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When you told your uncle that you wanted a fresh start, he didn’t ask questions. He knew that you and your fiancé had broken up, and he knew that you’d had some trouble while you were in law school, but he told you that he didn’t want to know the details. He’s one of your favorite uncles, and he knows how complicated and suffocating the rest of your family can be. He had been trying to get you to move to the States since you’d entered law school. “You can work for me when you graduate,” he’d said, months before you learned that you’d flunked out. “You’re going to one of the best institutions in the country, there’s an ordinance here that says graduates of your school are allowed to take the New York Bar if you make a particular grade. And while you’re studying for it, you can intern at my office. I know you want to do your part there, but I tell you, that rotten system will kill you from the inside with its graft and inefficiency. Just give this place a try for a couple of months. Maybe you’ll change your mind after you get a better feel for the legal system here. It’s tidier to navigate, and it’s a lot less corrupt than it is there.” Except you’d stuck to your proverbial guns and said that you wanted to carve out your own life.
He’d paid for your undergrad tuition, and even though you know that he would have simply seen it as his family duty, the complicated intersection of tradition, Western values, and economic reality that you and your generation inhabit make you uncomfortable about accepting handouts. You have nothing useful or material to contribute to the family at this point, and all the American TV and Western literature you’ve watched and read fill you with a rebellious, pressing need to be profoundly, publicly yourself, on your own terms. It clashes with everything you know about being a good child. You imagine that your parents’ generation had doubtless never felt that need with such intensity. And after everything you’ve already tried and failed to become, you don’t want to deal with that kind of guilt.
Now though, you contact him again. You have run out of options and all you want –all you need- is to leave and never return. He calls you on Skype and his pixilated face looks kind, but washed out in the indoor light. “Your mother didn’t tell you?” he says, “I’m retiring.”
And you understand. The life of an immigrant is hard. Your uncle is lucky. He got in legally, and he’s carved out a good life there, despite all of the cultural and physical incongruities a foreigner needs to negotiate with American life --that familiar, unshakable sense that you would never quite belong. Your cousin, his son, just completed his specialization at St. Luke’s, and he’s capable of taking care of himself. He’s living in a two-room in the Bronx, and he’d started sending dollars and care packages home shortly after he started his residency. Your parents and uncles and aunts love talking about how he’s a big-shot doctor in New York. You envy him enough to almost resent him, but after all of the summers you’d spent together being stupid and young, you know the pressure he’s had to deal with: to be good. You know that he knows how you feel, even if he will probably never understand your regret.
Your uncle tells you about how excited he is about getting all his affairs in order so he can take his retirement and set about opening a little farm resort in a property he’d acquired in the mountains near your family home. He’s wrapping up his part in his law practice, getting ready to pass it on to his partners. They’re scaling down, he tells you, and they can’t afford to hire anyone new.
“There’s a new firm down in Clinton though. Students of mine from when I’d done that lecturing stint at Columbia Law. Good kids. They’re looking for a legal researcher. If you want, I can ask them if the position’s still open.”