Growing up a foreigner in America is an indescribable thing. It has a way of steeping your perspective in comparisons and what ifs. You learn to be at first, overly defensive of the culture you came from, then you reject it to embrace American culture, then you go back again, until finally you settle into a kind of limbo when you realize that you don't fully fit into either world at all. Your reality and the way you perceive it are unique to yourself and others like you, other immigrants. So experiencing the recession as an immigrant is affected by that fact. I think it has been been more shocking for many people who came to this country to better their lives that it could have happened at all. So many of us foolishly believed that the America of our imaginations was impervious to defeat of any kind. 

     I was at my parent's house a week ago to visit my mom. My dad was out of town working, like he always is. I was sitting at the kitchen table when I happened to see mail from a debt counseling service. It was addressed to my mother, whose credit card debt is substantial. Added to this, her and my dad have also taken out two loans against their house, which they owe much much more on than they paid for it. They also have another houses worth of debt in hospital bills thanks to my dad accidentally burning almost a third of his body only a year and a half before my mom broke her wrist and their insurance company decided to drop them. 

    Ever since I saw that piece of paper I can't stop thinking about the path that their lives have taken since coming to the United States a little over ten years ago. We were miserably poor when we arrived, like a lot of immigrants. We slept in the office space of a factory that an uncle of mine owned, all five of us in one room.  My parents had taken out a loan shortly before leaving Finland and lost every penny in a matter of months just paying for the necesseties; school supplies, vaccinations, clothing, etc. With another loan, handed down clothing, borrowed furniture and piece of shit Astro van we managed to crawl up in the world enough to move into a house in a modest neighborhood in a town a little south of Orlando, FL that was for lack of a better more accurate term, crawling with white trash. Instead of a desk my sister had a plastic lawn furniture table. There was no dining room table, no bed frames, just mattresses on the floors in the bedrooms. If I had been older than my eleven years of age I might have realized why my grandmother cried herself to sleep every night when she came to visit us. 

   My parents worked hard, harder than you might think a person can survive working, sometimes twelve to sixteen hour days, often at least six days a week. They worked for my uncle who would eventually screw them over and leave us with nothing, again.

     Somehow, by some grace or some miracle, my parents made it. They built a life for us from scraps, from what seems like nothing in retrospect. They moved from Florida to Georgia and started their own business.

     My parents worked hard, even harder than I had always seen them work. Eventually they were able to buy a house, a nice house. They bought cars, redecorated, remodeled, took vacations. Their business was successful. They bought into the American dream the way everyone else in America was buying into the American dream in the late nineties and early 21st centuries; by buying stuff. They bought a Cadillac Escalade instead of a Chevrolet Suburban, my mom ordered jewelry from QVC and HSN, we got iPods, digital cameras, XBoxes, Playstations, Nikes, American Eagle clothing, laptops, PC's, and it felt like we had arrived. We belonged because we bought the same things everyone else bought, wore the same brands, kept up with the same shows. But most of all we consumed, we shopped, we bought, we consumed. 

     And then the stockmarket took a nosedive. And all of a sudden there was no money for the American Express, the Visa, the mortgage. But the buying didn't stop. It was like the packages in the mail, the new video game for my little brother, the new blouse, or the new couch would provide the answer, like the American dream could be revived. My parents' debt mounted, their income dwindled. The buying finally stopped. 

     I had known for a time that my parents were in a tough financial situation. My dad confided the seriousness of it all with me on a rare occasion when I got to spend time with him on the road when he was working. Without providing any specific numbers he told me he would work every day until he died and he would never pay back what he owed. I think my heart broke when he told me that, I have never met another person who works as hard as my dad or is more selfless about it. That was about a month before I sat in my mother's kitchen and happened to glimpse a piece of paper revealing the staggering credit card debt she has accumulated over the last ten years. Much of it necessary, unavoidable, trips to Finland to meet my oldest brother's twin boys, school supplies. But so much of it accumulated from an effort to buy the feeling that we belonged in America.  

    I think about the path that my parents lives have taken and I wonder how it could have been different. But at the same time I know that it couldn't have been different because it was the same path so many people's lives took in America. They bought stuff to feel like their lives meant something, or meant the things they wanted them to mean. 

     And now my parents, who've aged twenty years in half that time from sheer physical exertion and exhaustion, are close to having nothing, again. The hope, the faith, the force of will that brought them from nothing to something to everything failed to provide them with protection from the recession and their bubble burst along with everyone elses.  And even though it has been profoundly saddening to watch the hopes of so many Americans disappointed, and to see my own family so badly beaten by this recession, America for me is still a place where hope always has a place.