Story submitteD by: Nisreen Hasib
Noor Hasib
Photo: Noor & Nisreen Hasib
When I went to Egypt in 2008 for a study abroad program, I didn’t tell my mother I was there until about a week after I settled in. In all honesty, I had forgotten to tell her I made plans to be in Egypt.
I’ve thought a lot about that initial conversation with my mother over the past decade and a half. Lately, when I’ve thought of that conversation, another image comes up for me. It is of my mother at the age of twenty-five.
My mother was the only member of her family to immigrate to the United States. She had grown up in a kampung in Kuching, Malaysia. Before going to school each day, she and her siblings would tap rubber trees. She still has the scars on her hands. My grandmother and grandfather did not have a phone in their home. When she got to California, she would use calling cards to call one of her brothers that did have a phone.
Before coming to the United States, my mother and her siblings had continued to build on my grandfather’s legacy. He left China as an orphan and immigrated to Malaysia. My mother was born right around when Malaysia became an independent nation, and many of my uncles and aunts would work in the government and newly established companies in the country.
As the second youngest, my mother was not pressured to go into a traditional career. She became a writer. She was a dreamer, and so it was no surprise to anyone when she left Malaysia to build a new life in the United States.
I try to imagine what it must have been like to be here in the 1980s. Now, it is too easy to get in touch with people if you have a smartphone. What must it have been like to start building a life before we carried supercomputers in our pockets that allow us to instantly connect with our family at home, to translate weird words we don’t understand, and to find members of our home country to show us the ropes in a new one?
Life was not easy for the three and a half decades my mother has been in the United States. After getting divorced, she became a single mother to seven children, who she provided for as the sole breadwinner. She moved the entire family from California to the East Coast, doing the work to rebuild community in yet another new place. She put up with a daughter who developed a habit of taking off to new countries without telling her.
Immigrants are dreamers with grit. It is because of the legacy of immigration in my family that I know I can do anything I imagine. My family brought their dreams to life by taking advantage of every sliver of opportunity and luck that came their way. I could not be prouder of where I come from, and the stories and dreams that made me who I am.
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