The White House Project

Jenny Choi, Intern

I am a young immigrant woman. Around the third grade, my father decided to move our family to the United States so that he could make use of his American law degree and my sister and I could eventually go to college here. I, like many other young immigrant women living here, carry with me the experience of walking through the airport with my family, pushing a cart of a dozen mega-sized bags stuffed with our lives. I remember the initially broken English that gradually killed the self-confidence in my sister and me and the homesickness that I suffered from especially in the first few months. Most importantly though, I remember how all hardship made me a more hard-shelled individual. Hard work and diligence would eventually pay off as the obstacles slowly disappear. I called this “success.”

Success. It is a beautiful, yet strangely scary word. The idea of success gives us the motivation to move on with our lives and bear through the difficulties. More often than not, it is the beacon of light shining at the end of the road that inspires and motivates us. But from an immigrant woman’s perspective, the concept of success may also play a damaging role. As I went through my battles with the obstacles, I increasingly began to define success in terms of myself. At the end of the day, success was eventually making a better, more comfortable, and sounder life for me, regardless of the contribution, or lack thereof, that I was making to the larger community.

Many immigrants come to the United States in search of a new life, both educationally and financially. A lot of the time, this search for a higher-quality life often blinds us from the whole picture: the picture where we are members of a larger community and society. Our gradually deepening self-importance causes us to zoom in on the self just a little too much and ignore the potential – and the obligation – that we have to make our community a better place.

From a woman’s perspective, I eventually began to think about it this way: there I was, complaining about the difficulties of having to overcome language barriers and make new friends to get a better education, while other girls my age then were being sold off as child brides and denied education. I realized that compared to those girls, I was, by pure luck, born as a girl that was lucky enough to immigrate just to study in a better environment. The least I would be able to do in order to pay back to society would be to work for the greater good of the world, to step into public service, to take on community leadership.

In a country where women are already a far minority in political and corporate leadership, the statistics for minority women are even worse. It will already take years and years and years to set the leadership ratios equal to the gender and ethnic ratios, but it will never happen if the ambitious and young newcomers to this country never exit the self and step up to lead their communities.

With this, I call all immigrant women to think deeply in the New Year about the goal that they study and work towards, and if not already done so, to reset that goal to something that can put them out as a resource for the larger world to take advantage of and benefit from. What will you do to encourage participation in social progress in 2012?

Jenny Choi is the Communications and IT intern at The White House Project. She is currently a senior at Hunter College High School on the Upper East Side. She runs an organization called Civis Femina dedicated to calling young women to pay back for their educations here in the United States by working for the greater good of the community or their less privileged counterparts in others parts of the globe. 

Are you an immigrant woman, or do you have a related experience you’d like to share? Please tell us your thoughts on our Facebook page.