How’s That American Dream Working Out? A Tale Of Passports And Heroes.

Quick, check the expiration date on your passport!

I nearly missed a much-anticipated trip because my passport was uncomfortably close to renewal. There was a happy ending to my adventures in the United States Passport Agency, but it was a close call.

Armed with the right travel credentials, I am once again free to go wherever budget and taste take me. Not so for so many other people, especially in these terrifying days of war and exile. Where will today’s flood of refugees have their next passports stamped? For those who escape to the United States, as my mother did at the end of World War II, will they still find the land of optimism and opportunity?

And that’s my question for the day: in the year 2022, how’s that American dream working out?

For the answer, I am drawn to the stories of the thirty new winners of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, all immigrants or children of immigrants whose experiences include war, crime, racism, violence, poverty, and political oppression. While they and their families would encounter plenty of hardships and struggles in their new homes, in the trajectory of the younger generation, we can find evidence that the American dream still works.

How did these extraordinary young people succeed?

Whether they are musicians, technologists, legal scholars, or M.D./Ph.D. students, whether they come from Asia, Africa, Europe, or Central and South America, their stories have some shared elements.

Yes, these young men and women have obvious intellectual gifts, matched with a fierce resilience. But to reveal and nurture their natural talents, and to overcome the inequities that cloud the American dream, they all needed heroes. Sometimes one individual, sometimes more than one, these heroes appeared at the right moments and performed feats that seemed almost magical.

I would like to highlight four of this year’s Fellows, whom I met as a member of the board of directors for the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation. Three of them are from the City University of New York (where I serve as University Professor) and one is from UC Berkeley. Together, they embody the transformative power of public higher education at all levels— community college, undergraduate institution, and doctoral education.

Tao Hong immigrated to the United States after postponing his dream of becoming a researcher and college professor to take care of his ailing mother. At 21, he learned English and began to study engineering at CUNY’s Queensborough Community College. With the help of supportive faculty, he began to publish in the field of nanoparticle synthesis, eventually transferring from community college to Cornell and then to Vanderbilt, where his Ph.D. research will someday accelerate and extend portable cancer diagnosis instrumentation to help patients like his mother.

Edward Friedman’s parents were Jewish refugees who immigrated separately to the United States with their families from Moscow and Kyiv. Born with cerebral palsy, Edward became a passionate disability justice advocate. He graduated from Macaulay Honors College at CUNY, and now is a student at Yale Law School, where he represents the law school on the Graduate & Professional Student Senate and provides a voice for students with disabilities.

Audrey Chen is the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants from Taichung. Through the support of her parents and a robust elementary school orchestra program, Audrey fell in love with the cello. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Audrey studied molecular and cellular biology while she continued her cello studies at the New England Conservatory, always focusing on how to foster connections through shared musical experiences. Audrey is currently pursuing her doctorate in musical arts at the CUNY Graduate Center and teaching at Hunter College.

Hari Srinivasan lost all his developmental milestones as a child. A mystery to his teachers, Hari was nearly doomed to a series of low expectation special education classrooms. But his parents, immigrants from India, saw another life for Hari. Deploying a combination of alternative communication technology and schools, Hari’s parents put him on another path. From a child who could not read or write, he graduated as valedictorian of his high school and went on to the highest academic honors at Berkeley, where he wrote over 50 articles on autism for the Daily Californian and worked for various psychology research labs. His Ph.D research will explore the emotions of awe and empathy in autistics.

How do you interview Hari in the Covid era? We gathered on a Zoom screen (as we did for all the applicants). We spoke our questions and Hari typed his answers on a Google doc. That became our shared space, using the Google doc’s quotidian functionality as the stage for a surprisingly intimate gathering of ideas and insights. Our flat screen selves came alive.

There was no divine intervention for any of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellows, but intervention there always was. Parents who refused to give up on a child born with seemingly intractable learning challenges. A professor who battled bureaucracy, another who opened the door to a lab and research. A religious leader who never lost faith in the future. A grandmother whose almost mythical struggles provided motivation and inspiration.

But lurking beyond these uplifting narratives is the cold reality that heroes are in short supply. There are just not enough of them to go around. Heroes who move mountains need a big supporting cast. And too many of them work in places that are under-resourced and overwhelmed. It is hard to look out for that one remarkable individual when there are thousands to be rescued.

So how do we get more heroes into our lives? To that end, I offer three dreams.

1. Be a hero yourself, inspire and support someone. (Already doing that? Pat yourself on the back!)
2. For policy-makers and administrators: reduce the friction in our systems that impedes progress. Commit to being a bureaucracy buster. When you see that the rules are strangling the life out of someone or something, don’t shrug it off. Bend them or break them or rewrite them.
3. For inventors and entrepreneurs: please create the smart machines and processes that can help free the heroes to take care of the magic.

And a final reminder — don’t forget to check the expiration date on your passport!