Dear America

by Jose Antonio Vargas

  5.

  The Master Narrative

  “The problem with living outside the law,” Truman Capote once wrote, “is that you no longer have its protection.”

  I never felt protected by the law.

  I didn’t understand why the law was the way it was.

  To pass as an American, I always had to question the law. Not just break it, not just circumvent it, but question it. I had to interrogate how laws are created, how illegality must be seen through the prism of who is defining what is legal for whom. I had to realize that throughout American history, legality has forever been a construct of power.

  Lynchings, violent seizures of indigenous land, barring women from voting—all of that was legal. Until very recently, marriage between people of the same sex was not only considered immoral, it was illegal. “Separate but equal” was legal. Jim Crow was the law of the land.

  In 1954, Border Patrol agents showed up unannounced at citrus farms, cattle ranches, and factories with the goal of deporting as many Mexicans as possible. The whole effort, called Operation Wetback, was legal.

  The first peoples who populated this land, Native Americans, were not considered United States citizens until 1924, when the Indian Citizenship Act was passed.

  The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first law implemented to prevent a specific ethnic group from immigrating to America, was not repealed until 1943.

  The Naturalization Act of 1790, our country’s first set of laws dealing with citizenship, said that an applicant had to be “a free white person” of “good moral character” to be a U.S. citizen.

  Three years prior to that, in 1787, the U.S. Constitution required that escaped slaves be returned to their owners. Black slaves.

  There it was again: “black” and “white.”

  I didn’t realize it as such, but I was struggling to understand the construction of that binary, trying to unlock why “white” and “black” became an obsession for me, which was fueled even more when I first read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

  I was assigned to read the book in eighth grade when I joined an after-school book club led by Mr. Zehner, who taught language arts and U.S. history. A core group of ten students attended, including Sabiha Basrai, the smartest girl in my class. Her parents, Rashida, a graphic designer, and Farukh, a filmmaker, both immigrants from India, often gave me rides after school. As it happened, the book club was Farukh’s idea; he challenged Mr. Zehner to challenge his students to do more rigorous reading. We were assigned to read books—one book each month—that Mr. Zehner considered provocative and controversial while being comprehensible yet above our reading level. His list fit the criteria, from Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha to Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front to Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  No book stimulated me more than Morrison’s. The Bluest Eye was a puzzle: the way the book began, evoking the Dick-and-Jane-and-Mother-and-Father photograph from basic reading primers I knew nothing about; the way it was structured (the book was divided into four parts, each a season of the year); the way Morrison revealed the entire plot of the book on the very first page (Pecola Breedlove, the eleven-year-old at the center of the story, is impregnated by her own father, and she will live and her child will die); the way Morrison used language, including the italics that open the narrative. “There is really nothing more to say—except why,” Morrison writes. “But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.”

  The “how” of the story is Pecola being told that she is ugly, unattractive, unwanted. She takes it all in, so much that she wishes for blue eyes.

  The “why” of the story haunted me. Why was Pecola wishing for blue eyes when she had black ones? Who told her to want blue eyes? Why did she believe them?

  I would come back to Pecola’s story again and again, unlocking whatever meaning I could find. In the pages of The Bluest Eye, Pecola was a year younger than I was when I came to the U.S. Our lives couldn’t have been any more different, save for one central detail: we were both lied to. Hers was the lie that blue eyes were better, that she was not enough.

  I didn’t recognize the lies that made up my life until a year after reading about Pecola. By that time, I had become aware of the fact that I didn’t have legal documents to be in this country, that I was “illegal.” The word was ubiquitous, always floating in the air. “Illegal” was what the news media called us, from the television and radio news programs I consumed to the newspapers I read at the school library to the magazines I would lose myself in at the public libraries. The word, I discovered, was more than an identification—it carried meaning, signifying what I could not do. Being “illegal” meant not being able to drive, like most of my classmates. Being “illegal” translated to limitations of what my life was and what it could be.

  While watching PBS, I ran across a replay of an interview, held at the New York Public Library, between Morrison and the journalist Bill Moyers. The show was called A World of Ideas. I was so stunned by the exchange that I searched for the transcript.

  Moyers: I don’t think I’ve ever met a more pathetic creature in contemporary literature than Pecola Breedlove. . . . Abused by her—

  Morrison: Everybody.

  Moyers: —parents, rejected by her neighbors, ugly, homely, alone. Finally descending into madness. . . . It’s been years since I read that novel, but I remember her.

  Morrison: She surrendered completely to the so-called master narrative.

  Moyers: To?

  Morrison: The master narrative, I mean, the whole notion of what is ugliness, what is worthlessness, what is contempt. She got it from her family, she got it from school, she got it from the movies, she got it everywhere.

  Moyers: The master narrative. What is—that’s life?

  Morrison: No, it’s white male life. The master narrative is whatever ideological script that is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else. The master fiction. History. It has a certain point of view. So, when these little girls see that the most prized gift that they can get at Christmastime is this little white doll, that’s the master narrative speaking. “This is beautiful, this is lovely, and you’re not it.” . . . She is so needful, so completely needful, has so little, needs so much, she becomes the perfect victim.

  At the age of nineteen, when I started lying about who I was so I could pass as an American, I did not have any authority. The only history I knew of was my own, which I was still struggling to make sense of. But after watching the interview and reading the transcript, I decided that I must not play “the perfect victim”—in my mind, “victim” and “illegal” were one and the same. I convinced myself that someone, somewhere, somehow created “the master narrative” of illegality: human beings identified as “illegals,” as if one’s existence can be deemed unlawful; “illegals” serving Americans, either by babysitting their kids, or trimming their lawns, or constructing their houses, or harvesting their crops—the images and visuals perpetuated by the news media, corroborated in TV shows and movies; human beings being told what they cannot do and where they cannot go. Understanding the experience of black people in America—why black was created so people could be white—pried open how Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and other marginalized groups have been historically oppressed through laws and systems that had little or nothing to do with what was right. White as the default, white as the center, white as the norm, is the central part of the master narrative. The centrality of whiteness—how it constructed white versus black, legal versus illegal—hurts not only people of color who aren’t white but also white people who can’t carry the burden of what they’ve constructed.

  The Bluest Eye, I would learn, was Morrison’s first book. Often, her books, from Sula to Song of Solomon to Beloved, were not displayed alongside books by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or writers who make up the canon of American literature taught at schools. Too often, while searching for her work, I w
as directed to the African American sections of bookstores. Searching for Morrison led me to discover the work of black poets like Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar, to the writings of black writers like Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and James Baldwin. I cite their race because it’s a crucial element of their power. Black writers gave me permission to question America. Black writers challenged me to find my place here and created a space for me to claim. Reading black writers opened doors to other writers of color, specifically Asian and Latino authors (Carlos Bulosan, Sandra Cisneros, Arundhati Roy, to name just a few) whose work was often even more marginalized than that of black writers.

  Indeed, if Morrison provoked me to ask more penetrating questions—to insist on the “how” and the “why”—Baldwin challenged my very core. I read these words from Baldwin like they were some sort of dare: “You have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not its idea of you.”

  I wanted no part of the master narrative about who the “illegal” is.

  I would take refuge in creating my own.

  6.

  Ambition

  The more ambitious as a reporter I became, the more risks I had to take, the more lies I had to tell, the more laws I had to break.

  A few months after landing the entry-level job at the Chronicle, I applied for a paid summer internship at the Philadelphia Daily News in 2001. When Debi Licklider, the recruiter, asked if I had a driver’s license and if I could drive, I lied and said “yes” to both. While working in Philadelphia, covering the police beat and writing breaking news stories, I took cabs and rode buses and the subway to get to my assignments. A couple of times I had to hitchhike, making sure that no one found out. I couldn’t tell the editors that I didn’t have a license.

  The 9/11 attacks changed immigration, legal and illegal, making it more difficult for people to come to America. In 2002, I applied and was accepted for another paid summer internship, this time at the Seattle Times. Patricia Foote, the recruiter, emailed the summer interns to remind us to bring our proof of citizenship on our first day at work: a birth certificate, a passport, or a driver’s license, plus an original Social Security card. I immediately called her. I took a leap of faith and told her about my immigration status. She sounded surprised and perplexed. And sympathetic—at least she sounded like it on the phone. She told me she had to consult a lawyer at the office and would get back to me. When she called, she rescinded the offer.

  I didn’t know this woman. Effectively, she was a stranger. I got paranoid. Paranoid enough that I decided to fly to Seattle. Although I’d watched every episode of Frasier, I’d never been to Seattle. I didn’t know anyone who lived there. Using money that I saved up while working at the Chronicle, I booked my first-ever plane ticket, reserved my very first hotel room, and asked Patricia if we could meet in person. I don’t remember exactly what we discussed while sitting across from each other at the 13 Coins diner, not too far from the Times office. Seventeen years later, she doesn’t remember much, either. But what I do remember was that I wanted to look her in the eye, to show that I was a real person. I didn’t ask her to keep my secret. Nevertheless, she didn’t tell anyone about it.

  After what happened with the Times, I was crushed. Rich and Jim, whose scholarship sent me to college, suggested I meet with an immigration lawyer. Jim covered the cost, and Rich accompanied me to the meeting in downtown San Francisco.

  The meeting did not go well. The only solution for me, the lawyer said, was to leave the U.S., go back to the Philippines, and accept what’s called a “10-year bar” before trying to come back to America, this time legally. The moment the lawyer said it, I was certain that it was the only solution. I hadn’t seen Mama for almost ten years. Maybe it was time to go back, even if going back meant discarding what I’d done to build a life for myself here. I was so distraught at the thought of leaving that I didn’t say a thing. In my mind, I was already starting to plan my trip back to Manila.

  As we walked down Montgomery Street, looking for his parked car, Rich broke the silence.

  “You’re not going anywhere. You’re already here,” Rich said. “Put this problem on a shelf. Compartmentalize it. Keep going.”

  I’m not sure where my life would have gone without those words. I pocketed and referenced them whenever any kind of doubt surfaced. Put this problem on a shelf. Compartmentalize it. Keep going.

  So I did. The following summer, I applied for the internship program at eight newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post. To my surprise—and it was a surprise—I was accepted by all of them, including the Post. I didn’t think I had much of a chance given how competitive it was. But I landed one of the twenty available spots. I got it! After Cheryl Butler, the recruiter, called to offer me the internship, I emailed myself notes from our conversation, just to make sure I had not imagined it. Dated Wednesday, December 4, 2002, and time-stamped at 4:30 P.M., my notes read:

  Cheryl Butler called and offered me the Metro desk internship at the Washington Post.

  She said I’ll be getting the Post for free for a month; someone will call about drug testing.

  I should send a big picture; someone will call about housing.

  I still can’t believe it. I still can’t believe it. I’m still pinching myself, waiting for Cheryl to call back and say, “Ooh, just kidding.”

  Well, well, Jose. Be proud, and stop being so paranoid.

  Then the first person I called was Pat.

  “Am I taking someone else’s spot?” I asked. I always thought I was taking someone else’s spot. I had internalized this anxiety from years of hearing the they’re-taking-our-jobs narrative about “illegals.”

  She cackled.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “You earned it. Go.”

  But going meant needing a driver’s license. Unlike in Philadelphia, where a license was not required, Cheryl, the recruiter, reminded me that I needed a license to get the job.

  7.

  White People

  Shortly after the holidays in 2003, I spent ten hours in the computer room at Mountain View’s public library figuring out how to get a driver’s license.

  I googled every single state to find out its requirements. Each required a green card or a passport. Well, every state but Oregon. All Oregon required was a school ID, a birth certificate, and a proof of residency in Oregon. As luck would have it, Karen Willemsen, my former co-worker at the Voice, who was like a big sister to me, knew someone who lived in Portland, Oregon: Craig Walker, her father-in-law. Even though I’d never met Craig, he allowed me to use his mailing address as proof of residency. Along with a couple of close friends, I had Rich, Pat, and Mary send cards and letters to the Portland address. The most memorable card was from Mary, with a quote from someone named Tommy Lasorda on its cover: “The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a person’s determination.” Inside, Mary wrote, “Jose, I love you. Mom.”

  Mary’s son C.J., who was home in Mountain View, volunteered to drive me to Portland for my driving test. He was attending trade school right outside Portland, and we made the seven-hour drive in Mary’s Jeep Grand Cherokee. Along the way, C.J. and I stopped in Pioneer Square so I could practice parallel parking.

  There was no failing this test. Weeks prior to my planned trip to Portland, Rich would buy Starbucks and practice driving and parking with me in school parking lots. “The goal,” he said, “is to not make me spill this mocha on my lap.”

  In all those years I’d gotten closer to my second family, I never introduced Lolo to Rich, Pat, or Mary. Lolo disapproved of me going to the Post. Working in San Francisco was one thing; working in Washington, D.C., was a whole other thing. In Lolo’s mind, I was risking too much.

  “Hindi ka dapat nandito,” Lolo would say. (“You are not supposed to be here.”)

  “Paano kung nahuli ka?” Lolo would ask. (“What if you get caught?”)

  I scored 71 on the driving te
st. A passing score was 70. My driver’s license was issued on June 4, 2003, less than two weeks before my internship at the Post began. It would expire on February 3, 2011, the exact date of my thirtieth birthday. This Oregon license would be my only piece of government-issued identification for eight years. Meaning, I had eight years to “earn” being a “citizen.”

  When I look back now, I am stunned that not one person during that entire period wondered if we were doing the right thing. There was a part of me that expected someone—maybe Rich, maybe Mary—to ask: “Are we breaking the law here?” Not once did someone say, “Wait, let’s pause, let’s think this through, this may get sticky.” Not once.

  Recently, after meeting some members of my “white family,” which is what I call the folks from Mountain View High School, a Mexican American friend asked me why I think all those white people helped me. Was it “white guilt”? The “white savior” thing? I laughed out loud. It’s neither of those. I told him that even though I know that they’re all white—physically, that is—I didn’t think of them as white people when I was growing up. I associated white people with people who make you feel inferior, people who condescend to you, people who question why you are the way you are without acknowledging that you, too, are a human being with the same needs and wants.

  I told my friend: “I didn’t meet the kind of white people you’re talking about—the people who put you in your place—until I moved to Washington, D.C.”

  8.

  The Washington Post

  My summer internship at the Washington Post led to a two-year internship out of college, which meant moving to Washington.

  Pat, Rich, Sheri, Mary, and Jim were thrilled. To them, there was no question that I should go. I’ll never forget the pride in Rich’s voice on the phone: “Jose, it’s the Washington Post. It’s All the President’s Men. This is amazing.”