I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir

“Why is she so brown!?! Where are her blue eyes like her daddy? Oh well…I’ll call her ‘brownie’!”

Gharib is conditioned by her family to strive for whiteness, which is conflated with Americanness. According to this logic, having darker shades of brown skin takes one further away from whiteness and thus further away from being a “true” American. This is an example of colorism, in which dark-skinned people of color are more severely discriminated against than light-skinned people of color. Using hyperbole, or exaggerated language, Gharib depicts how her father laments the fact that the infant Gharib does not have features that approximate whiteness.

“They were on their way to the…American Dream! And to my parents that meant: A big house with a white picket fence! A two car garage! Credit cards! Luxury handbags! Enough money to send back home to the parents! A Mercedes Benz or a Lexus! Annual trips to Disney World! Ralph Lauren Polo shirts for the whole family! Kids that were American—

but not too American.”

Gharib’s parents’ idea of the American Dream is built around material goods. These goods, like a two-car garage and white picket fence, conjure the image of a white suburban family. Gharib qualifies that the list represents the American Dream “to my parents.” Gharib herself resists defining the American Dream. Gharib uses exclamations for exaggeration and to convey sarcasm and contempt: The American dream that her parents envision is so far from what many people can actually achieve.

“Even though I was just a kid, I could see that my parents were struggling. When I was six, my mom had Min Min. Her dad may have been Filipino and mine Egyptian, but we were sisters all the same. Nanay helped out a lot and took care of us. Mom worked two jobs, seven days a week, on Thanksgiving and Christmas, to pay for private school…private tutors…and a basic middle-class life.”

Gharib’s mother left a lucrative upper-class life and career in the Philippines for a much busier, labor-intensive pair of jobs to give her family a life in America. This exemplifies a phenomenon in which many first-generation immigrants are given jobs they are over-qualified for.

“I knew that everything I had was because of my mom’s sacrifices. So I tried to work hard, too. I tried to live up to the virtues of…the perfect Filipino kid!”

Gharib thinks that she needs to repay her mom’s sacrifices. She depicts a common first-generation American experience, wherein parents project their expectations of what one can achieve in America onto their children. While Gharib willingly works hard for her mother’s sake, she shows how this dynamic can put stress on the shoulders of first-generation American children.

“Fortunately, it was easy to be Filipino-American in Cerritos, the town in Southern California where I grew up. Most kids at my elementary school were just like me.

‘Yuck, cold siopao* for lunch!’

‘Ugh, me too.’

*Pork buns. They’re cool now, but not so much back then.”

Gharib doesn’t have the experience that some first-generation Americans have of attending a primarily white high school and having white students mock her cultural foods; many students at Cerritos High were also Filipino and ate similar foods in their own families. She briefly addresses the cultural appropriation of food; non-Western foods are discovered by white people and subsequently become cool or trendy, when before those same foods may have been mocked.

“Out of respect for my parents, I tried to follow their faiths. I prayed with my dad. I prayed with my mom. And just like religion meant something to them, it meant something to me, too. I loved the forgiveness, peace, and mercy of the Virgin Mary. I felt like I could tell her all my secrets. I loved the greatness and absoluteness of Allah. Knowing there was no God but Him was comforting. I loved that Mohammed was just a messenger of God. To me he was a symbol of humility and selflessness. I loved the pomp and circumstance of Catholicism. I felt like I was a part of something.”

Gharib has an easier time blending her parents’ cultural and religious practices together as a child, without the added judgment of peers. She creates her own interfaith practice that blends aspects of Islam and Catholicism. As she grows up and learns more about how people perceive her, blending her cultures becomes more difficult. She uses repetition, repeating “I” at the beginning of many sentences for emphasis. Her sentences, short and declarative, slow the pacing down, encouraging the reader to linger on her meaning.

“Dad was very proud that he had an American daughter.

‘She’s half American!!!’

‘…And Filipino.’

He loved dressing us up in clothes with American flags on it.

‘She lives by Disneyland!’

But I didn’t really feel like a ‘real American.’ I had a round, brown face. I was in Egypt…? I had a weird name. I loved Spam. I spoke English with a Tagalog accent. Basically, I felt like a giant, Spam-eating FOB*!

*Someone who is ‘fresh off the boat.’”

Gharib’s father ignores the Filipino parts of her ancestry, telling his friends in Egypt that she is “half-American.” Even though he has moved back to Egypt, he displaces his American Dream on to her. Both equate Americanness with whiteness; this makes her father proud, but Gharib feels that, because she is brown, she is less American than her father claims.

“I learned a lot from my stepmom, Hala, too. She taught me how to be a woman. Unlike my mom, Hala understood my thick, curly hair and showed me how to tame it. We baked cakes and cooked together. She bought me my first pair of heels (silver, white, and baby blue platforms), and taught me to walk in them. Kind of. She was there when I got my first period. She taught me how to belly dance (although I never really ‘got’ it). She was the first person I ever smoked a cigarette with. She showed me how to wax my mustache.”

Hala has an important place in Gharib’s life. She teaches her about Egyptian womanhood. Gharib’s thick, curly hair texture is different than her Filipino mother’s hair, and it is Hala that teaches her how to care for it. She tries to teach Gharib the social customs that women in their culture usually know. Their time together in the summer together is limited, but Gharib remains grateful to her for her instruction. Gharib uses repetition, beginning multiple sentences with “She,” to emphasize how important Hala is to her. This also creates a sense of accumulation with all the things that Hala teaches her.

“I also witnessed extreme poverty. In Egypt, some families were so poor that they sent their children to work. We once had a 12-year-old maid named Negla. She did housework, laundry, and chores while I just played. She ate in the kitchen, on ‘special’ plates. I never forgot that; I never forgot her. I remember asking her if she wanted to draw with me, but she couldn’t even write her name. It was so unfair.”

Gharib shows how the social system in Egypt is very different than in the United States. While both countries have social striation and poverty, these issues are extremely visible in Egypt. Someone living in a middle-class area like Gharib might never see the most extreme effects of displacement, lack of education, and poverty in the United States, which is concentrated in different areas. In Egypt, Gharib experiences different and more visible class and gender disparity. She is aghast that her family’s pre-teen maid does not even know how to write her name. Though Gharib does not extrapolate on her observations, Negla’s “special plates” are meant to keep her from eating off the nicer dishes that the family uses for themselves. Gharib uses repetition again for emphasis and to create a sense of lyricism—“I never forgot.

“When I was about 20, a bunch of my Egyptian-American friends and I went to Alexandria to attend our friend Sally’s wedding. Some of those friends had only been to Egypt a handful of times. But they seemed to know everything about being Egyptian. They knew how to zaghrat—make a ‘lolololololo’ sound with their mouths, for the bride…and how to belly dance. They knew what to wear to the wedding. And most of all, they knew how to speak Arabic beautifully.”

Only in retrospect does Gharib realize that seeing poverty and unrest around Egypt doesn’t make her a “true Egyptian.” In comparing herself with friends who know Arabic language and customs, she struggles with Cultural Isolation and Assimilation. She assumes that not knowing Arabic and other customs like belly dancing compromises her Egyptian identity.

“I’m Egyptian-Filipino. I grew up with my Filipino family here in Cerritos. I eat rice every day. And I went to Catholic school, but my dad is Muslim and lives in Egypt. I spend my summers with him! I can understand Tagalog and Arabic. Esayak? Kamusta ka? So I guess both? Well, I kind of feel more Filipino because that’s who I spend more time with.”

At Cerritos High, people begin to learn about each other by asking the question “what are you?” Most people respond with just one or two words. When she is asked, Gharib has trouble explaining the nuances of her cultural upbringing. She shows how people’s cultures are complicated and their identities within these cultures are individualized. This is more nuance than Gharib knows how to explain as a teen when confronted with questions.

“What I really wanted, though, was to meet real-life white people. And Cerritos had hardly any! In freshman year, I had a mega-crush on a boy named Jorge. He wasn’t white, but he was close enough […] Being one of the ‘whitest’ boys in school, he really had his pick of the litter.”

Gharib sees Whiteness as a Cultural Norm. Her family raised her to think that white people were better than other people and that she should strive to emulate them. When Gharib is a teen and young adult, this takes the form of crushing on and kissing white boys. Her peers call Gharib “whitewashed,” but many girls have crushes on Jorge because of his relative whiteness, indicating that seeing whiteness as desirable is a pervasive problem.

“I hung out with anyone who would have me…a motley crew of punk kids. ‘The Group,’ as we called ourselves, came from all different backgrounds—but we had lots in common.”

Stuff we loved!

We made fun of posers.

We played music.

We all loved punk.

We wore pins and patches.

We made zines + comix.

We dabbled in graffiti.

We skateboarded.”

Gharib feels isolated from groups of Filipino students. She thinks that her multicultural heritage keeps her from fitting in with them. Instead, Gharib finds her clique with the punk kids, who value things that are anti-establishment and against the social mainstream. This clique feels ideal for Gharib, who does not feel like she fits into any of the other school cliques. Here, Gharib creates a list, breaking up the rhythm of the text. She repeats “We” for emphasis.

“In the end, I got the label I’d been searching for. Most Unique. It gave me so much validation. At school I always felt like an outsider. A misfit. A weirdo. But maybe that was totally okay. Maybe that’s what made me cool.”

Even though she will try to assimilate with white students at Syracuse, Gharib embraces the high school yearbook superlative “Most Unique.” Having an award for being the most unlike anyone else is validating for Gharib, who previously saw her difference as a social weakness.

“Actually, Mom was always like that. If Min Min or I wanted something, she just made it happen. No matter how dumb or crazy. But helping me go to a stupidly expensive school on the other side of the country…it meant she trusted in my plans for the future. She believed in me. It was the greatest gift she could have ever given me. And there was nothing left to do but succeed.”

Gharib’s mother made many sacrifices to afford her and her sister a middle-class life in America. She found a way for Gharib to attend Syracuse University even though she had to get financial help and refinance their house. However, these sacrifices also put pressure on Gharib to succeed, a pressure many first-generation Americans feel.

“One big reason they agreed to send me to Syracuse (which Tito Maro insisted was part of the Ivy League, ha-ha), was because of the ‘exposure.’

‘We’re sending you to a white school so you can learn from them. Eat like them. Dress like them. Act like them. Because when you get into the real world, that’s how you have to be.’

I was ready! Bring it on!”

Gharib’s family often discusses whiteness and white people as something to emulate. Her mother will buy dresses she sees on white women and her uncle wants her to observe and mimic white people at school. They tell Gharib that emulating whiteness is what she must do to fit into the real world without deconstructing what types of systems hold up whiteness as a cultural norm.

“In the dorms, I couldn’t tell the girls apart. I thought they all looked the same. I quickly realized I didn’t know crap about white people. Everyone seemed to know all the songs at the bar. I had to google the lyrics. I also seemed to say stuff that made them mad. I was just stating facts. But I learned that commenting about personal appearance was not cool. (Although very normal in Asian culture.)”

Gharib experiences culture shock being around mostly white people for the first time in her life. She didn’t have the experience of being ostracized by white students in primary and secondary school that some first- and second-generation immigrants have. Instead, her knowledge of white people comes from television, like the show Felicity, and she finds that media representation doesn’t indicate anything about how people truly are. It has not prepared her, for instance, for the drastically different social cues and norms she and her peers would have.

“The most surprising thing about college was that no one asked me the question that was so important in high school: what are you? I didn’t anticipate how much I’d miss being asked. How else would I get the chance to tell them who I was? Where I came from? Sometimes I would initiate the question. But they were always so off. The response was always so lukewarm. The worst was when people responded: ‘I don’t see color.’”

Gharib’s white peers claim colorblindness. This does not indicate a lack of racism like they might think; instead, it dismisses diverse people and cultures. While people should not discriminate against others for the color of their skin, Gharib suggests they should acknowledge that people’s lived experiences in the United States are vastly different depending on their race, ethnicity, gender, etc. Gharib varies the rhythm of her prose by asking questions.

“‘We’re gonna put you with the Hawaiian group.’

‘But I’m not Hawaiian!’

‘Your name kinda sounds Hawaiian.’

Come to think of it, I didn’t just encounter this type of behavior at the office. It was everywhere!

Later, I’d come to learn these side comments had a special name: microaggressions.”

In her first adult job, Gharib continues to face the types of microaggressions she experienced in college. Microaggressions are an insidious form of discriminatory language, sometimes unintentional, and people making them might be reticent to see how their language perpetuates racist stereotypes. Someone might not mean harm by telling Gharib that “Malaka” sounds Hawaiian, but in doing so they invalidate and demean her Egyptian and Muslim heritage.

“The problem of ‘what are you?’ Let’s ask some real people what they think!

James: ‘It implies otherness…that somehow I’m not American.’

Stephanie: ‘If someone asks within moments of meeting you, it feels reductive.’

Judy: ‘I don’t mind…unless it’s a man trying to hit on me.’

Brenda: ‘To me, it’s the tone of the question. Some are curious. Others come across as crass or irritated.’

Emily: ‘When it’s another ‘other,’ I love it. But when it’s a white dude at a bar, it’s gross.’

Marissa: ‘It depends in timing, topic of conversation, and tone.’

Erin: ‘I never thought of it as offensive until other people told me I should be offended.’”

After she makes friends in adulthood with people from diverse backgrounds, Gharib learns what is problematic about “what are you,” the question that used to circulate around her high school. At Cerritos, people asked to learn about others and their backgrounds, but Gharib learns that the question still carries negative connotations. The question implies that the person being asked is somehow “other.”

“When I told Dad that Darren and I were getting married, he was really disappointed. Did I really not know any Arab Muslims in DC?

‘Dad, I’m marrying Darren.’

‘Couldn’t you have gone to a local mosque?’

‘And say what, that I’m looking for a husband?’

‘Yes!’

We didn’t talk for a month after that. Finally, I called and said: ‘Look, Dad, let me be real with you. I don’t want what happened between you and Mom to happen to me. I love Darren very much. And he loves me, too. We are going to be happy together!’

‘Okay, but it’s me who will be punished by God—for not being there to help you marry a Muslim.’

‘I’m sorry.’”

Gharib’s father’s believes that Muslim women should marry Muslim men. When Gharib gets engaged to Darren, her and her father’s divergent cultural beliefs about who Gharib should marry becomes a problem in their relationship. Even though he attends her wedding and walks her down the aisle, he believes that God will punish him for not helping her find a Muslim husband. Gharib shows how parents and children who span different cultures and generations can sometimes have different cultural ideas that conflict with one another.

Here, Gharib weaves in exaggeration and humor, her father exclaiming “Yes!”—she should have walked into a mosque and stated that she was husband-seeking.

“The best part was that Mom and Dad were both there to walk me down the aisle…Just two immigrants and their American-born daughter, in this strange, beautiful land that I called home.”

Gharib struggles with juggling her Egyptian, Filipino, and American background throughout her teens and young adulthood. Her wedding signals a moment where these three cultures are not in opposition to one another, like she felt in her youth, but blended. Both sides of her heritage—Filipino and Egyptian—are represented in her wedding ceremonies. Their equal importance in her life is signified by both of her parents walking her down the aisle together.

“There were already so many customs I lost or ignored. Sometimes I caught myself wearing shoes in the house, a major no-no in Asian homes. I couldn’t remember the songs of my youth. Weeks would go by when we’d neglect to eat rice! The superstitions that used to scare me didn’t anymore. Sometimes, I threw rice away. In Filipino culture, it’s bad luck—it’s like throwing money away. Sometimes I’d cry in the bathroom. In Islamic culture, that’s when spirits could possess you! I didn’t eat noodles for my birthday, a symbol of long life in Asian culture. Still, I knew I had to have some of those values inside me—because I could see it when me and Darren’s cultures clashed.”

Gharib worries about staying connected to Islamic and Filipino cultures. She wants to bring practices from both cultures into her new life with Darren, but there are many that she doesn’t know, either because she forgot them or purposefully ignored them in her youth. Many first-generation Americans slowly begin losing access to cultural languages and practices as they are pressured to assimilate into white American culture.