American Like Me

by America Ferrera

  Because of my father, I am organized, disciplined, and an entrepreneur. He instilled the values of hard work, integrity, and accountability into my life. He gave me the structure that I needed to be a prolific artist. He encouraged me to never stop learning, whether that be knowledge I can use to fuel my art or make my business more efficient.

  Between my two parents, I feel like the perfect balance of artist and businesswoman. They gave me the best of their worlds, which happened to be exactly what I needed in my life’s passions and pursuits. And because of these skills drilled into me, I am able to have a thriving career, a deep appreciation for art, and an eye for business.

  It is because of my immigrant parents that I have a fulfilling life. It is because of their lessons that I have a career, the willingness to work hard, and the gratitude for what I sometimes take for granted. So thank you, Mom and Dad, for giving me the life that you consciously wanted me to have. For instilling the skills in me to maintain it. And for all the wonderful qualities that make me both Asian and American.

  PHOTO BY WANDA VARGAS-HERNANDEZ

  Laurie Hernandez is an American-born, second-generation Puerto Rican gymnast, an Olympic gold medalist, and the youngest-ever champion on Dancing with the Stars. At the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janiero, Laurie won silver in the individual balance beam competition and gold in the team final.

  Laurie Hernandez

  IT WAS ONE OF the greatest moments of my life. I was sixteen years old and I’d just heard my name called. My lifelong dream had just come true. I was going to the Olympics! This was something I had wanted since I was five years old.

  I will never forget the feeling of finding out I’d made the cut. This was before gymnastics fans and journalists started calling me the “Human Emoji,” but I am pretty sure I was making alllll the emoji faces that day. Especially the ones involving laughing and crying at the same time.

  But another very memorable thing happened that day. Right after they called my name, the journalists were lined up, asking me questions. And one of them said with a huge excited smile:

  “Laurie, how does it feel to be the first US-born Latina gymnast to make the US Olympic team in more than thirty years?”

  This caught me off guard. My whole life I didn’t plan to be “the First Latina Gymnast to Make the Olympic Team.” I never really thought about it in those terms. So when this highly specific question was asked, I might have been making that emoji face where the yellow bald guy is showing all his teeth, and it looks like he’s cringing and sort of fake smiling at the same time. You know the one who looks like something really awkward just happened? Or maybe I made the surprise emoji face. The one where the mouth and eyes look like perfect little o’s.

  I wasn’t upset about what the reporter said. It was pretty cool to hear. But the truth is, I didn’t even know I was the first Latina to do this in thirty years. The even deeper truth is that I’d never even put much thought into the idea that I was a “Latina gymnast” in the first place. I was just Laurie, the girl who loved to work really, really hard at gymnastics. The girl who clowned around a lot but was also super focused on being the best she could be and making her family proud.

  Of course I knew I was Latina. But I never thought about the idea that I might be representing all Latinas.

  My grandparents came to New York from Puerto Rico and had my parents in New York. My mom and dad grew up living around lots of other Puerto Ricans in New York. But by the time I came along, in 2000, my parents had moved to a quiet middle-class town called Old Bridge Township, New Jersey. They thought it would be a good place to raise me and my older brother and sister. They wanted us to be able to pursue our dreams—to be able to go to good schools, take gymnastics, and have a comfortable house with enough space for my grandma to live with us. And plenty of room for family dance parties, of course.

  I remember coming downstairs as a kid and seeing my parents salsa dancing in the family room. They would be blasting the music—my dad loved Marc Anthony, Sergio Mendes, Ricky Martin, and Toco. I just referred to it as “Spanish music.” You know. Music where they sing in Spanish. Maybe it was Puerto Rican, or Mexican, or Cuban, or American. I’m not really sure. Either way it was a lot of fun. I’d reach the bottom of the stairs, and my dad would extend a hand and pull me onto the “dance floor.” My grandma would always be there too.

  “When I was a young girl in Puerto Rico, this is how we danced,” Grandma would say, while she demonstrated a very funny version of a merengue, moving her body as confidently as she would have if she were forty years younger.

  “Okay, Grandma, but when I was a young girl in New Jersey, this is how I danced,” I would say, being super sassy and doing my best whip and nae nae.

  Grandma would just laugh and shrug her shoulders watching me demonstrate my moves. We all had fun no matter what style of dance we were doing, and we all had good rhythm. I didn’t even realize how good my sense of rhythm was until I was working on floor routines at gymnastics practice. The dance part of it always came so easily to me. Meanwhile, some of the other girls would have trouble finding the beat. But me and my Puerto Rican grandma could always find it just fine.

  When we told my grandma I had made it onto the Olympic team, she just calmly nodded her head and said without any emotion, “Great. Good job, honey.” My mom and I exchanged a look. We knew what was going on. Grandma hadn’t really understood what we told her and was just doing her smile-and-nod thing. Even though her English was pretty good, she would sometimes tire of translating everything in her head and just kind of tune us out. She missed some major news that time. But she made up for it two weeks later when she came running and screaming from her bedroom. She had been watching her favorite telenovelas on Univision and had seen a commercial come on about me and my teammates going to the Olympics.

  “Mamita! Mamita!” (She always called me this.) “You’re going to the Olympics! I’m so proud, mamita!”

  And then a stern but smiling glance: “Lauren, why didn’t you tell meeeeeee?!”

  She didn’t get to attend the Olympic games in Rio de Janeiro when I competed. Her health wasn’t good enough to handle the traveling. But it didn’t matter, because she had been there every step of the way—my whole life, helping me become who I am.

  My parents worked a lot, and my brother and sister are several years older than I am. So when I was a kid, I spent a whole lot of one-on-one time with Grandma. Since she lived with us, she was always there for me. She used to help me get ready for school in the mornings. I had wild curly hair—I still do—and my grandma used to try to keep it out of my face. She was a practical and tough woman who would not allow herself to lose a battle with a pigtail. My mom was a lot gentler and didn’t always win the war, but when Grandma set her mind to it, she made perfect pigtails. She would pull my hair so tight that she’d end up ripping hairs out of my head trying to get my kinky hair to behave. Then she’d drop me off at school on her way to the senior center every morning. My hair always looked amazing, and hers did too. If it was raining, she’d tie a plastic bag over her head to protect her do. Maybe most kids would have been embarrassed by their grandma walking around with a bag on her head. But I wasn’t. I just couldn’t be. Because that’s just who Grandma was, and I didn’t care who saw it.

  One of my friends at school was a girl named Jessica Hernandez. It was a crazy coincidence that she had the same last name as me—especially because she was Chinese. We were some of the few kids in our school who weren’t white. But we never really thought about it. The other kids in the class used to ask us if we were related. We would just giggle and shrug our shoulders. We couldn’t have looked more different, but we both loved playing hopscotch and running relay races. And that was really all that mattered.

  When I would come home from school or gymnastics practice, Grandma would be there cooking in the kitchen. She made a lot of her favorite foods from growing up on the island—things like rice, beans, chicken, or pork. To this day, her beans
are the only beans I have ever liked. I know, I know. I’m supposed to love beans—I’m Puerto Rican. But I never really liked beans too much. Except for when my grandma made them.

  If I didn’t eat all the food she served me, she’d get mad and ask me in Spanish when I was going to finish my plate. Then she’d get annoyed because she’d have to switch to English to ask me again—because I didn’t understand Spanish very well. It was so funny to me as a little girl to see someone so fired up about a clean plate. Some people might assume she was annoyed I liked American food more than Puerto Rican food. But it wasn’t that. She was just so practical that she didn’t like to see food go to waste. Especially not food she had cooked.

  She would always make me laugh with her persistence. She never, ever gave up when she wanted something. If she felt someone else was in the wrong, she would not rest until the other person agreed that she was right and they were wrong. In the kindest way possible, she cared about justice and righteousness. She was very persistent, aggressive, and strong. My dad and I have inherited some of her traits.

  My parents never talked much about her life. I knew that Brunilda Esther Hernandez had left Puerto Rico when she was a young woman. My dad used to say that she moved to New York for a better life. I knew her early years had been hard somehow, that she’d lost her husband before I was born and that she still had a lot of family back in Puerto Rico. But to me, Puerto Rico was a beautiful, magical vacation place I went to a few times, where I danced to the sound of the coqui and ate quenepas by the branchful like any other wide-eyed, salivating tourist. I might as well have been Jessica Hernandez on Luquillo Beach, digging for sand dollars and drinking Maltas. This was the place where Grandma was born, yes, but she never showed any sadness about being disconnected from it, and she never tried to make me feel guilty for not knowing enough about it. She just let me be me and enjoy my life in New Jersey. She let me see her as someone who was right at home wherever she was. She was a happy, funny, intense lady I loved so dearly, who made me horchata pops and tolerated my constant dancing and clowning around.

  She was always laughing with me. But when something would upset her she would curse in English—and only in English. Don’t get me wrong. She didn’t curse very often. She was a devout Catholic and hung crosses all over the house. But when she did feel upset enough to curse, it was going to be in English. Even if she was alone in her bedroom where no one else could hear, she’d switch to English to utter the bad word. The hilarious thing is that I didn’t really understand much Spanish, but I sure understood the English curse words my grandma was slinging around.

  If I could change anything about my truly wonderful, fortunate life, it would be to go back and speak Spanish with my grandma. I would love to learn to speak it better and would be so proud to be able to share that with her. I’m learning it right now even though I will never get to talk to her again. She passed away in 2016.

  The last time I saw her, I was standing next to her while she delivered a special message to me (in English) for the viewers of Dancing with the Stars. I was competing on the show, and as I made it further and further along in the competition, they wanted to show more about my family and give my grandma a chance to wish me luck. My family might have been more excited about seeing me on Dancing with the Stars than they were about seeing me on the Olympics. When you see footage of my mom and dad in the stands at the Olympics, they look pale, nervous, scared, and almost sick. It’s such a hard thing for a parent to watch their kid in that level of intense, global competition. Nobody can relax in that environment. But Dancing with the Stars was a whole lot easier to take in. I was dancing after all. And that was the Hernandez family’s thing! And Grandma couldn’t have been happier to see me on TV shaking what she (and God) gave me.

  When the camera crews first arrived to film her, she pretended like she didn’t want to be on TV. But as soon as they fixed her hair and made it look really amazing, she was immediately ready for her close-up. I’ll never forget what she said when the cameras were rolling:

  “Hi, Lauren, this is Grandma. I’m very, very proud of you, mamita. Continue doing the way you want it: fantastic. Okay, mama?”

  Continue doing the way you want it: fantastic.

  She said it so clearly in her less-than-perfect English. Be whoever you want to be. Do it your way. You are fantastic. Puerto Rican, American, Olympian, gymnast, Latina, dancer, goofball, Human Emoji, granddaughter, Lauren. She accepted me no matter what. And she brought our family to this country where we were allowed to follow our dreams, where we had room to dance!

  She died a few weeks after she filmed that interview for Dancing with the Stars. She didn’t even live long enough to see me win the mirrorball, but I think of her every time someone comes up to me and thanks me for being an inspiration to the Latino community. Or every time a group of excited Puerto Ricans crosses the street in a hilarious, loud frenzy to come tell me (while practically dancing on air): “HEY, LAURIE! WE’RE PUERTO RICAN!!! YOU’RE PUERTO RICAN TOO! WE’RE SO PROUD OF YOU!!” It’s like I have a big extended family everywhere I go, and I couldn’t be more honored.

  In the year after the Olympics I got more and more questions from journalists and gymnastics fans about how it felt to be representing Latinas. I have thought about the significance of it more and more. I am pretty grateful that it has never been hard to just be me—regardless of my heritage or my dreams of being an Olympic gymnast. Sometimes finances were pretty tight for my family, but we always had one another and it was never hard to be strong when you could lean on family. We were just a regular, tight-knit Puerto Rican family who loved dancing, eating pork and arroz con gandules, and who treasured family and faith.

  And I feel so lucky that I never even had to second-guess any of this. We live in such a diverse country. A little girl in America with the last name Hernandez can be Puerto Rican or Chinese. And gymnastics has been a mostly white sport in the past, but my Olympic team in 2016 was one of the most diverse in history. We had a Latina (me!), a Jewish gymnast, and two African-American gymnasts. Some kids have had to struggle to figure out how they fit in, who they are, or what their heritage means to them. But I’ve been so lucky to have the permission to be exactly who I am. To continue doing it the way I want. Nothing less or nothing more.

  The other day, a mom and her daughter came up to me in the airport and started talking to me about my hair.

  “Hi, Laurie . . . ? Excuse me . . . I know this might sound strange, but I just wanted to tell you thank you so much for never straightening your curly hair.” The mother smiled nervously.

  I immediately thought of my grandmother’s hands in my hair, pulling my insane curls through her fingers until she had created two perfectly placed poufballs on either side of my head.

  “My daughter has really curly hair like you,” she continued. “And I’m so glad she can see that a curly-haired Latina is out there in the world making history!”

  “Thank you,” I said. And I felt so proud. Then I paused and sent a big juicy emoji-face wink straight up to my grandma.

  Kal Penn is an actor, producer, and former Obama White House aide. He has appeared in a number of productions, including the Harold and Kumar franchise, The Namesake, How I Met Your Mother, and Designated Survivor. His first book is being released in 2019. Follow him @kalpenn for updates.

  Kal Penn

  THE FIRST TIME I rode on Air Force One, as we cleared the runway and climbed into the sky, I thought to myself, Well, this was all supposed to have been impossible. Then, I picked up the white unsecured phone next to my seat and called my parents. My folks are amazing. They had always borne the burden of my comical and ridiculous life choices. “We didn’t move to America for you to become an actor”—I remember them telling me in eighth grade, when I first expressed an interest in the arts as a potential profession—“but it’s a very nice hobby.” Impossible life choices had been a common thread all along.

  In middle school I was a huge nerd who got bullied (
before there was a name for this). By high school, I was petitioning the board of education to let me take multiple honors programs. We had a fantastic public high school district where I grew up in New Jersey, with both an international studies and a performing arts honors program; I applied and got accepted to both, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to attend both?! It certainly wasn’t my fault if the other kids didn’t want to apply themselves. My parents pay taxes too! The school board rejected my proposal on the grounds that it offered me an unfair advantage on my GPA (cry me a friggin’ river). They made me pick one.

  I picked performing arts. Not taking no entirely for an answer, I convinced the school board to let me wake up every day at 6:00 a.m. to go take AP history at another high school in a different town so that I could spend the middle of the day in my actual high school auditing a global history class that the cool, supportive young teacher Mr. Krais was in charge of. Then I’d go do the rest of my academic classes, including the honors performing arts ones. In high school, I was that kid. Insufferable at times but ignoring laughter from the bullies and rejecting the irritating answer adults best liked to use: “No, you can’t do that. That’s impossible.”

  By the time I got to college, I had heard impossible a lot more from adults. When I graduated and began many years as a struggling, aspiring actor, I heard it more than I thought possible. “This is impossible. You’ll never get cast. You’ll never get a job. There are no roles for Indian-American actors. Impossible!”

  This was very similar to what I was being told within the Indian-American community: “Don’t go into a career in the arts. You should have majored in something stable. Why are you doing this?” Why couldn’t I just be a doctor or engineer like Sadena Auntie’s kids?!I