About two months ago, I received my green card. The moment came after 7 years of waiting, and 14 years of being an immigrant to this country.
There are plenty of guides out there documenting the process side of getting a green card, yet very few on the emotional side of things. This is how I felt while waiting for the green card:
Rootlessness. For the longest time, there is always a plan in the back of my head that I’ll need to pack up everything and leave this life behind. This may give me the benefit of living a minimalist lifestyle, yet it made it difficult to put down roots and engage with a community.
An inability to engage in long-term planning. While you wait, it’s hard to switch jobs, and even harder to take up a new career. It’s a legal requirement to tie my status to my job, and then somehow the job silently becomes my identity.
When I finally got the green card. I didn’t feel excited. I felt numb.
The feeling reminds me of the Morgan Freeman scene from the movie The Shawshank Redemption. When he was asked if he was “rehabilitated” over the years. When he was not giving a flock about this anymore and then he was finally free.
Yet in many ways, I am lucky.
I got my green card only after 7 years of waiting. The wait time for an Indian-born person today is 134 years (I also read an amazing documentation of an Indian-born engineer). If you have a friend, colleague, or classmate in your life who is in that situation, you can always act in kindness towards them.
One act of kindness I will always remember is from Susie, HR in the startup I joined in Boston. While we were doing the green card paperwork together, she set up a bi-weekly check-in with me. The meeting evolved from filing in forms to venting and eye-rolling about the whole process. Susie and I both know there isn’t much we can do to change the tedious legal process, but she made me feel there is a friend in my corner.
As I am writing this, I feel an overwhelmed sense of gratitude towards the people who sat in my corner: Seth, Juhan, Susie, Jason, Reshma, April, Genevieve, Jodi, Jeff, Vanessa, and my dear Qiusi. Thank you.
