The American Dream: A cliché?
Part 1
Dear reader, I know that clichés turn you off. So, I am going to throw a lot of clichés at you right up front, right now:
America was, and still is, a land of opportunity. When you go to USA from a foreign country, the residents may not like your skin color or your accent, or your native customs or your lack of “culture”, but you can work or start your business if you qualify. When you work , you can acquire more skills, make more money and save money and then make some more. You can branch out in your business and explore new sources of income. It is really as simple as that. To an industrious soul, whether native or foreign-born, America does not disappoint.
Okay, that’s enough for now.
That being said, there are clearly two generations of migrants to USA from Asian countries. Take for example, South Korea. The older generations fled a war –ravaged, corrupt country in the 60’s and 70’s. If you meet them, they are older folks now, you will be amazed at their simplicity, thrift and sometimes, severe cynicism. Until about ten years ago, I would often see Korean couples in their sixties, wearing crumpled clothes, shopping fervently at the cheapest discount store for generic poor quality grocery items., then driving away in their old battered car. If you follow them around, you would have discovered that they owned like ten apartments as well as a successful business or worked as research scientists with million dollar grants. The American society made them uncomfortable, the future made them paranoid, they stumbled through life with penury and humility.
Compare this with the recent immigrants from South Korea. The first things you will notice are their appearance and attire. Yes, the couture is remarkable because they do wear $400 jeans and carry Louis Vutton handbags on their informal days. And men wear pimp overcoats that cost maybe thousand dollars instead of a $40 ski parka worn by their predecessors. And I have been to some parties with Korean men, with rare aged single malt (which I drank) and 500 dollar hookers (which I could not afford!)
These folks left Korea in the 1990’s or later when it was already out of the poverty trap and on its way to becoming an affluent society. These migrants work hard but they spend their money and have no humility complex whatsoever.
It’s kind of the same for Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore as well.
For India, after the economy opened up in the 90’s , it was possible for bright students to migrate to get a Masters degree in any tech related fields or in finance (as opposed to only Ph.D. programs in hard sciences) – they either financed themselves or got scholarships for the Masters programs, none of which was possible twenty years prior to the 90’s. With the advent of new technology, these folks grabbed the American dream and hit it way out of the ballpark. Forget a million dollars of lifetime assets, people in top tech companies get paid several million dollars every year! In Wall Street, some of these Indian venture capitalists and traders are worth a billion dollars.
Even today, multinational companies hire the top students right out of IIT or the Business Schools and put them on a high pressure track that would get them many millions down the road. If you heard of Satya Nadella, or Sundar Pichai, or venture capitalist Vinod Khosla or a little older rogue Rajat Gupta, you know the kind of wealth I am talking about. The second and the third tier of these new migrants are still doing very well, I have met some whose annual incomes are between five to ten times my decent professor’s salary in USA. Some of them are like the Korean new immigrants, some more balanced.
But I am not talking about these migrants in this blog.
We migrated in the 70’s and the eighties for either Ph.D.’s in hard sciences or in Economics, or as licensed medical professionals.. We left a sorry state of abject poverty and social and political disarray in India where job opportunities were very few even for the talented people. I can expound on how wretched living conditions were then, but no, that will be more clichés or non-credible babble from an oldtimer.
Mainly we were academics or bureaucrats or medical professionals. We mostly did good, some of us are famous for our research or other accomplishments. We made good money, although nowhere near the new immigrants. People are different, so some of us are obnoxious NRI’s , some others are like the older Korean immigrants.
Even in the land of opportunity, lives of men and women are not linear. We are not money-making robots. The pitfalls on the way to riches are well known, and in America they are more intense. There are drugs, gambling, alcohol, and con artists. Trust me, the temptations rain on you harder here than in other countries. Then femme fatales and the magnificent crooks appear once you are successful . Then there are men and women who get bumped by serious relationship problems or domestic abuse.
And luck, of course, the old lady luck sometimes destroys a perfectly good life and sometimes rescues a sinking soul.
So the stories I tell are of ordinary people with not so ordinary lives. I lived in USA for forty years, so some of the lives I talk about span several decades.
From Vietnam to Kansas
In the late eighties, a couple came to Lawrence, Kansas from Vietnam – don’t ask me how they ended up in this small university town in the middle of the country, but they did grow up in Vietnam. Their English was awful, it was hard to understand them. They had no marketable skills, they would not get a job in a factory or an office because of the language barrier.
They rented one small room in a strip shopping mall with a kitchen at the back and opened up the “Golden Dragon” –simple Chinese food, American style. No ambiance, a few chairs and tables.
At that time , there were quite a few Chinese restaurants in town, they were engaged in a bitter “buffet battle”. Everyone of them offered a huge Chinese buffet with ordinary, inexpensive dishes . This was a battle of attrition where everyone lost money for a while, the battle continued off and on for the next twenty years or so.
Vince and Nancy (their American names) stayed away from buffets and stuck to simple Chinese combos that cost a little bit more than a combo meal at McDonalds. Food was tasty, although I found it rather bland. People with small appetites or small budgets liked it a lot. Each of them worked for about fourteen hours every day and raised two daughters at the same time.
The couple started their day early – they were at the restaurant by 9:30 in the morning after picking up their supplies from different stores in the city. The lunch crowd was crazy, started from around eleven am.
Everyday, 3pm to 5pm was dead slow in the restaurant, The lunch crowd was gone, the kitchen was getting ready with dinner prep. By mid-nineties, they have rented an adjacent room and expanded their space by putting in a few booths. I remember Nancy going home around 3pm and bringing her little daughters to the restaurant. She would chop veggies or make dumplings sitting in a booth while talking or playing with her young daughters. This was her only chance to spend quality time with them. Soon, she would send the daughters home and start working again, going home around 11 pm when the daughters were fast asleep. A few years later the daughters would also help their mom- this was their bonding activity, not Disneyworld vacations, not watching movies, not even road trips with mom and dad – just stripping string beans, shredding carrots and stuffing mixtures into dumpling dough. Both parents worked both in the kitchen and at the counter, they would cook and serve food and scrub floors and toilets if needed, seven days a week, every day of the year. The number of employees expanded from zero to about five over the years
Things improved gradually and consistently. The Golden Dragon statues appeared on the wall with other Chinese adornments, a liquor license was obtained (beer only with food orders, no hard drinking and no fighting) , the menu kept expanding to include more fancy Chinese food.
After ten years or so, more remarkable marketing strategies were implemented. One person, then two, were hired for home delivery only. Several large TV’s were put up on the walls. The booths became more fancy, the walls had glass paneling. And yes, free WiFi.
Their menu kept on expanding, culminating in a grand coup – a Chinese language supplementary menu without English translation. This one had the real Asian stuff – Chinese hot pot, Vietnamese Pho, Thai meat dishes with fish oil, and all the good stuff that Americans will never order. The Chinese menu was available on request, the staff will translate for you if you asked (with some disdain)!
The place became a favorite hangout for Asian students, both foreign-born and first generation. They did not like the standard American bar food like chicken wings and mozzarella sticks. This was their favorite sports bar with Asian appetizers!
Also, some of us non-Chinese people went there regularly and had Vietnamese Pho for lunch ( an excellent noodle soup with lots of meat and veggies). I also sampled some other stuff too from the Chinese menu.
The Golden Dragon took off. It did roaring business for a few years. Ultimately, as their fortunes grew, the couple split up, although amicably.
Nancy, in her mid-fifties the last time I saw her around 2015, still looks good. Her skin glows, her hair is perfect – I suspect weekly visits to a fancy spa and a beauty salon – I think she deserves it!! She drives a brand new Mercedes and wears diamond earrings, and owns a couple of houses besides her own. She still works about ten hours a day in the restaurant – and yes, cooks and cleans herself if needed. The daughters are going to college. Every evening , one of the daughters works at the cash counter. Every summer, both the daughters work at cash and serve food for two and a half months. This is their permanent part-time job, which , knowing Nancy, is unpaid except for a small allowance. These young women didn’t get too much time to socialize and party unlike their non-Asian friends, but I always found them happy and smiling. By now they have graduated from college and flown out of the nest, I am sure.
Vince has a brand new trophy wife ( why else would you get divorced in your middle age?), and a child from her. His own car is a lipstick-red Jaguar convertible. He has sold his share of the Golden Dragon to Nancy and opened a real upscale Asian restaurant. The prices are fancy, but you can sample Chinese, Japanese , Vietnamese and Korean food – high quality, big on ambiance, and of course hard on your wallet. Instead of unskilled people that Nancy employs at her place, Vince now hires polished professional servers. Every evening , he shows up to supervise, dressed impeccably in a suit and a tie. I have eaten here several times and was very impressed .
The problem, of course, is that Lawrence is a small town. With a population of only about 100K including university students, a gourmet eatery will not get enough customers . I predict trouble in the future. Recently, I heard that Vince has sold the restaurant and opened another one in nearby Kansas City which has about one million residents. That would have been a better choice for upscale Chinese places. I hope he is doing well.
No, Vince and Nancy did not become multi-millionaires or anything like that (may be each has about a million dollars worth of assets as of now). But each of them came a long way, penniless from Vietnam, from four plastic tables and sixteen chairs in a bare room and a large plastic jug for iced tea on the cash counter. Hard work and some great business decisions – that’s all it took to turn their life around.
Da Man
Manohar Raamlagan was from Guyana. His great grandfather migrated from India to Guyana to work on a plantation. His grandfather owned a small business and sent his kids to college. His dad had a Master’s degree in mathematics. He was no scholar, but good enough to migrate to USA on a relative’s sponsorship. He worked as a Math teacher in a two year college in a big city. Not affluent, but comfortable.
Manohar, (nicknamed Da Man) was a typical first generation American kid when I met him in the nineties. He was an economics major, slightly better than an average student, very polite and soft spoken. He was ready to find a job in the US corporate world after graduating. We chatted often about India which was his ancestral land that he and his forefathers had never seen.
About three years after he graduated and left, he was back in my office, bitter and disillusioned!
It took me a while to find out the full story. Apparently the electric utility company that he worked for as a junior executive made a lot of profit in one year. Three million dollars were given to the Research and Development (R&D) department as a tax write-off. As he was a part of the R&D department, he encountered firsthand a classic example of corporate greed and wastage. For one year he witnessed the senior people doing “research ” by buying extremely high-risk energy options and derivatives. It was research on “new trading strategies” – it was actually extremely high-risk gambling with fancy financial assets. The research meetings were mainly organized in nice and expensive bars with lots of fancy food and alcohol and sometimes female companionship – all on company money. The bets paid off nicely at first, resulting in an additional one million dollars of profit, but more high risk options were bought immediately. The outcome was as expected. When all was said and done, after deducting all the “business expenses”, about 20000 dollars were left of the three million dollars. Nobody got fired or even censured, it was “R&D” – too bad it did not work out- this was excess profits anyways, What ticked off Da Man was that they could have given the three million to charity if nobody wanted to do any serious research with the money Heck, they could have spent 500K on their business meetings and still given away 2.5 million. But hey, this is corporate capitalism, they could show their money was spent on valuable energy research and that’s what counts!!
Well, Da Man recoiled from this revolting ugly capitalism, and vowed never to work again for a private firm or the government. Easier said than done, right! He has kept his promise!
No, he does not steal or sell drugs for a living! He carved out a niche as a volunteer for numerous environmental or spiritual non-profit institutions. He started out making only his expenses, but after about twenty years gets enough money as an elite and experienced volunteer to support himself. Boy, he has had a lifetime of exotic jobs.
Building sustainable housing for tribes in the jungles of Peru. Teaching schoolchildren in the rainforest of Ecuador. Growing organic veggies in an expensive resort in a remote forest in Oregon for spiritual healing ( the guests pay a lot, he gets to live for free, and gets all the spiritual cleansing for free was well!). A cornucopia of priceless experiences.
He does not work regularly, maybe a few months in a year when projects become available. He has no job security. He is financially poor and will remain so for the rest of his life. He shares an apartment with two other people and lives in boring small towns where rents are low. He could never afford a new car. He can never get married and have children unless he finds a rich woman who shares her soul and her assets with him. His standard of living is below American poverty line.
He is in his mid-forties now with a grey beard and a happy smile. Very relaxed. Possibly with some choice weed!!
Well, I consider Da Man’s life to be a roaring success! He did not like the system, he said to hell with it, yet the society gave him enough opportunities to pursue his ideals. The capitalist society took away his opportunity to be affluent, but he is otherwise immensely rich! I have been fortunate enough to be a friend of Da Man over the years.
I want to write about remarkable lives of ordinary people. This was the first installment. More will come later.
Ciao!!