Liuan’s story – her mother’s sacrifice for the next generation
In many ways, Liuan Chen Huska is a relatively typical citizen of her community: she and her husband Matt live in Wheaton, Illinois. They both graduated recently from Wheaton College, and they are active members at the Church of the Resurrection in Glen Ellyn. What not everyone knows about Liuan is that her family has been splintered up by our country’s broken immigration system. Read her story below.
After Mother’s Day brunch has long passed, perhaps it is still fitting to chew on the meaning of motherhood and sacrifice.
That my mother sacrificed for her children is an understatement. My family emigrated from China to America when I was three. Many years later, when my family was in the process of applying for green cards through my dad’s employer, he divorced my mom. No longer “qualified” to remain in the U.S., as she was no longer part of our family in the eyes of the government, my mom had to move back to China, or stay in the States “illegally”. Would she mother me from across an ocean or remain without papers here so she could be present throughout my growing-up years?
From a mother’s perspective, the answer was clear. Her child had grown up in America. The opportunity for me to live here was the driving force behind her leaving behind her homeland and old life in the first place. Would any mother not stay to see her daughter through adolescence to adulthood and support her in living out her dreams in a new country?
My mother stayed in the U.S. and ended up starting her own Chinese restaurant, where she created jobs for citizens. She married my stepdad and they have two young children who are U.S. citizens. My stepdad came into the country undocumented in the first place, and his immigration situation is a whole other story. In 2008, after they spent nearly 10 years of building a life together in America, the Department of Homeland Security abruptly arrived at their door one morning and detained my stepdad, leaving my mother to run the family restaurant and caring for their children. They both had deportation orders.
Today, my stepdad has been deported back to China, after spending nine months in an immigration jail. My mother is still here, because she clings tenaciously to the dream to raise her two young children in America and give them the same opportunities that I had. She has been waiting 15 months for a court decision on her appeal to reopen her immigration case.
Many would ask my mother, Why are you still here? Why stay in this limbo stage of irresolution and shadow when you’re not even sure you’ll be allowed to stay? Why not go back to your own country and your husband and forget the American dream?
These are questions she has wrestled with over and over. I don’t know what I would do if I were in my mother’s position. Yet, if you ask her, she will say, “Because of the children.” She cannot bear to uproot them from their life, their schools, their friends. In China, they would be struggling for the remainder of their educational career to catch up with their peers and adjust to a culture and language that is foreign to them. They are U.S. citizens. Here, they are at the top of their class, and the path toward college and a bright future is relatively clear.
So, instead of putting her children through the struggle, my mother herself struggles – to raise her kids by herself, to support the household with the odd jobs she can patch together since she still cannot work legally, to sustain a life in America where her children can freely pursue their dreams.
Many in our day misunderstand or criticize the first-generation immigrant struggle, which puts the well-being of the next generation before its own. Why would you live your whole life working yourself to the bone for your kids’ future when you could live a comfortable life in your own country? You’re not even supposed to be in this country! Yet, is that not a mother’s instinct, to give everything for her children’s good?
Today, the malfunctioning immigration system looms large and controversial on the national agenda. Hard decisions have to be made that will affect not only the economy and public life, but also the 1100 families ripped apart by deportation everyday. We would all do well to take a closer look at the issues (not to mention the people) at stake – as descendants of immigrants, and as mothers, fathers, and children ourselves.
