Dear America

by Jose Antonio Vargas

“I gotta head back to the station,” the sheriff said. “I’m gonna let you go. Slow down, young man.”

  Slow down.

  I had more than one deadline.

  There was no slowing down.

  I froze as he drove away as the stench of urine filled the car. Since procuring a license I wasn’t supposed to have, driving had always been stressful. One way I dealt with the tension was by playing Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing,” which turned out to be the soundtrack of the two years I traveled the country covering the 2008 campaign. I drove all over the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, got lost in Kentucky while following John Edwards, and got even more lost in Indiana while covering Sarah Palin. I got lost trying to follow Oprah Winfrey in South Carolina, where she was campaigning for Barack Obama. I was witnessing and covering history yet I felt so removed from it, like I had no right to be there.

  Driving down Highway 175 that night in Texas, as Stevie was reminding me not to worry about a thing, I couldn’t help but worry about everything.

  Even when it seemed like everything was going well, really well, I worried about everything.

  12.

  Purgatory

  “Jose! My man! Congratulations, you won!” Kevin Merida, one of the Post’s top editors, called to tell me the good news.

  I was confused. Won what, I wondered? According to Kevin, I won, as part of a team, the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting for covering the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. My contribution to the winning package was an interview with a key eyewitness, whom I reached because I knew how to use Facebook. I didn’t believe I had won anything until I saw my byline in the package; even then, I didn’t really believe it until I saw my name listed in the nominating letter to the Pulitzer committee.

  But instead of feeling elated, the first thing that crossed my mind was: What if anybody finds out?

  A couple of hours later, as news of the prize spread—not only in the U.S. but in the Philippines, where news reports said I was the youngest and only the fourth Filipino journalist to win—my phone rang. It was my grandmother. It was Lola. She didn’t say congratulations, or say how proud she was of me, or ask me how I felt. She was worried about what I was worrying about. Spoken in a whisper that dripped with shame, Lola asked: “Anong mangyayari kung malaman ng mga tao?” (“What will happen if people find out?”)

  I ignored the question. I told her I had to go. After I hung up, I rushed to the bathroom on the fourth floor of the newsroom. I sat down on the toilet. I cried.

  In a way, winning a part of the prize was the beginning of the end. The lies had gotten so big that they swallowed everything up, including all the good things. The lies, I remember thinking that day, had to stop. I didn’t exactly know how to stop them or when to stop them or what I would do after I stopped them. I just knew that they had to stop.

  Passing was purgatory. It was exhausting, always looking over your shoulder, waiting to get found out, always wondering if you’re not passing enough. Paranoia was like some viral disease that infected my whole body. Stress was oxygen.

  I couldn’t be present for my own life. Even—no, especially—on a day like this.

  13.

  Thirty

  Reading The New Yorker felt like shopping at a grocery store for food I’d never tasted and probably could not afford. I told myself then, improbable as it sounds: if I’m ever going to be a serious writer—whatever that means—I need to write for this thing. And then I got my chance.

  “Where are you from?” Mark Zuckerberg wanted to know.

  We were walking around his leafy neighborhood, not too far from the headquarters of Facebook. It was a sunny, cloudless afternoon. I was getting to know him; he was, in turn, getting to know me. Zuckerberg was not the awkward, Asperger-y type that he had been portrayed to be. He looked me in the eye. Minutes after we were introduced, he was texting with his mother. I requested that he and I take an hour-long stroll, just a reporter and his subject, speaking on the record, no holds barred. Zuckerberg, often flanked by his handlers whenever he talked to reporters, agreed to the walk. It was August 6, 2010, and I was living a dream—a big part of my dream.

  I was on an assignment for The New Yorker, one of the magazines I had discovered at the local library when I was a kid. I was mystified by the black-and-white cartoons (were they supposed to be funny?), confused by the punctuation marks (I thought a semicolon was a mistake; it looked like a period on top of a comma), and needed a dictionary and an encyclopedia to digest a lengthy review of a new book on Shakespeare. Not only that, but I had beaten more experienced and, frankly, better writers and landed an exclusive interview with a largely misunderstood and often caricatured character: Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, who, at the time, had yet to be deeply profiled. The profile would come out before the premiere of The Social Network. I had convinced Zuckerberg and his trusted team, including Sheryl Sandberg, that I was the right journalist for the job. Unlike most reporters, I told Sheryl, I actually knew how to use Facebook. I had assured The New Yorker, eager for the exclusive, that I was a fair journalist for the job. (“Are you sure you’re not ‘friends-friends’ with Mark?” David Remnick, the magazine’s top editor, asked me.) Zuckerberg was twenty-six. I was twenty-nine, about six months shy of turning thirty.

  Turning thirty weighs heavily on most people, who think they should be married by then or should be making a certain amount of money. It weighed heavily on me for reasons I could not share with even my closest friends, much less my mentors and previous employers, including Arianna Huffington, who recruited me to join the Huffington Post in the summer of 2009, and Donald Graham, the former owner of the Washington Post Company, where I was hired right after college. (As it happened, Graham had introduced me to Zuckerberg at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2007. “Oh, you’re not wearing flip-flops,” were my first words to Zuckerberg.) By the summer of 2010, at the peak of my journalism career, depression had completely sunk in. Worse, I refused to share what troubled me for fear of drawing people into a kind of a tempest I myself did not fully comprehend. All I knew was, turning thirty came with a deadline, both practical and personal.

  Practically, my driver’s license—the only legal form of identification I had—was set to expire on February 3, 2011, my thirtieth birthday.

  Personally, I had hoped that, by the dawn of my fourth decade, life, the kind of life that did not mean hiding from the government, hiding from loved ones, even hiding from myself—real life—would actually begin.

  “I’m from Mountain View,” I replied.

  It was the easy answer to Zuckerberg’s easy question, the kind of question I had never fully answered since I found out that I was not supposed to be here. I never answered it fully on government forms, be it while applying for jobs or a driver’s license. I rarely answered it fully when friends, coworkers, and even potential lovers inquired about why I had not visited my mother or why I rarely talked about her, or why my grandparents raised me, or why I couldn’t take advantage of an all-expense-paid trip to Switzerland, or why I didn’t want to work in Baghdad and cover the war in Iraq.

  Journalism was a way of separating what I do from who I am, a way of justifying my compromised, unlawful existence to myself: My name may be at the top of this story, I may have done all the reporting and the writing, but I’m not even supposed to be here, so I’m not really here.

  Since I began writing, the three most dangerous words in the English language for me have been “I,” “me,” and “my.” That’s partly because I’ve so internalized the axiom that I need to “earn” my American citizenship that I’m uncertain if I’ve “earned” the right to express myself in such personal terms. It’s also partly because I’m afraid of what happens when I confront my own despair, the sense of disorientation and abandonment I’ve been grappling with since arriving in this country as a motherless twelve-year-old. I run away from people, especially people who want to get close. I run away from
myself. Because I’ve never felt at home, because I’ve never had a real home, I’ve organized my life so I’m constantly on the move and on the go, existing everywhere and nowhere. I cannot sit still. I live at airports, which is somewhat fitting, since my life was changed that one morning in an airport in a country I left to go to a country where I’ve built a life that I have not been able to leave.

  14.

  Facing Myself

  My relationships with people were shaped by the secrets I kept and the lies I had to tell; I feared that the more I shared of myself, the more people I would drag into my mess.

  The lies I told to get jobs were exacerbated by the lies I told friends and coworkers about who I was, where I came from, what I could not do, and why.

  When my friend Angelica invited me to her wedding in Mexico City, I made up some lie about my grandmother being sick. For me, traveling outside of the country was out of the question. If I leave the U.S., there’s no guarantee I would be allowed back.

  I never displayed photos of family members at work or at home. You put photos up, people ask questions.

  There were many times I actually told people that my parents were dead. It was easier to say that I was alone, just as, years earlier, it was easier for me to represent myself at parent-teacher meetings.

  For more than a decade, I carried the weight of trying to succeed in my profession—I need that byline, I need that story, I need to be seen—while wanting to be invisible so I didn’t draw too much attention to myself.

  Then came the Zuckerberg story. There I was, walking down California Avenue, near downtown Palo Alto, less than two miles from the home where I was raised, cajoling Zuckerberg to open up to me (I had asked him about his trip to an ashram in India; about his mistakes and regrets running Facebook at such a young age; about his controversial views on transparency and publicness), while unable to truly open up about myself. Throughout 2010, I started reading stories about young undocumented Americans, many of them still in high school and college. Their rallying cry was: “We’re undocumented, unafraid, and unapologetic.” And using new technologies that I’d been writing about—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube—they were chronicling their own stories, daring politicians and the public alike to look away. I was particularly attracted to the story of a young undocumented immigrant from Ecuador named Maria Gabriela Pacheco, whom everyone called Gaby. She had been organizing for immigrant rights since she was in high school. Joined by three friends, Gaby walked from Miami, where she grew up, to Washington to drum up support for the DREAM Act. I followed Gaby’s story on social media. I even stalked her on Facebook. There she was in the news, sharing her story publicly and trying to engage people like Joe Arpaio, the notorious sheriff who talked about and treated undocumented immigrants like cattle. How could she be so fearless? Why was I so scared?

  There comes a moment in each of our lives when we must confront the central truth in order for life to go on.

  For my life to go on, I had to get at the truth about where I came from. On that August afternoon, working on the biggest assignment of my life, I realized that I could no longer live with the easy answer. I could no longer live with my lies. Passing was no longer enough. Before I could write any more stories, I had to investigate my life.

  To free myself—in fact, to face myself—I had to write my story.

  15.

  Lawyers

  I had spoken with at least ten immigration lawyers, all of whom told me that telling my full story publicly was not a good idea. One lawyer went as far as calling it “legal suicide.” Talking to lawyers made me feel like I was carrying an incurable disease, with everyone offering their diagnoses. Few offered treatments.

  “The thing is, you weren’t supposed to make it this far,” a lawyer told me as she sipped a Diet Coke.

  One warned, “The moment you publicly declare that you’re undocumented, you cannot get hired. How are you going to make a living?”

  Another had an interesting suggestion that kept me sleepless for a few nights: “What if you left the country and came out as undocumented from the Philippines?”

  Given my high-profile contacts, one lawyer wondered if I had considered asking a member of Congress to introduce a private bill, typically a last-ditch effort to protect immigrants from deportation. “Having a senator introduce a private bill on your behalf—even if it doesn’t pass, because they rarely pass—offers you a safety net.” I told her that I would consider it. But the whole point of my planning to come out as undocumented was to marry my specific story to other stories. To complicate the narrative. To take immigration, especially unauthorized, “illegal” immigration, out of the “merit-based,” “good immigrant v. bad immigrant,” “less deserving v. more deserving” framework.

  “Are you trying to be a martyr?” she asked.

  “No,” I replied. “I am trying to be a human being.”

  I kept thinking back to that lawyer sipping the Diet Coke: “You weren’t supposed to make it this far.”

  But because I am here, because I did make it this far, because of the sacrifices of Mama, Lolo, and Lola, and in spite of their fear and shame, because I could not have done what I’ve done without the love and support of strangers who became mentors and allies, because of all of that, I have an even greater responsibility to speak up. Many of us hold some kind of privilege. It was time for me to risk mine.

  16.

  Second Coming Out

  About “coming out,” which I’ve done twice in my life: it’s less about “coming out” and more about letting people in. I learned that you come out to let people in. The reality is, the closet doesn’t only hide you from strangers. The closet also hides you from the people you love.

  For more than a decade, I hid my Filipino family from my “white” family of mentors and allies, and I hid my friends from both of them. It was easier to keep everyone apart.

  Many members of my Filipino family did not know (or did not want to know) that I was gay. Most of my closest friends did not know that I was undocumented. I compartmentalized people like I compartmentalized feelings.

  To celebrate my thirtieth birthday, the day my driver’s license from Oregon was set to expire, I decided it was time for everyone to meet everyone. I threw myself an “I may get deported” party to share my decision to come out as undocumented, with the goal of sparking a more honest, more inclusive conversation about immigration and the millions of people many Americans deem “illegal.” In front of everyone I loved, I said that I was not sure what would happen to me—arrest? detention? deportation?—but what I did know was that I needed all of them to know each other.

  Most people in the room had an idea of what I was planning on doing. That night, many of them told me they didn’t really believe it until I shared it in front of the whole group.

  “I was hoping you’d change your mind,” my friend Scott told me.

  Thirty people showed up, traveling in from all over the country. With the help of my aunt Jennifer, I had organized a dinner at an Indian restaurant in downtown San Francisco. Lola came, accompanied by Uncle Rolan, his wife, Alma, and their children A.J. and Nicole. Lolo’s sister Florida attended, as did several aunts, uncles, and cousins, including Aida, my exuberant aunt, and Ate Gladys, a cousin who’s more like the older sister I never had. All my mentors from Mountain View High School showed up. After meeting Pat, Rich, Sheri, Mary, Daisy, and Jim for the first time, Lola turned to me and said, “Hindi ko alam na puti pala silang lahat.” (“I didn’t know that they were all white.”) Beloved friends from New York City and Washington, D.C., made the trip. My reporting career has been guided by editors who became mentors and later very dear friends. It was a special thrill to introduce Teresa Moore, the editor who helped get me a job at the Chronicle, to Marcia Davis, who edited most of my work at the Post.

  As people mingled with each other through the buffet dinner of chicken curry, samosas, biryani, and naan, I realized that I had made a mistake by keeping everyone apart all th
ese years. I was afraid that they wouldn’t have anything to talk about. It was not until my family life, my school life, and my work life all converged in that Indian restaurant that I discovered that they indeed had something in common: their generosity to me.

  And to be seen by so many people, so many good people, meant that I was here, and maybe even that I was supposed to be here.

  Uncle Conrad, who flew in from San Diego, pulled me aside and told me he was overwhelmed after meeting everyone.

  “Your whole life is here,” he said.

  Not my whole life. Lolo had been gone for four years. He died of a heart attack in January 2007. I was glad that we were able to reconcile months before he died, to get to an understanding about why he did what he did and why I did what I had to do. I apologized for all the hurtful things I said. I apologized for being rebellious and disobedient, for running away from him, thinking that he resented whatever it was I had become. Turns out, he didn’t resent it—he just didn’t understand it.

  “Hindi ko alam na mangayayari ang lahat ng ito, apo ko.” (“I didn’t know all of this would happen, my grandson.”)

  Lolo wasn’t the only major figure in my life who was absent from the party. Two months after we buried Lolo, my father, whom I hadn’t seen since I was about eleven years old, was dying from lung cancer. I found out when his siblings found a way to contact me, first by email and then by phone. They needed help in paying for my father’s funeral. At first I didn’t know what to do. I was angry. And I was angry that I was angry. When the anger subsided, the only appropriate thing to do was to send whatever extra money I had to the man who was partly responsible for my being born.

  17.

  Outlaw

  I was about to throw away the career that I’d risked everything for. No one was forcing me to do it. I was forcing myself to do it.