I’m (Still) Proud to Be American

Last night, on a call with my brother and mom to discuss her care—her illness being the latest in a long line of quiet battles—she said something unexpected.

“Do you remember,” she said, “we moved to America exactly 40 years ago? We should celebrate.”

The moment caught me off guard. My mother is a lot of things—tough, pragmatic, unsentimental to her core. After our family immigrated to Oakland, California, and my parents split up, she raised my brother and me on a few hundred dollars a month in child support. She worked hard, saved harder, and never paused to look back.

So when she suggested commemorating our arrival to this country, I didn’t know what to say.

Celebrate coming to America? Now?

My family members and friends are being laid off—some casualties of the biotech winter, others of the tech downturn. At my own job in higher ed, we’re bracing for budget cuts. At a birthday dinner this week, one friend worried about losing her job because of new tariffs. Another, a public school teacher, wasn’t sure if she could safely travel abroad. A coworker is seriously considering moving out of the country.

So no, this doesn’t exactly feel like the moment to wave a flag. Part of me feels worried. Part of me feels angry. This is no way to treat good people.

And yet, after the call ended, her words stayed with me.

We came to this country when I was eleven. My parents had little more than hope and a dream for a better life. Growing up in Oakland, I went to underfunded inner-city schools. But my high school English and social studies teachers believed in kids like me. They fundraised so we could visit Washington, D.C., and see our nation’s capital with our own eyes. They encouraged us to dream big. So I did.

I got into UC Berkeley. My dad offered no financial support, but public tuition wasn’t astronomical back then, and I scraped together scholarships from the likes of the Oakland Rotary Club. I still remember going to their holiday luncheon, nervously thanking them for making my education possible. Later, a National Science Foundation grant helped me through grad school, where I also worked as a teaching associate to finish my education.

In America, I learned, opportunities do exist for those who work hard.

I tried my hand at entrepreneurship right out of grad school. Inspired by classmates, I launched a Web startup with three MBAs, who played it safe and also took a job out of school. This was the dot-com bust, and after six months of trying, I followed suit.

The thing is, in America, you’re not defined by your failures. You can always try again.

A few years later, I teamed up with a former classmate and his friend to build another startup—an events-based social network. The odds weren’t in our favor: three engineers, no business background. But we pitched the idea, raised venture funding, hired a team, and eventually sold the company to AOL.

That’s the thing about America. It’s one of the few places where you can start with just an idea, a laptop, and a stubborn sense of possibility—and build something real.

I even met my husband online—a novelty back in the early 2000s. We lived and worked just blocks apart but never crossed paths until the internet connected us. That’s the beauty of this country, too: it embraces innovation in ways few others do.

But the better love story? My mom’s.

Years after we’d left for college, she learned English at a local community college, took child development classes, and found work at a daycare center. A coworker told my mom about her experience online dating. My mom was incredulous —“Her English is worse than mine!” She’s determined to try it too. And in her late 50s, my unsentimental, fiercely independent mother married an Irish-American man she met online.

Nope—she wasn’t too old to find love. Not in America.

My husband is also an immigrant. His family fled Vietnam after the war, escaping by boat and landing in a refugee camp in Thailand. They were sponsored by an American church and made their way here. To them, Americans weren’t just generous—they were life-saving.

His father worked full-time at a restaurant while attending school full-time. He faced rejection from employers because of his limited English, but eventually landed a federal job. There, he worked hard and thrived, often finishing in weeks what others took months, and even found corporate tax loopholes and saved the government millions.

America has been good to our family. And we’ve done our best to give back.

But these days, I worry. I worry about the growing cuts to education and research. I worry about the rhetoric around immigrants—not just undocumented ones, but legal immigrants like us. In my current role, I help students explore entrepreneurship and innovation. Many are international students, and more than a few are anxious about whether they’ll be allowed to study, work, and stay.

And yet—I remain hopeful. Because I believe in this country.

This is a nation that sent people to the moon, that led the world in COVID-19 vaccine development. The birthplace of Silicon Valley and Generative AI, the home of bold ideas. But if we want to keep that edge, we need to keep investing—in people, in science, in belief.

We’ve been through dark times before: the Civil War, the Red Scare, the fight for civil rights. And each time, America has managed to evolve, to grow, to rise from the ashes.

It feels dark now, yes. But maybe that’s how dawn always begins.

Tomorrow, to celebrate 40 years in America, I’m going to do the most patriotic thing I can think of: I’m going to a rally—to show I care about this democracy, about this messy, beautiful experiment we all share. I want to do my part in creating a brighter future that all our kids can thrive in.

Mom, this is how I’m going to celebrate. I hope you’re proud of me.