Author: Wendian Wang
Once a salesman came and tried to convince us to install solar panels.
Because my uncle was planning on buying an electric car for his son and a solar panel would provide enough electricity, my uncle was happy to install one. Almost all of our Chinese neighbors already have solar panels, and they talk about how it saves so much money, but my aunt didn’t agree with her husband. Sounding very determined, she turned down the salesman’s promotion; “we don’t need solar panels. We don’t want to get into trouble”.
By “trouble”, she meant communicating with the salesman and filling out the complicated forms that would be troublesome for a family who doesn’t speak English. However, the salesman indicated that he could speak a little bit of Chinese because he used to stay in China for two years. Thus, my aunt was delighted to accept his promotion; she invited him to the garden, and of course, chatted with him in Chinese.
However, later I was asked to help my aunt translate. I soon discovered that the salesman’s Chinese fluency was only good enough for him to greet in Chinese, but not to negotiate a business treaty. Whenever my aunt started to ask for more specific information on the installation of the solar panel, the salesman started to stumble and fail to answer any questions. They were both frustrated.
After the salesman left, I researched the solar energy company where the salesman came from and sent my aunt a “solar panel customer protection manual”. My intention was to provide more information, but my aunt grew more concerned: she started to worry that the company could be a fraud, and that she had signed some “dangerous” documents without knowing their content at all. She even started to blame herself for putting the entire family into “trouble” because workers would be coming tomorrow to measure our roof for solar panel installation. She could barely understand the government policy on solar panels, or read the bills from energy companies, or trust any other energy companies on the internet. Finally, she asked me to text the salesman to cancel all the documents she possibly signed. She wanted me to tell the salesman that we don’t need solar panels any more. She said, “if we’re now in China, I could communicate with the salesman, or even with the company. But here, in the United States, I could only say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to whatever he said.” The fear and the helplessness were real, showing that even if the solar energy company isn’t a fraud, it was hard for an immigrant family to enjoy the services that an ordinary American family enjoys. If solar panels represent a high quality life, my aunt’s family struggles to achieve it due to language and cultural barriers, even though they earn enough money to survive.
It’s hard to say whether immigrants are living their promising dream life in America, since even small things in life, such as solar panels, bother them a lot.
While they are earning enough money, they are not getting their desired jobs. A lot of immigrant families around me are real estate developers and white-collar workers in China, but they could only work as hourly workers or uber drivers in America because of language barriers. Although hourly workers and uber drivers are not inferior jobs, many people don’t show much respect to them. Surely, one can support a family by working as an hourly worker or as an uber driver, but how are they treated by others in the workplace? Are they targeted for their skin color? Are they discriminated against because of their jobs? Are they happy? One can be aware of all the situations mentioned above, but still determined to go to America, just for the possibility that maybe, maybe one day they can live a better life in America.
UCLA Anthropology and Asian American Studies Professor Kyeyoung Park once said in an interview in SAPINES, an Anthropology magazine, "class and race are very important dimensions to understand inequality in the U.S., but they can’t explain everything. Neither does economics. Just because you make more money doesn’t mean you have a higher status in the United States. Another key dimension is the politics of citizenship". Maybe economically, Asian Americans and immigrants are in a better position than other minorities, but socially, culturally and politically, they are seen as perpetual outsiders who find it hard to blend into American cultures.