How to Get U.S. Citizenship and the American Dream
When I was 8 years old, I found hidden in a drawer a little, brown book. It was a well-worn copy of, "How to Get U.S. Citizenship," which my mother had used to prepare for her U.S. citizenship exam. When I asked her about it, she explained that it was one of the items packed into her small suitcase along with a few articles of carefully selected clothing, photographs, and jewelry that would be the only things that would remind her of the life she had lived in Korea. As I glanced through the pages, I thought about my mother as a young woman dreaming of a life in America - a place where she believed the streets were lined with gold.
In 1973, my mother, alone and without knowing a word of English, left all that was familiar to her for a life in the United States. She joined my father who had emigrated years earlier with his sister, the wife of an American GI. Her friends and family told her she was bound for an easy life where she would live in a big, American house. Caring for her children would be her primary concern. But when she arrived, she settled into a cramped, 3-bedroom house in Westland, Michigan with my father, his mother, his brother, sister-in-law and their young daughter.
After my brother and I were born, it became apparent that my father’s low-wage job in a warehouse would not support our family of four, so mom decided to look for work. Despite her very limited English, she was hired to work on the assembly line at General Motors and became our household’s primary wage earner. Her job eventually allowed us to move out of Westland and into a nice, middle class neighborhood with good schools. Her work was difficult, but life was definitely taking an upswing. About 7 years in, Mom was laid off from GM and was forced to take odd jobs in Chinese restaurants or flea market jewelry shops in Detroit. At times, Mom held two or three jobs at a time, just to keep us afloat. She worked hard to ensure we could remain in that middle class lifestyle. Mom scrimped and saved to make sure her two children had enough to eat, decent clothes, and the opportunity to attend universities to pursue careers that would ensure they’d never have to work as hard as she did. General Motors called mom back after a few years. One of her jobs was a welder on the night shift. Her tired 5 foot 4 frame would come home smelling of exhaust. And her shirts were covered in tiny holes from stray sparks. Though it was difficult work, she never complained. Instead she regularly encouraged us to do well in school so we’d never have to work so hard as she did. Mom ended up working for almost 30 years and is now enjoying a much needed retirement.
The significance of this little book is that it is an important bookend to the immigration story of my family to the United States. When she arrived, mom was full of great expectations for herself, but having found the reality of life much different than expected, she modified her dreams to encompass something more tangible. In 1978 she applied for and received her U.S. citizenship. One of the annotated pages in this little book pertains to why she, the applicant, wanted to obtain US citizenship? Mom underlined this answer, “I wish to work for the benefit of this country and to protect the happiness of our children.” If you’d ask her today, my mom would proudly affirm that she had achieved the American dream-a better life for herself and for her family. It allowed her the ability to have an American dream for her children to attend college and live securely in the comfort that they could provide for their families. Achieving this was our way of being able to honor our mom’s hard work and sacrifice.
C.H. Kang
How to Get U.S. Citizenship (2nd Edition)
1973-present
Teresa Kim, History teacher in Vista, California
citizenship-american-dream
Darkest Before the Dawn
Due to the oil and gas industry plummeting in 2016, my dad lost his job that he had for over 30 years, right before I was about to leave for college. I couldn’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of guilt and anxiety for the duration of that summer. In addition to this, I was unhealthily dwelling on all the new transitions that were to shortly come. Having to live on my own, find a new group of friends, and ultimately, adjust to the course load that university was going to demand of me were all weighing heavy on my mind.
I was mindlessly listening to music one night when a particular lyric caught my attention. “It’s always darkest before the dawn,” from Florence + the Machine’s “Shake It Out” quickly resonated with me upon hearing it. Hearing these words at this time of my life helped me realize that just because things seem difficult and unbearable at the time, it doesn’t mean that they will always be that way. Hearing the right string of words at the right moment can have a profound effect and I am thankful that the Humanities celebrates such moments.
Florence + the Machine
"Shake It Out" by Florence + the Machine
Summer 2016
Natalie Huebel, 22 years old and a student at Texas A&M University.
darkest-before-the-dawn
Haunted by Homer’s Sirens
This particular poem helped me to think about a challenge that I was facing in a different way, and helped me try to bring some sense to it. It was a catalyst to help me focus on the present and the “now,” and the worries that come with all of the things that you can’t control, in the future and the past, need to be chased out.
<p>About seven months ago, our son was in a tragic ski accident, and was in a coma for close to a month. And during that really painful time, we didn’t know what was going to happen. Was he ever going to wake up? Was he not going to wake up?</p>
<p>I, myself, couldn’t sleep and I was haunted all the time by thoughts of what might happen to him in the future, and how did this happen, and thinking about the past. And I remember thinking in one of those late-night moments about “The Odyssey” and about the description of the sirens on the banks. Of Odysseus asking to be tied to the mast, and having beeswax in his sailors’ ears, and realizing I had these kind of spirits that were haunting me.</p>
<p>In that context, I remember thinking very directly, “I know what those sirens are. I know what that’s about.” I didn’t know before then what—at least for me—that poem was saying. And at that moment, I realized the sirens were really from the future and from the past, and that in dealing with this situation with our son—the only way to deal with this—was by staying very much in the present.</p>
Homer
The Odyssey
Kevin Guthrie, founder/president, ITHAKA
kevin-guthrie-homers-sirens
My Front Porch Looking In
Music helped transform my understanding of the world. There is a song for any emotion and the song can either exacerbate an existing emotion or help change the way you are feeling. It can cheer you up or allow you to wallow in whatever you are feeling but at the end of the day the fact that music can make you feel something is where its power comes from.
I was around seven years old. My dad and I were in the car when the song came on. "My Front Porch Looking In" by the band Lonestar was my favorite song and I knew every word. I loved singing the song at the top of my lungs every time it came on. Today though, I stayed quiet. I had just witnessed yet another argument between my parents and my dad had taken me for a drive around town to cool off. He looked over at me with a confused expression when he saw I wasn't singing. All of a sudden he started singing the song as loud as possible and started to sway back and forth. He smiled and nudged my arm and soon enough I was grinning and singing along. This was the first time that music helped me to cope with a difficult situation. Since that day, I have turned to music as a sort of therapy to help me get through any rough time and the power of music has never failed me.
Music helped transform my understanding of the world. There is a song for any emotion and the song can either exacerbate an existing emotion or help change the way you are feeling. It can cheer you up or allow you to wallow in whatever you are feeling but at the end of the day the fact that music can make you feel something is where its power comes from.
Lonestar
"My Front Porch Looking In" by Lonestar
2005
Zachary Fine, 19, Student
my-front-porch-looking-in
Letter from My Grandfather
Ina Dixon explains how a letter from her grandfather to her grandmother, written just before the Battle of the Bulge in WWII, reconnects her to her grandfather and the hardships he suffered at the time.
A family letter written during World War II
Ina Dixon, History United
letter-from-my-grandfather
The Day My Interest in Race in America Was Born
In this video submission, Ken Burns recounts how formative experiences, both deeply personal and as a young person growing up in the midst of the Civil Rights era, have shaped his perspective on American history and have informed nearly all his documentary projects.
Trying to make sense of his own individual story within the nation’s collective reckoning with race, Burns reflects on how “we human beings seek always to find some frame to understand things.” The humanities, he continues, facilitate our finding “some meaning in it all precisely because of our inevitable mortality.” He believes that the work of history, particularly biography, helps us to organize our stories, and perhaps even to divine “the way that human beings are.” Whether unsettling or inspirational, history always proves useful.
1963
Ken Burns, documentary filmmaker
ken-burns-race-in-america
Fathers and Sons
In this video, Scott Gartlan discusses his reaction to seeing Arthur Miller’s 1947 play <em>All My Sons </em>and seeing deep connections between the play’s narrative and his own life story. He goes on to reflect on the power of storytelling to bridge generations and personal circumstances.<br /><br />Witnessing the performance of Miller’s play was a “flashbulb moment” that deepened Gartlan’s appreciation of “what art can do in representing life.”
A performance of Arthur Miller's play <em>All My Sons</em>
Scott Gartlan, Executive Director, Charlotte Teachers Institute
fathers-sons
Placing Our Family in the Story of America
<p>Actor John Cho shares how the humanities reveal answers to the most important questions in life. He notes his fondness of reading and how, during his childhood, the <em>Little House on the Prairie</em> books helped him process and understand his family’s place in America.</p>
<p>To celebrate its 40th year anniversary of grant making, programming, and partnerships that connect Californians to each other, California Humanities invited a group of 40 prominent Californians to explore what the humanities mean to them. For more information visit <a title="California Humanities: We Are the Humanities" href="http://calhum.org/about/we-are-the-humanities" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">California Humanities: We Are the Humanities</a>.</p>
<em>Little House on the Prairie</em> by Laura Ingalls Wilder
California Humanities
John Cho, actor
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms">Standard YouTube License</a>
john-cho-little-house-on-the-prairie
Executive Order 9066
<p>Actor, author, director, and activist George Takei recalls his family’s resilience and ability to find joy, beauty, and love in simple treasures while imprisoned in Japanese internment camps in the 1940s. He notes that the humanities remind us that we are better than war and destruction and together are capable of bettering society.</p>
<p>To celebrate its 40th year anniversary of grant making, programming, and partnerships that connect Californians to each other, California Humanities invited a group of 40 prominent Californians to explore what the humanities mean to them. For more information visit <a href="http://calhum.org/about/we-are-the-humanities" title="California Humanities: We Are the Humanities" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">California Humanities: We Are the Humanities</a>.</p>
George Takei, actor, author, director, activist
george-takei-executive-order-9066
The Currency of Emotional Intelligence
<p>Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye is the 28th Chief Justice of the State of California. She recalls her experiences as a student in a humanities class in college, her upbringing in a Filipino community of hardworking women eager to pass on their traditions, and her realization that the humanities teach us to celebrate and respect the stories and uniqueness of people.</p>
<p>To celebrate its 40th year anniversary of grant making, programming, and partnerships that connect Californians to each other, California Humanities invited a group of 40 prominent Californians to explore what the humanities mean to them. For more information visit <a title="California Humanities: We Are the Humanities" href="http://calhum.org/about/we-are-the-humanities" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">California Humanities: We Are the Humanities</a>.</p>
Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye, 28th Chief Justice of the State of California
tani-gorre-cantil-sakauye
This Couldn’t Happen to Me
This past year my aunt, my mother’s sister, passed away very young at age 45. Her passing devastated me and my family. The thought that kept entering my head was there’s no way this could happen to me. Tragedies, catastrophes, and other huge losses have never affected me so directly. <br /><br />Then, in one of my English classes we began to read a book <em>Beyond Katrina</em>, which detailed the destruction of Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Reading about these people who lost so many family members so suddenly and so young just broke my heart in ways I had never understood until now. The same thought was most likely going through their heads, this can’t be happening to me. <br /><br />It was at this time that I realized that we really are all in this together. Death and loss is a tragic thing, but it brings people so much closer and that is the most human thing I have ever felt. It was so beautifully sad.
<em>Beyond Katrina</em> by Natasha Trethewey
April 2018
Madison Forrest, 18, student
this-couldnt-happen-to-me
A Personal Perspective on Journalism in the 20th Century
Betty Debnam created and edited <a href="http://cdn.lib.unc.edu/dc/minipage/">the Mini Page</a>, a nationally syndicated newspaper supplement that ran from 1969 to 2007. Inducted into the <a href="https://library.unc.edu/2018/04/40629/">North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame</a> in 1999, her journalistic efforts introduced children to forms of news and ignited their curiosity. In this Humanities Moment, Debnam reflects on both her familial ties to the industry and her vision for civic engagement through literacy.
Betty Debnam, journalist and founder of the Mini Page
personal-perspective-journalism-20th-century
Neruda and the Shimmering Lives of Lifeless Things
Reflecting on growing up as a clumsy child with two rambunctious brothers, two phrases immediately come to mind, burnt into my memory like a brand from their ceaseless repetition: "make your bed" and "they're only things." One of these ("make your bed") never failed to inspire in me a blood-boiling rage of the Sisyphean sort: after all, what was the point of making your bed if you were just going to unmake it a scant twelve hours later? The other ("they’re only things") was less affectively charged, but the well-meaning platitude applied like a balm by my mother after this or that was broken never seemed to sit right. I understood the moral sentiment, which underscored the relative importance of social relations over material goods. Yet, while I lacked the language to articulate it, it never seemed fair to cast some of these goods as inert, inherently meaningless "things." Scraggly blankets, favourite markers, even the contours of secret nooks tucked away in the crevices of the basement: these beloved things seemed to occupy some special, understated liminal space between person and mere object, between meaningful language and the absolutely mute. <br /><br />Reading Pablo Neruda’s <em>Odes to Common Things</em> was the first time that I found myself experiencing that electric connection between self and materiality through the mind of someone else—through the eyes of a poet. For Neruda, the life of a chair invokes a rich ecosystem. It is not a utilitarian object, easily cast aside and replaced with another: it is a dynamic actor in a vibrant and distinctive jungle lifescape of sounds, smells, stories, and—ultimately—symbolism. Soap, not just a cleansing agent, is the "pure delight" of ephemeral fragrance as it sinuously winds its way through the world, impressing itself on us. And all of these things, taken together, constitute more than an inert backdrop for human life: as Neruda says, "they were so alive with me/ that they lived half my life/ and will die half my death." It is Neruda's appreciation for the vitality at the heart of the seemingly mundane, the shimmering lives of lifeless things, that I try to channel whenever I am trying to philosophically express our place in the world and all of its unexpected dimensions—or trying to come to grips with the loss of a favourite coffee mug.
Pablo Neruda's Odes to Common Things
Approximately 2014
Sarah (Sadie) Warren, 31, PhD Candidate, Instructor, and Digital Scholarship Associate
neruda-and-shimmering-lives-of-lifeless-things
<em>A Touch of Green</em>
While doing research in Nanjing, the capital city of Jiangsu province in China, I made a visit to a local neighborhood called Dafang Lane. There's no famous tourist spot here, but I was drawn to it by a Taiwanese TV series that I watched years ago -- <em>A Touch of Green</em>. <br /><br /><em>A Touch of Green</em> is a 2015 TV series that is based on a novella of the same name by Pai Hsien-Yung, a phenomenal Chinese writer. The story unfolds the life of three Republic of China Air Force pilots and their wives from the Chinese Civil War period (1945-1949) to the White Terror period (1949 to 1987) in Taiwan. The story is not an ode to China's revolutionary past, but rather to the tumultuous and miserable lives of ordinary Chinese people who left their homeland and migrated to a new island after the KMT lost the Civil War in 1949. It is not centered on the bravery of the pilots or the strength of their wives. Instead, the drama portrays their anxiety and weariness over the war, their helplessness when confronting fate and history, and their grief over their loved ones' deaths. It touched me because it transcends macro-historical frameworks and narrates the bond, love, pain, and survival hardship of an ordinary group of people. <br /><br />In the original novella, Dafang Lane is the military dependents’ village where the wives of the pilots resided. The old buildings still exist today, and there is a brief introduction on the wall explaining that they were constructed in the 1930s and are now protected historical sites in Nanjing. I walked around Dafang Lane, as if I was walking down the memory lane of modern Chinese history. The dripping sound of life echoed here, as I imagined how the wives of the pilots anxiously awaited their husbands' safe landing or their deaths. For me, the Dafang Lane is not just a place; it's also a humanities moment that intertwines the TV drama, the novella, and the untold history of a group of pilots and their families.
<em>A Touch of Green </em>(television series and novella by Pai Hsien-Yung)
May 2021
Jinghong Zhang, 26, history Ph.D. student
touch-of-green
Sounds of a Thing in Indiana
The following text is a transcript of the above recording.
My name is Daun Fields, I’m a punk singer and a Ph.D. student at the University of Florida. I’m 42 and this is my Humanities Moment.
So, my humanities object is the Fisher Price tape recorder. It’s a brown, chunky, hard plastic kid’s tape recorder from the 80’s. It was manufactured by Fisher Price from 1981-1987. The space in which it existed in my life was in the very back room of a (four room) single-wide trailer in southern Indiana, Franklin, Indiana, in a bustling trailer park. The back room of the trailer was my younger sister Jessie and my bedroom. We had a bunk bed, the walls were stacked with board games and dressers and toys, and in the corner of that room was a taxidermied barn owl. Which was illegal to have in the state at that time and I think still is. At that time that’s what that space looked like. This tape recorder, I suppose I chose it because it was the first time that I ever heard my own voice projected back to me and I was probably 7, or maybe 7 or 8 years old around that time.
The reason I chose this object is because, looking back, in that moment when I first heard my voice back to me, I realized that there was a lot of the world and sounds in the world and words that people said and sounds that came out of humans that I could save. That I could stop, and rewind, and listen back to them. So instead of always kind of replaying things in my mind, which I did as a child, being musically inclined from a really young age, hearing songs and being able to sing the words right back and sing the melodies right back and always kind of having songs in my head and singing out loud and humming and being really focused on sound and melody and the way that people talked; the volume at which they talked or the pitch at which they talked or the music playing in the grocery store and things like that...this tape recorder was such a big thing. It was just such a big thing in my life.
One of the things my sister and I would do is we would record ourselves playing cards. So we would play Slapjack or we would play GoFish and all these card games that were really exciting that would just get us laughin’. We would record ourselves playing those games and then record ourselves laughing. One of the interesting--I think maybe a better word--important or more profound reasons this tape recorder was so, just, I guess so powerful for me, is because I would record things and it wouldn’t necessarily be like I would record now as an adult. How I would record vocals or background sounds that you would want to edit out or you would want to filter and compress and get everything sounding really perfect, or the pitch, or the autotune. It really was just, you would hit record, and any sounds going on around the area would also pick up. So it was more just a full soundscape. Looking back, it really reminds me of how much is always happening. That it may not just be this one singer singing this song or this one person speaking. But there’s all of this other life that’s happening all around.
I would record my sister and I laughing or playing cards. Sometimes when my mom and dad would be fighting a couple of rooms up in the front of the trailer My sister and I would get really quiet and get behind the door and we would record them. And I would have these fights that I would have on tape and I would listen back to them. I’d listen back to them and I would hear my mom, who was very quiet normally, her voice would be very deep and she would be really loud. And sometimes the fights would go on for a long time and eventually I didn’t want to listen to those again so I would stop, rewind, and then I would go maybe into a different space. I would go outside, or I would go to my grandma’s house where it was really quiet, in a big brick farmhouse that was about two miles from the trailer park--really close--surrounded by nature, surrounded by cornfields, and I would record the cats in the barn. I would record the dog or I would record myself kind of singing along with the creek or my sister and I singing a song we learned in church, at the Baptist church down the street.
When I would listen back to these recordings, I was just listening. I wasn’t listening to find mistakes, I wasn’t listening with notes or ideas on how to improve the next time. And that object itself, that chunky, hard plastic, brown, corduroy brown, corduroy 1980’s brown, two-toned tape recorder, it really shifted me. It helped me to hear myself. It helped me to, I suppose, understand that I was a thing, just like the bird that I recorded or the cat that I recorded, or the humans that I recorded--that I was also a thing. That I had sound to contribute. And I had things to sing.
Fisher-Price Tape Recorder
1986
Daun Fields, 42, Punk Singer, Ph.D. Student in English, University of Florida
sound-of-a-thing-indiana