The thing

with the post-immigrant experience is that our possibilities of mobility are determined by the conceptual world of our immigrant parents. In order to break free, to overcome, those determinations, there must be a rapture—an event which breaks us free and hurls us into the unknown. But once hurled into the unknown, there is no roadmap, no memory to help us along. Our parents can do so much. Mine could only encourage me and doubt me. They encouraged me to do what I needed to do; but doubted that I was doing anything productive. They had no eyes to see ahead of me, so they assumed I wasn’t going anywhere. When I moved away to college, my father entertained the idea that I was living as a pimp in the “big city.” A pimp! Since no one in the clan had gone away to college, no one could imagine what I could possibly be doing so far away from the farm. So rumors started circulating that I had been spotted in San Francisco selling dope on California Street by the Red Light District. This rumor turned into a more robust conception of my travels: I was not selling, but collecting! The news got to my father, who had a violent reaction to the idea. It didn’t help matters that I had a scholarship and didn’t have to work. My mother called and asked for reassurance that I was, in fact, reading books somewhere and not sinning against all she believed in. I was irritated that my father had actually believed it. But what did I expect? This thing I was doing was not something that was done. I had to deal with it: I eventually brought my dad to see the University, to walk around it, to smell the grass. I don’t think he forgot about my pimping until I graduated for a second time. By then, he was satisfied to know that at the very least I knew my way around the darkness.