HOW I GOT TO SOCIOLOGY

Neither/Nor

I grew up in one of the most diverse cities on Earth in one of the most diverse school systems in the U.S. - the LA Unified School District in sunny Los Angeles, California. My mom was a recent immigrant from Indonesia and my dad, a descendant of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, was a transplant from New York. We were a symbol of the ethnic richness of our surroundings. And yet, I always felt like an outsider because there were so few biracial kids in my schools. In fact, I was bullied for being mixed from my earliest days in elementary school. I was taught to think of myself as neither Asian nor White, neither Indo nor Cali. My race made me an orphan in my own country.

I also suffered from another kind of dissonance, a kind of class-based dissonance. My apartment building housed immigrants from every continent. The one thing we shared in common was being poor. But thanks to bussing and redistricting, my schools were always in affluent neighborhoods. So I was always comparing myself to others who had more, and I was always coming up short.

You see, like the many immigrants in my building, my neighborhood, and my town, my mom came here highly educated yet young and without a college degree. Even if she had had one, it wouldn’t have been accepted in this country. So, despite all her skill and talent, her work options were limited to menial labor and low-level office work, and she worked long hours almost every day of the year to struggle to make ends meet. My dad, who had come from a family of education and means, had developed a life-threatening drug addiction in high school and just barely made it through college. By the time I was born, he was in and out of jail, on and off the streets, living a life of crime. Though my parents loved me with all they had, I felt like I just didn’t belong. I couldn’t locate us in the American Dream.

Not Alone

This dissonance taught me a couple things. Instead of seeing myself as entitled to the comforts of community, culture, and all things good in life, I learned that I would have to piece out my own way forward. I would have to make a new script for myself with my own narrative. I knew firsthand that aspects of our identity that seemed to be so intrinsic to us, like our race, and social statuses that were supposed to be so basic, like our class, were not as clear-cut as they seemed. I had to learn more.

I also came to see that, though I couldn’t claim an identity or access a community like my peers could, I almost always had something in common with the people I met. I learned that I was not alone in being poor or second-generation, and I was not alone in being confused. I was definitely not alone in feeling like the American Dream was corrupted if not plain corrupt. I began looking for others who, like me, felt like they were in freefall, kids who felt like they were always slipping through the cracks. In high school, I began developing a sense of justice and equity for all of us who didn’t fit, and a personal ethos in which I would strive to make our stories known.

Dreaming with Sociology

My world was so big and yet so small at the same time, something evident in my college applications which were focused on just a handful of public schools in my state. I remember how anxious I was when I learned that the $40 application fee, which was already a serious burden for my mom, was for each of the Universities of California and not all of them. I also remember the relief I felt when I got into two of the five with full scholarships—UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley. Berkeley had me waitlisted for Spring and I simply could not wait. I had to get out and get started on building my dream.

I entered school at UC Santa Cruz as an International Studies major. I told the school that I wanted to use my binationality to chart a new politics for immigrants in America, but what I really wanted most was to open up opportunities for me to work outside the U.S. Visiting my family in Indonesia, finally as an adult and not just a tagalong kid, helped me see how trapped I had been in my American mindset. I wanted to broaden my mentality and set myself up for a better life than what I could access here in the U.S.

I didn’t end up going that distance. Thanks to an introductory Sociology course on social justice and race in America that I took Freshman Year, my revolution in circumstances and mentality happened right here at home. I began seeing that I was living in a system that was set against the well-being of not only me but also the vast majority of America’s inhabitants. And this system was actually part of an unequal global order where the injustices were not limited to the halls of this country. Running away was no longer an option for me. I had to know more so I could change the system, so I could subvert the order, and flip the script. I looked at the college catalog with fresh eyes and got to work charting a new path for myself, dreaming a new dream of justice and equity for all, using Sociology as my guide.