The blue and red lights and screeching sirens break the calm of the chilly autumn night. “They’re coming,” I whisper. Holding back tears, I bury myself under my blanket, tighten my sweaty palms, and anticipate the police.

1, 2, 3 … BOOM!

The door comes crashing down, revealing two officers. The backs of their black coats read “Homeland Security.” Their rigid faces show no expression in the dimly lit hallway. They plant their heavy boots with each stride as they approach Ma and Ba’s room. Slamming the bedroom door open, the men draw their guns and fire round after round at Ma and Ba. Then – the unbearable silence, pronouncing the deaths of my parents.

This is the nightmare that haunted my childhood.

When Ma and Ba arrived in the U.S., begging Lady Liberty to grant them a new home, she was unsatisfied with the poor non-Europeans and pointed her guiding torch outward, demanding that they go back to China. Defiantly, my parents stayed and started a family.

At a very young age, I knew that I held more responsibilities than a typical boy. At age seven, I learned to pay Ma and Ba’s bills. At 11, I bought health insurance for my family. At 13, I worked 25 to 35 hours a week as a cashier and waiter at my parents’ understaffed Chinese buffet.

I recall Barbara Kingsolver writing that “this whole idea and business of Childhood was nothing guaranteed.” She was right, at least for me. I was an autumn leaf in early spring: the awkward kid dressed in the same grease-stained shirt from yesterday. My black-striped shoes worn down from consecutive nights of bussing tables, while other kids’ shoes were dirty from play. My jet black hair smelled of day-old Chinese food; their blonde hair held the scent of sweet berries. My voice was that of a foreigner; theirs was the native tongue. They whispered their secrets – a crush? – to friends; I kept my secrets to protect my family.

As I navigated through grade school, the fear of deportation plagued my thoughts. I was timid and spoke little, fearing that my accent would expose Ma and Ba. During those years, I devoted myself to helping them run the restaurant. After school, I left my homework untouched and submerged my hands in buckets filled with dozens of hard-boiled eggs. I peeled the eggs diligently and felt comforted, knowing that Ma and Ba were nearby. This way, I thought, I would never lose them.

Later, I realized that Ma and Ba settled in the U.S. so that one day they might see their son as a beacon of upward mobility. As they spent hours toiling in the restaurant, juggling both the orders and their sanity, I spent hours reviewing my English homework and enunciating the foreign words, determined to fulfill the future that they never could. Working and facing the daily derisions of customers, they instilled in me the courage to pursue education as a path to success. They remind me that my success is not my own but the progress of our genealogy. They nudge me forward to alter not the distant past, but the near future.

I now see that life is a collective story told by the color of my skin, the clothes that I wear, the voice that I embody. If my Creator were to appear before me in the midst of a twilight, offering me the possibility of life anew where words like Chinese, deportation, and restaurant would be alien to my ears, would I take it? I would shake my head and reply that those words – this life – are the very constituents of who I am as a son, a brother, a student – a human.