I watch as my aunt washes out single-serve yogurt containers and stacks them neatly in her cupboard. Peering over my writing, I observe as she chops spring onion for our dinner, collecting the leftover root stubs to bury in a dirt tray she keeps in the front entryway, already thick with new shoots.
I pull open the unfamiliar cupboards in search of a mug and find bags within bags of plastic bags, neatly washed and folded. There is an instinct in me to scorn the unnecessary frugality of it all, for they have long since been able to afford fresh vegetables whenever, and there might be 50 yogurt containers that will reside in the cupboard, never to be repurposed.
My aunt laughs, perhaps to excuse herself. “很土” she smiles sheepishly (translation: unsophisticated, backward). In that moment I stare at her hands — red and cracked from years of hard work.
In that moment, I think of how terribly backward I have it all. Because if anything is unsophisticated, it must be my problems, the kind that feel urgent and all-consuming within the walls of a place like Duke, yet fade to insignificance in the face of real hardship.
On campus, some of the most discussed issues revolve around our next summer internship and the relentless chase for prestige. Success is something to be optimized, every moment a stepping stone toward a future defined by LinkedIn updates and industry placements. It’s a world where we agonize over interview prep and networking strategies as if our lives depend on them. And as we all know, this life isn’t easy.
But this life — my comfortable, structured, well-supported life — is incomparably easy compared to what my aunt, my mother and my father went through.
When my aunt was my age, she volunteered to be sent to the Chinese countryside under Mao’s policies, taking her older brother’s place so he wouldn’t have to go. He was the family’s “darling boy,” and she, being the eldest girl, 12 years older than my mom, was expected to sacrifice. She doesn’t talk much about the grueling labor, earning just 64 yuan (an equivalent of 17.87 USD converted for purchasing power parity) in an entire year, or how she found a way to leverage the system of rewarding laborers by studying agriculture and earning a degree.
My aunt doesn’t seem to mind that once she arrived in America, she gave up a position as an adjunct professor to be closer to home — working as a parking attendant. When I ask her why she’s so nonchalant about the sacrifice, she laughs again and tells me that working in the countryside was the hardest thing she’s ever done, and no other tragedy will ever compare.
Like her, my parents also knew what it meant to start over with nothing — not even the comfort of language, familiarity or safety.
When my dad was 13, he and my grandmother fled Soviet-controlled Poland. He spent time in a refugee camp in Italy before finally making it to Canada, where he worked to put himself through college, eventually earning a master’s degree in mathematics.
When my mother was 21, she left China with two suitcases, realizing that neither the law nor journalism she had studied could change the system around her. At 21, she re-entered high school, learning English, just to give herself a fighting chance in college. I daresay her English is better than mine, and I’ve grown up speaking it.
It is so easy to forget that those who came here with nothing, not even language, have had it a hundred times harder than I will ever have it. My struggles are real, but they are relative. I have the privilege of worrying about which path I will take, not whether I will have one at all.
I can’t help but reflect on how narrow my definition of personal success has been. All my role models have done great things: built careers, led organizations and changed industries. But I can think of nothing greater than surviving some of the hardest working conditions, escaping, and somehow, against all odds, building a life for yourself and your family. That is courage. That is perseverance. That is a kind of success no résumé bullet point will ever capture.
Take a walk through the city. The world isn’t just held together by people with degrees from top 25 universities. It’s held together by those who labor unseen. The parents who work blue-collar jobs to raise their children. Our lovely WU hospitality workers who work three jobs and attend community college. The amateur musician playing saxophone in a dimly lit bar. The artist who paints murals in the back of alleyways because they believe in creating beauty even when no one is watching.
At Duke, we are taught to maximize every opportunity, to optimize our time, to view success as something that can be neatly packaged into a résumé. And sometimes we make the mistake of trying to fit all of our success into that one page, although it is so much more than that. We should recognize that the privilege of caring about our CVs, the privilege of choice, is one that few ever get to have.
Before we chase the next great thing, we should take a moment to reflect on the people who got us here. The ones who gave up everything, their careers, their homes, their countries, so that we could sit in lecture halls and debate what success even means.
Maybe that means calling your parents. Asking them about the stories they don’t have a chance to tell. Maybe that means going to see your elders in Minnesota during spring break while you still can.
That reminds me — I’m going to go call my grandma now.
Annie Ming Kowalik is a Pratt sophomore and a visiting international student from the University of New South Wales. Her column, "The Tasmanian devil: An Aussie's experience in Americana," typically runs on alternate Mondays.
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