by Kelly Yang
“Mom, c’mon, it’s time!” I called. She closed the math licensing exam book that she’d been reading nonstop and went into the bathroom to change. She came out wearing a bright pink sundress she’d bought on sale at Ross.
“You look beautiful,” my dad said. He marveled at her, standing proud and tall in his pair of black slacks, a crisp white shirt, and a gray sports jacket that he’d borrowed from Hank. My mom slipped her arm in his.
“You were right about the clearance rack,” my mom said to him with a smile. “There’s a lot of good stuff in there!”
Outside, there was a long line of cars waiting to pull into the Calivista. Most of the guests were gathered at the pool, mingling. I spotted Mr. Abayan, Auntie Ling, Mr. Bhagawati, and many of our other shareholders. Even Mrs. Welch was there! As my mom and dad went over to say hi to everyone, Lupe and I walked around with plates of dumplings.
“This is so nice!” the investors said, nodding at the walls we’d gotten freshly painted the week before.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around to see Mr. and Mrs. Yao.
“We were in the neighborhood,” Mr. Yao said to me. He waved at José, standing over at the grill next to Hank. José gave him a little wave back. Then Mr. Yao turned to Lupe. “I heard the news about your dad. I’m glad they let him stay. He was a good worker.”
“Your mom too,” Mrs. Yao added. She put a hand on Lupe’s arm. “I, uh … I owe you an apology.”
Mrs. Yao and Lupe went to find a quiet place to talk, leaving Mr. Yao and I standing alone by the pool. I offered him one of Jason’s dumplings. At first, Mr. Yao shook his head, but when I insisted he try it and bet him five dollars he’d like it, he popped one in his mouth.
“Mmm, these are tasty,” Mr. Yao agreed as he munched on the pot sticker. He reached for another one, but my plate was empty. I hollered at Jason to get his dad some more, and Jason grinned so hard, his cheeks dimpled.
As Mr. Yao waited for the dumplings, he gazed around at the pool and the rooms. I thought maybe he was a bit sad seeing his motel get turned into a hostel, but instead, he said, “Congratulations, Mia. Very well done.”
He held out his hand.
I can’t describe the feelings that coursed through me as I shook Mr. Yao’s hand. Why did it mean so much to me to finally hear him say that? After all this time, everything I’d been through, why did I still care what he thought? But I did. For some unexplainable reason, that day, as I took Mr. Yao’s hand and shook it, I felt myself come full circle as a manager.
The skin around his eyes stretched as he offered me a rare smile.
Just then I heard Hank’s voice calling across the pool. “Mia! Get over here! We’re ready to cut the ribbon!”
I turned to see Hank waving a big pair of golden scissors.
“Excuse me,” I said to Mr. Yao, then walked over to the front office and joined Hank, Lupe, José, my parents, and the weeklies.
As Lupe held out the red ribbon and Jason lifted up the bow, I cut it with the golden scissors. The entire motel erupted in cheers.
“To the new Calivista!”
Lupe, Jason, and I threw our arms around one another, our laughter jingling like three keys on a ring.
I was ten years old when Proposition 187 passed. That year, I watched in horror as the advertisements blasted on television and my Latino friends hung their heads in shame, huddled in the back of the classroom. The boy who died, Julio Cano,1 was just two years older than me and lived in the same town.
I remember as a child watching my best friends—many of whom were Mexican and came from blended families—worry about whether they and their family members would be next. The anger and vitriol directed at illegal immigration was everywhere, this explosive rage that you could feel when you walked down the street. In school, kids would point and whisper whenever a child who wasn’t white walked past, speculating whether they were illegal—their voices soft at first, and then louder and louder as it got closer to the election.
And then on that Election Day in 1994, I remember watching as people cheered when it was announced that Proposition 187 had passed—60 to 40.2 The knowledge that that many Californians voted to not allow innocent children to go to school made me sick to my stomach. It was a permanent and irreversible slap across the face to me and every immigrant I knew.
Later that year, we moved to Chula Vista, California, a border town, just eight miles from Mexico. I made friends with many other fellow immigrant children and witnessed the traumatizing effects of Prop 187 on their families, the lingering fear and worry and anxiety of the provisions, even as Prop 187 was being legally challenged.
I carried these memories with me for many, many years, until one day, I was sitting in a political science class in college. The professor was a man from TV that I recognized—Governor Pete Wilson’s campaign spokesman, Dan Schnur. I was taking a class with one of the masterminds of Wilson’s campaign. That semester, the distress and frustration of my childhood all came flooding back as I listened to the strategy behind the pain I had witnessed.3 To get through the course, I reminded myself it was in the past. Prop 187 had been struck down by the courts. We’d moved on. No candidate in the future would ever try to pull something like that again.
I was wrong.
In the summer of 2015, I watched as presidential candidate Donald Trump got on TV and blasted Mexicans as criminals. It was like déjà vu—the same anger, hate, and vitriol, a punch from the past, a page directly out of Wilson’s playbook. Like Wilson, Trump rode that anger all the way to victory. In the years that followed, President Trump separated immigrant children from their parents at the border. The number of deportations of undocumented immigrants with no prior criminal records has tripled under Trump.4
This time, I knew I had to write about it.
In my research for this story, I visited an immigration detention jail, spoke at length to immigration lawyers, interviewed families, and conducted extensive research on the 1994 election, including the sharp increase in hate crimes in the months before and after Proposition 187 passed. Every single one of the hate crimes depicted in this novel actually happened during this period in California history. According to 1990 census data, one in four California residents were Latino.5 In the eleven months following the passage of Prop 187, there were thousands of instances of harassment and rights abuses committed against Latinos in Southern California. The Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations recorded a 24 percent increase in hate crimes against Latinos in 1994 and 1995. Among them, many Latinos were turned away from banks, refused service, told to “go back to where you come from,” and forced to show their money before ordering in restaurants. Latinos in North Hollywood were asked by bus drivers to pay more than non-Latino riders—often double the regular fare—and asked to sit at the back of the bus. An apartment manager of a Van Nuys apartment building told a Latina woman—a citizen—that she and her children could not use the pool after 6:00 p.m., because those hours were for “whites only.” A Los Angeles woman was viciously bitten by a dog, and when she asked the owner to help with the medical bill, he responded, “Illegals have no right to medical care, Pete Wilson said so.” In October 1994, an Inglewood police officer arrived at the home of a legal permanent resident and drew his weapon because he said her stereo was on too loud. He threatened to deport her to Mexico if he ever had to come back.6
In schools, teachers assigned students to write essays about their parents’ immigration status.7 After Proposition 187 passed, in addition to Julio Cano dying, some hospitals and clinics reported a sharp decline in patients. In the weeks and months after Prop 187 passed, there were also reports that some of the estimated 300,000 to 400,000 undocumented children in California schools were not going to school.8
In addition to quantitative research, I also conducted qualitative research. I spent time in the Central Valley interviewing blended and undocumented families, migrant workers, and field workers, to better understand what it is like to be un
documented. These families welcomed me into their lives and bravely shared their struggles. They took me to the fields where they picked fruit in the blistering heat. I tried to pick the fruit too; within minutes, my fingers bled from the thorns and my eyes stung from sweat and the pesticides in the air. This was their life, day in and day out. I met with their children. Over tamales and burritos, they shared their challenges with me. I listened to girls so smart and kind, any institution would be lucky to have them, yet they didn’t qualify for financial aid. Their futures are a wild unknown, all because their parents chose to escape what were often critical conditions in their hometowns in the hopes of providing their children with more opportunities in life.
I also spent time discussing Lupe’s story with the policy experts and leading immigration attorneys at the Criminal Justice Reform Program at Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco. They shared with me the reality that undocumented immigrants face today, which, as painful and hard as Prop 187 was, is even tougher now. Since President Trump took office, immigration arrests have gone up by 40 percent, at a rate of almost four hundred people a day.9 All across the nation, families are being ripped apart. President Trump recently announced he was rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, leaving the estimated 700,000 undocumented immigrant children in limbo, and possibly in danger of deportation.10
And while Lupe’s dad, José, got a temporary stay, the immigration laws changed in 1996 such that it is significantly harder, almost impossible, for an undocumented person to gain legal status other than through marriage. Today, if Lupe’s dad went before an immigration judge with the same set of circumstances, most likely he would be denied.
There are the notable cases where due to grassroots and community organization, deportations get postponed or canceled, such as the case of Javier Flores Garcia.11 But they are the exception, not the norm. By not giving hardworking immigrants with no criminal convictions a realistic path to citizenship, undocumented immigrants are left fending for themselves in the dark, vulnerable to exploitation, abuse, misinformation, and hopelessness. My biggest hope in writing this book is that it will give people a better understanding of the circumstances facing undocumented immigrants so that we can enact better policy. Not just hot-button propositions to win elections, but laws that embody the vision and core values of our country.
1. Lee Romney and Julie Marquis, “Activists Cite Boy’s Death as First Prop. 187 Casualty,” Los Angeles Times, November 23, 1994, http://articles.latimes.com/1994-11-23/news/mn-689_1_illegal-immigrant-parents.
2. David E. Early and Josh Richman, “Twenty Years After Prop. 187, Attitudes Toward Illegal Immigration Have Changed Dramatically in California,” Mercury News, November 22, 2014, http://www.mercurynews.com/2014/11/22/twenty-years-after-prop-187-attitudes-toward-illegal-immigration-have-changed-dramatically-in-california.
3. Dan Schnur described the strategy behind the 1994 Pete Wilson Campaign at the Institute of Governmental Studies conference on the 1994 Gubernatorial Election, a transcript of which was published in California Votes: The 1994 Governor’s Race: An Inside Look at the Candidates and Their Campaigns by the People Who Managed Them, edited by Gerald Lubenow (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies Press, 1995).
4. Rogue Planas and Elise Foley, “Deportations of Noncriminals Rise as ICE Casts Wider Net,” HuffPost, updated January 9, 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-immigration-deportation-noncriminals_us_5a25dfc8e4b07324e8401714.
5. Mark Baldassare, A California State of Mind: The Conflicted Voter in a Changing World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 151.
6. Nancy Cervantes, Sasha Khokha, and Bobbie Murray, “Hate Unleashed: Los Angeles in the Aftermath of Proposition 187,” Chicana/o Latina/o Law Review 17, no. 1 (1995), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1p41v152.
7. Daniel B. Wood, “California’s Prop. 187 Puts Illegal Immigrants on Edge,” Christian Science Monitor, November 22, 1994, https://www.csmonitor.com/1994/1122/22021.html.
8. “Prop. 187 Approved in California,” Migration News 1, no. 11 (December 1994), https://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/more.php?id=492.
9. Laurie Goodstein, “Immigrant Shielded From Deportation by Philadelphia Church Walks Free,” New York Times, October 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/us/sanctuary-church-immigration-philadelphia.html?referer=https://t.co/T1OYHWcyJg?amp=1.
10. Catherine E. Shoichet, Susannah Cullinane, and Tal Kopan, “US Immigration: DACA and Dreamers Explained,” CNN.com, updated October 26, 2017, http://edition.cnn.com/2017/09/04/politics/daca-dreamers-immigration-program/index.html.
11. Goodstein, “Immigrant Shielded from Deportation.”
Read on for a sample chapter of Front Desk!
My parents told me that America would be this amazing place where we could live in a house with a dog, do whatever we want, and eat hamburgers till we were red in the face. So far, the only part of that we’ve achieved is the hamburger part, but I was still holding out hope. And the hamburgers here are pretty good.
The most incredible burger I’ve ever had was at the Houston space center last summer. We weren’t planning on eating there—everybody knows museum food is fifty thousand times more expensive than outside food. But one whiff of the sizzling bacon as we passed by the café and my knees wobbled. My parents must have heard the howls of my stomach, because the next thing I knew, my mother was rummaging through her purse for coins.
We only had enough money for one hamburger, so we had to share. But, man, what a burger. It was a mile high with real bacon and mayonnaise and pickles!
My mom likes to tease that I devoured the whole thing in one gulp, leaving the two of them only a couple of crumbs. I’d like to think I gave them more than that.
The other thing that was great about that space center was the free air conditioning. We were living in our car that summer, which sounds like a lot of fun but actually wasn’t, because our car’s AC was busted. So after the burger, my dad parked himself in front of the vent and stayed there the entire rest of the time. It was like he was trying to turn his fingers into Popsicles.
My mom and I bounced from exhibit to exhibit instead. I could barely keep up with her. She was an engineer back in China, so she loves math and rockets. She oohed and aahed over this module and that module. I wished my cousin Shen could have been there. He loves rockets too.
When we got to the photo booth, my mother’s face lit up. The booth took a picture of you and made it look like you were a real astronaut in space. I went first. I put my head where the cardboard cutout was and smiled when the guy said, “Cheese.” When it was my mom’s turn to take her photo, I thought it would be funny to jump into her shot. The result was a picture of her in an astronaut suit, hovering over Earth, and me standing right next to her in my flip-flops, doing bunny ears with my fingers.
My mother’s face crumpled when she saw her picture. She pleaded with the guy to let her take another one, but he said, “No can do. One picture per person.” For a second, I thought she was going to cry.
We still have the picture. Every time I look at it, I wish I could go back in time. If I could do it all over again, I would not photobomb my mom’s picture. And I’d give her more of my burger. Not the whole thing but definitely some more bites.
At the end of that summer, my dad got a job as an assistant fryer at a Chinese restaurant in California. That meant we didn’t have to live in our car anymore and we could move into a small one-bedroom apartment. It also meant my dad brought home fried rice from work every day. But sometimes, he’d also bring back big ol’ blisters all up and down his arm. He said they were just allergies. But I didn’t think so. I think he got them from frying food all day long in the sizzling wok.
My mom got a job in the front of the restaurant as a waitress. Everybody liked her, and she got great tips. She even managed to convince the boss to let me go with her to the restaurant after school, since there was nobody to look after me.
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My mother’s boss was a wrinkly white-haired Chinese man who reeked of garlic and didn’t believe in wasting anything—not cooking oil, not toilet paper, and certainly not free labor.
“You think you can handle waitressing, kid?” he asked me.
“Yes, sir!” I said. Excitement pulsated in my ear. My first job! I was determined not to let him down.
There was just one problem—I was only nine then and needed two hands just to hold one dish steady. The other waitresses managed five plates at a time. Some didn’t even need hands—they could balance a plate on their shoulder.
When the dinner rush came, I too loaded up my carrying tray with five dishes. Big mistake. As my small back gave in to the mountainous weight, all my dishes came crashing down. Hot soup splashed onto customers, and fried prawns went flying across the restaurant.
I was fired on the spot and so was my mother. No amount of begging or promising to do the dishes for the next gazillion years would change the owner’s mind. The whole way home, I fought tears in my eyes.
I thought of my three cousins back home. None of them had ever gotten fired before. Like me, they were only children as well. In China, every child is an only child, ever since the government decided all families are allowed only one. Since none of us had siblings, we were our siblings. Leaving them was the hardest part about leaving China.
I didn’t want my mom to see me cry in the car, but eventually that night, she heard me. She came into my room and sat on my bed. “Hey, it’s okay,” she said in Chinese, hugging me tight. “It’s not your fault.”
She wiped a tear from my cheek. Through the thin walls, I could hear the sounds of husbands and wives bickering and babies wailing from the neighboring apartments, each one as cramped as ours.
“Mom,” I asked her, “why did we come here? Why did we come to America?” I repeated.