Three things that brought me to America

My name is Raven and I grew up in Singapore. I’ve been living in the Bay Area for the past 8 years and it has become a second home to me. I’ve grown used to many aspects of being in the valley and come to take parts of it for granted.

I applied to grad school last year. In the midst of essays and interviews, I was forced to take stock of my past. I thought about what were the things growing up that brought me to this moment in my life. What compelled me to come to America? In the end, I narrowed it down to three things.

The first was science fiction. I was a voracious reader as a kid, but in particular I loved science fiction. I was raised by American legends like Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert. They greatly expanded my conception of what are possible futures for both humanity and my own life. I saw everything not for what they were but what they could or perhaps should be.

The second was the Internet. I got online in the late 90s and never left. As an introverted teenager, I spent most of my free time on IRC, online forums, and World of Warcraft. I was part of many communities and wrote a blog that at its peak had tens of thousands of readers. I developed a lifelong habit of writing that proved useful when the time came for college applications.

The third thing was my love for American politics. For reasons I can no longer remember, when I was twelve, I convinced my mom to get us a subscription to Time Magazine. I remember reading it cover to cover every week, developing extensive opinions about the Iraq War and being entertained by Joel Stein’s humorous columns. My favorite TV show was The West Wing. Its awe-inspiring monologues forever shaped my political consciousness. American neoliberalism was my religion and Aaron Sorkin my prophet.

Through science fiction, online communities, and politics, I became American at heart. I dreamt about the positive potential of American innovation and democracy. My cultural and political attitudes felt out of place in Singapore. In some sense, I had no choice but to make my way here.

Eight years later, in the era of technological inequality, political polarization, and Trump, I am living through a crisis of faith. Perhaps the idealistic America I fell in love with had never been real, or perhaps this is just a minor setback in a grand moral arc that bends towards justice. I do not know where I will ultimately fall, but I persist on this journey.

This was a short 3-minute speech I gave at a camp I attended recently. I originally wrote a much longer piece with more details, but they felt unnecessary and distracting. I would like to revisit this topic some day with deeper perspectives when I outlive some of the fear and cynicism.

As someone who grew up secular and whose younger, prouder self mentally belittled religion, I often had to learn to piece together my own sources of spirituality from the words of those who simply attempted to speak truth. In times when I feel the deepest disappointments in the state of where we are as people, my mind often turns to the science fiction novel Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. In this eternal and generational struggle between humans and our own frailty, there are many points in history where evil dominates and justice lies dormant. In the end, it requires individual acts of ceaseless struggle in face of this overwhelming hopelessness to move the needle back to sanity.

I want to believe.