This too is America

We are artists, we paint pictures of gold and pearl laid streets. We are writers with the most descriptive and convincing words of persuasion. We are grout in the making, we tell stories of a place we only wished was as we had imagined. But instead, we have a world upon which reality prevails, waking us from that beautiful trance and robbing us of that dream we would so love to hold on to.

And so we hate reality, we hate the dirty streets with its dust and awful stench, we hate the subways, the endless rides on the trains with the loud chatters of people who behave just like market women back home. Are these Americans too? Where are those Americans we saw on the big screen back home? Where is the America we read about in literatures? The true America. That Utopia America now exist only in the tales woven for unassuming friends and relatives.

We have to keep up the illusion because God forbid someone back home thinks America is not as great as they believe, then why would they envy us? Why would they want to come to America so badly? Fasting day and night, praying to God to send them to the great America. So we have to keep up the illusion. The beautiful sceneries that make up the settings of our social images becomes a stage on which we act for a few minutes before returning to reality. The unseen America, not entirely desirable. Not the beautiful one painted for us with words and cameras, not the one we saw on television, but the one we live in, the one that looks familiar, the one that looks like a place back home.

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