula south of San Francisco, dividing communities by race and class and separating adequate schools from great ones. Residents on its east side were generally on the lower end of the economic ring, mostly service workers and laborers. Folks on the west side, particularly the western parts of Mountain View and its neighboring towns, Los Altos and Los Altos Hills, were considerably more affluent, white-collar professionals and technology entrepreneurs who cashed in early and felt comfortable buying their kids convertible BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes. The parents of well-to-do students were generous to many students from working-class families like mine, paying for field trips, no questions asked. To this day, I don’t know just how much Sandie and Art Whipple, whose daughter, Ashley, I sang and acted with, spent to ensure that I got to go on this and that trip. Fees for speech competitions would be covered, with no trace of who paid for what. Karen Keefer, my speech and debate coach, usually covered what I couldn’t pay for. For the most part, you couldn’t find anyone to thank because they didn’t need or want thanking. If it sounds too benevolent to believe, just too good to be true, perhaps it was. Nevertheless, I was a product of this community. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened to me if I had not attended a relatively wealthy school in a community of privilege.
Shortly after we met, Pat introduced me to Rich Fischer, her boss, the school district’s superintendent. Though he was the highest-ranking official at the school, he wore his authority lightly. He was friendly and accessible, regularly roaming the school grounds interacting with both students and teachers. “Don’t call me Mr. Fischer,” he said during our first meeting. “It’s Rich.” I was more comfortable with teachers and administrators than I was with my classmates. Part of it was because I was forced to grow up fast and had adult-size ambitions that seemed bigger than getting good grades and getting into a good college. I had to take care of myself. Another part of it was because whenever I was with adults outside my family, I was the center of their attention. They engaged me in ways that my grandparents did not and could not.
I was elected as the student representative on the school board, which meant I ended up spending more time with Rich. After he and his wife, Sheri, and their granddaughter, Alexis, attended a performance of Lend Me a Tenor in which I played a bellhop, they took an interest in me. Rich’s longtime assistant, Mary Moore, scheduled biweekly lunches where we could catch up. The lunches led to dinners, and I got to know both Rich and Mary, whose relationship was less like boss and secretary than brother and sister. They were like a family unit, and they treated me like family. Over the years, Mary has written me more greeting cards—birthday cards, holiday cards, hope-you-feel-better cards–-than anyone else I’ve ever met. Mary introduced me to her daughter, Daisy, and her son, C.J., both of whom are around my age. Because I was forced to grow up quickly, I befriended many adults, including Judy Hannemann and Susan Sweeley, who served on the school board.
“There is always one moment in childhood,” Graham Greene once wrote, “when the door opens and lets the future in.” As the years passed, Pat, Rich, Sheri, Alexis, Mary, Daisy, C.J., Susan, and Judy, among others, are the people who would find windows and try to open them when doors were shut. They did it because they could afford to; more importantly, they did it because they wanted to.
3.
An Adopted Family
“What do you mean you’re not applying to college?” Pat asked. While on our regular Starbucks stop, she was wondering why I hadn’t shared anything about my college plans. This was the end of junior year, the time of fretting over college admission tests, the time of planning college tours.
I told Pat that I was not planning to go to college. I said I had a job lined up after high school, covering city hall and writing feature stories for the Voice, which would pay me twenty-five and fifty dollars per article—a solid sum. I tried to sound proud of my plan, even though I felt defeated. College was never an option, especially after I found out that I was in the country illegally and that I couldn’t apply for financial aid. But I couldn’t tell Pat that. I had not told anyone except for Mrs. Denny, the choir teacher. Every spring the choir goes on tour. In the beginning of my junior year, Mrs. Denny announced to the class that we would be going to Japan. Shortly after, I pulled her to the corner of the room, near her desk, where no one could hear us.
“Mrs. Denny, I can’t go to Japan.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t have the right papers.”
“What are you talking about?”
She paused.
“We’ll get you the right papers.”
“No, no, you don’t understand.” I really didn’t know what words to use, or if I could trust her with this information. All I could say was: “I don’t have the right passport. I don’t have the right green card.”
Mrs. Denny’s eyes parted like curtains. Her shoulde
rs dropped. The only word she managed to say was, “Oh.”
The following day, without giving me any warning, she told the whole class that the plan had changed. Instead of going to Japan, we would head to Hawaii. I don’t remember if my classmates were disappointed or angry. What I will never get out of my mind was the reason that Mrs. Denny gave me when, years later, I asked her why she changed the plan: “I was not leaving any of my students behind.”
All of the adults I knew at Mountain View High School wanted to make sure I wasn’t left behind. Soon, everyone was asking about my college plans, including Gail Wade, the mother of one of my closest friends, Nathalie. Gail and I met while I was representing myself during a parent-teacher night, and our shared love for the Russian figure skater Maria Butyrskaya drew us closer, to the point that she started referring to herself as my “Jewish mom.” Her house was only a few blocks from school, and Gail taught French at a nearby middle school. Sometimes, during our lunch breaks, she and I would meet at her house and watch tapes of skating competitions.
Without realizing it, I replaced Mama, to whom I barely spoke at the time, with Pat, Sheri, Mary, and Gail. I couldn’t talk to my own mother while I was collecting mother figures.
Eventually, I had to tell them the truth. I had no idea how they would react. I feared that they would reject me. One by one, I explained the fake green card, the fake passport, why I had to always bum rides to and from school, why college was not an option.
“Oh, now I understand why you don’t drive,” Rich said. “I couldn’t figure out why.”
This was in the early weeks of 2000, more than a year before legislation called the DREAM Act—short for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, which would grant a path to legalization for children brought to the U.S. illegally—would be introduced in Congress. At this point, there were no Dreamers and no one called anyone “undocumented.” Teachers and educators, especially in more affluent communities like Mountain View, did not have much experience with the issue, much less know what to do with someone like me.
Pat and Rich spoke to lawyers separately; their families considered adopting me. Mary and Gail considered adoption, too. But it was too late. Their lawyers said that because I was already over the age of sixteen, adoption wouldn’t fix the problem. According to the lawyers, Lolo and Lola could have adopted me before I turned sixteen had they known it was an option. Although they were naturalized U.S. citizens, Lolo and Lola were wary of lawyers and fearful of the U.S. legal system. Mary’s daughter, Daisy, offered to marry me even though she knew I was gay. I declined, lovingly.
At the time, I felt disconnected from Lolo and Lola and didn’t know how to process this information. I was too numb to feel anger or heartbreak. I was so ashamed of myself, so ashamed of Lolo and Lola—of the situation that was created for me, a situation that I didn’t know how to solve—that I never bothered to introduce them to the family I discovered at Mountain View High School. I was too young to realize that the dream that Mama, Lolo, and Lola had for me was dictated by their own realities, by their own sense of limitations. The America they dreamed for me was not the America I was creating for myself.
If my adult mentors couldn’t adopt me, they were determined to figure out a way to send me to college. They did, identifying a scholarship program that did not ask or care about my immigration status, established by a venture capitalist named Jim Strand, whose kids attended my school district. I received a four-year scholarship to college. Soft-spoken and taciturn, Jim met me at Peet’s Coffee in downtown Los Altos. He told me there were no criteria for the scholarship; he didn’t care whether or not I had the right papers. The only thing that mattered was whether I really wanted to go to college and needed help. “Thank you very much,” I said, and insisted on buying him the iced coffee. I had chosen to go to San Francisco State, which had hosted the summer camp that jump-started my journalism career. But that wasn’t the only reason why. After finding out that my green card was fake—that the Alien Registration Number was not mine—I never wanted to be associated with a number. So unlike most, if not all, of my college-bound classmates, I didn’t take the SATs, the college admissions test. As it happened, San Francisco State didn’t care about SAT scores so long as my grade point average was higher than 3.0. Since I already had a career, at least in my mind, I didn’t really care much about grades or GPAs. Thankfully, mine ended up being higher than 3.0. It was 3.4.
As it turned out, I was the very first recipient of what is now called the MVLA Scholars. Jim donated one million dollars over five years to seed the scholarship, and other parents and philanthropists have continued to fund it since. Since its inception eighteen years ago, more than 350 students have received support from the scholarship. According to the scholarship’s administrators, all of whom are volunteers from the community, about 98 percent of the 137 students that they are currently supporting are the first in their family to attend college in America. Of those 137 students, 36 happen to be undocumented. Along with Jim, I now serve on the scholarship’s advisory board.
4.
Breaking the Law
The first time I willfully broke the law, I was sitting in a small conference room on the third floor of the San Francisco Chronicle building.
It was spring 2000. I was just about to graduate from high school and was planning on moving to San Francisco for college. A journalist named Teresa Moore, who had edited articles I had submitted to a youth magazine, suggested I get an entry-level job at the Chronicle, where she had been a reporter. I’d answer the phone and deliver people’s mail and faxes, but Teresa said I could also pitch freelance articles on the side. In was in. “There’s nothing like working inside a big newsroom,” she told me.
Before I allowed myself to say no—before I dared explain to Teresa that I didn’t have the right legal documents to work—I found myself inside the Chronicle building filling out an employment form. Until that point, I had only been volunteering or doing contract jobs, nothing serious, certainly nothing that required legal paperwork. Since my discovery at the DMV, I avoided talking about paperwork, just as I avoided any conversation about driving. I had never filled out an employment form before.
The form asked for my full name, home address, date of birth, and phone number. That was the easy part.
Then came two dreaded statements, both in bold letters.
The first:
I am aware that federal law provides for imprisonment and/or fines for false statements or use of false documents in connection with the completion of this form.
The second:
I attest, under penalty of perjury, that I am (check one of the following boxes):
They were followed by boxes, one of which I was supposed to check:
A citizen or national of the United States
A lawful permanent resident (Alien #) A
An alien authorized to work until (Alien # or Admission #)
I am not a “lawful permanent resident.” I am also not “an alien authorized to work.” My “alien registration number,” the number on the fake green card that Lolo bought me, belongs to someone else. I didn’t know if that person is dead or alive; I didn’t know what risk I would put that person in if I had used the number. I hated that I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and that I could potentially hurt someone. The only choice left was box number one, which was not really a choice because I am not a U.S. citizen. Not by birth. Not by law. Later, I would also learn that, under 18 USC § 911, it is “a criminal offense for anyone to falsely and willfully impersonate a citizen of the United States.” Moreover, “whoever falsely and willfully represents himself to be a citizen of the United States shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”
But I wanted the job.
It meant independence, from Lolo and Lola, from Mama.
I needed the job.
Sweating under my brow, a couple of drops staining the form, I checked box number one.
Naïve as it sounds, I remember thinking: Yes, I am lying. But I am to going to earn this box.
I don’t remember how many times I said it to myself: I am going to earn this box.
What I always remember is hearing people say that people like me should “earn” our citizenship.
Exactly how I would earn being a citizen, I had no idea. What I did know, however, was that Lolo’s lies were now my lies. I was no longer the blameless kid who wasn’t aware of the circumstances of how I arrived in America. I was now a nineteen-year-old making a difficult and necessary choice to survive, which meant breaking the law.
What would you have done? Work under the table? Stay under the radar? Not work at all?
Which box would you check?
What have you done to earn your box?
Besides being born at a certain place in a certain time, did you have to do anything?
Anything at all?
If you wanted to have a career, if you wanted to have a life, if you wanted to exist as a human being, what would you have done?
Dear America Page 5
