A Search for Belonging

Growing up in America with immigrant parents, you're often on your own navigating your future, and so institutions like elementary school become more than just places of study. They become agents of social advancement. One day, in fifth grade, someone came to class and told us about magnet schools, explaining that you could apply to study a particular subject at a particular school. Getting into the program was connected to the category you'd been assigned in tests you'd taken, and there was a mysterious point system that helped you get into this or that school.

I was put into the “gifted and talented” category and, taking the little booklet they gave us, read over all the different options for middle school. I decided I wanted to attend the 32nd Street School / University of Southern California Visual and Performing Arts Magnet and to become an actor. I got accepted, and I was sure that my move to America was connected with some greater fate. I needed to believe that all these difficulties were being endured for something. In reality, this was just the first in a series of desperate dashes to find a place within American society where I could feel not only safe but also that I was able to realize some of the gifts and talents that the Los Angeles Unified School District identified me as possessing. The sad fact is that I'd succeeded in merely getting myself out of one difficult reality into another. Because, as an immigrant kid with little context, I was guided mainly by a headful of fantasies, delusions of grandeur, and a hefty dose of ignorance.

Today, when I can reflect, I realize my many fantasies were part of an elaborate defense system erected to cope with the constant changes and bombardments of new realities I had to process and in which I had to function in real time. I developed some convictions that became deeply entrenched and that influenced the course of the rest of my life—some of which took decades to break down, and others that still influence my sen