My Rich African Parents' American Dream
land of the free right?
This is a work of fiction.
Nothing in this story is real. The characters, events, and situations are entirely imagined and created for literary purposes. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to real events is purely coincidental.
enjoy
“Hi, sir, what do you want to eat today?” the chef would ask my father every morning, without question.
That particular Saturday, he said he wanted to eat light—“I have a long day ahead,” he replied, without explaining what “long” meant in his world. The chef nodded once and disappeared into the kitchen.
Within minutes, the house filled with the smell of butter and coffee. The juiciest mangoes and papayas, sliced and arranged like an offering. Eggs Benedict, the yolk just barely trembling. Freshly squeezed juice, homemade croissants still warm, vegetables on the side he never touched, tea exactly the color he preferred, and, of course, his vitamins lined up for the day.
By the time he sat to eat, his clothes had already been ironed by another pair of hands and his shoes were polished about five times now. The table was laid in the middle of the house, light pouring in through high windows. He sat, stretched a little, and smiled the smile of a man who had never had to hurry for anything in his own home.
My mother came down already dressed for the day. She smelled like good perfume and new ideas. She placed a hand lightly on his shoulder as she passed.
“Today will finish me,” she sighed, but there was a spark in it. “I have that event to organize; your son has football; your daughter has swimming. I don’t even know where my own head is.”
“Don’t worry,” he answered, picking up his fork. “You always figure it out.”
The house was buzzing. Maids moved swiftly through the rooms, straightening what was already straight. Somewhere a radio hummed softly over the sound of water running. Saturdays were for sleeping in, then for a large breakfast, then for everyone scattering to their various lives, all of which were laid out for them like options on a menu.
We never knew exactly what my father did for work. We knew he didn’t have the kind of job that required waking up in the dark, fighting traffic, or standing in line to be paid. We knew that when his name was mentioned, people nodded the way you nod at a fact: the sky is blue; water is wet; he is someone important. We liked to imagine that on Saturdays he went to see business partners, because that sounded like the kind of thing a man like him would do.
My mother herded us into the car, shouting over her shoulder:
“Did you pack your jersey? Your socks? Where is your towel?”
We shouted back from different corners of the house. The driver opened the car door for her as she was yelling at us to get in. Once we were all in, she told the driver where to go, and the chaos turned into small, excited talk about what our weeks had consisted off.
Sundays were different. Nobody slept in on Sundays.
The chef had less time, but never less care. Everyone was up early, preparing for church. My mother wore her best jewelry on Sundays, gold that glowed against her skin. Her hair was wrapped and styled in a way that made older women in church lean over and whisper to each other.
At church, even if we were late, they would always find us the best seats at the front, near the air conditioner. Old women who had been coming for twenty years would stand up from their plastic chairs when we arrived, and we would pass and sit in the padded ones. The pastor made sure to greet us, even from the pulpit.
“Ah, our brother and sister are here,” he would boom into the microphone. “God has been good to them, He can be good to you too.”
People watched us with a small hunger in their eyes. This is what God’s blessing looks like, their faces seemed to say. This is what we’re praying for.
After the service, my parents could never stay too long to talk. There was always a lunch waiting at the hotel everyone wanted to go to. The buffet there was legendary, but we rarely visited it. My parents ordered from the menu, asked for dishes that were not written down, made small corrections to the way the food was prepared. The waiters knew their names and the live band would sometimes play my mother’s favorite song.
Sometimes people staying at the hotel would come over to greet my parents. They belonged there, in the good lighting, in chairs that didn’t wobble, with waiters that came when called and never rolled their eyes. They belonged there, and everyone could see it.
And yet, for my father, it was not enough.
His dreams were bigger than that small city, bigger than the country that had trained him to be somebody. He wanted to go to the country of the rich, the country of the best, the place where, in all the movies, the story always ended with someone holding a glass of something golden on a rooftop: the United States of America.
My mother had no objection. She had been to New York once and came back talking about it like a love affair. She loved Michelle Obama and Jimmy Choo heels with a devotion that made my father jealous. And so it did not come as a suprise nor bothered when her husband proposed to move their lives there.
On the other hand, we were in private schools. We spoke English with an accent the teachers called “international.” We watched the same shows, used the same apps, scrolled the same feeds as kids in London, Toronto, Chicago. We knew how America looked on a screen, and it looked like an upgrade from what we already had.
So when my parents told us we were moving, we thought only of bigger houses, better schools, malls with more brands. We thought our lifestyle would follow us, like luggage.
First, there were visas to get. My parents had done it before, we had gone on multiple vacations around the globe. This time the questions were more pointed than usual.
I remember one man at the embassy, the way his face tightened when he saw our documents being stamped “approved.” It was a quick thing, a small twisting of his mouth into something between annoyance and disbelief.
Still, the visas were there, blue and official, so it did not matter. We booked first-class tickets for the almost twenty-hour journey with two layovers. My parents sold the house, or maybe they rented it out; there was talk of investments, of property “back home” that would always be ours even if we decided never to return.
On our last layover, the dream flickered for the first time.
We were already seated in first class when a flight attendant came over, smiling in a way that did not reach her eyes.
“Can I just check your tickets again?” she asked my father, her fingers already reaching.
She looked at the tickets, at us, at the tickets again. Then she called another attendant over, whispering. They both looked at us, at the tickets, and at us once more.
They checked the tickets three times like that, one after another, as if the letters boarding pass for first class could arrange themselves into economy if they stared hard enough. Around us, other passengers watched with a polite curiosity they did not bother to hide.
When they realized they were wrong, the apologies came quickly.
“So sorry, sir. Just a routine check. Let us know if you need anything at all.” Suddenly we were “sir” and “ma’am” again.
My father smiled, but something settled behind his eyes then, something he could describe only much later. That was the first time, he would say, that he realized respect could be taken away and given back in the same breath, depending on who thought you belonged where.
We landed in America at night. The city lights outside our new apartment window looked exactly the way they did in the photos: big and beautiful.
Our friends back home saw the stories we had posted on Instagram, upon landing, they instantly replied:
“Wow, what a dream.”
“Take me with you.”
“What a life.”
It only looked like a dream.
The first thing we lost was the way people looked at us. Here, people looked at us and their faces hardened.
There were no bowed heads, no “Good morning, sir,” no “Yes, madam,” said with a half-smile. Sometimes there were no greetings at all. In the grocery store, cashiers avoided our eyes, shouted “Next!” over our heads, threw our things into plastic bags like we were the ones in a hurry.
We were watched, but not with admiration. Security followed us down aisles we had every right to be in. If we laughed too loudly, people turned around, eyes narrowed, hands tightening on their bags.
The money my parents had brought began to shrink in front of their eyes. Exchange rates and hidden fees and “one-time deposits” and “processing costs” of every kind introduced themselves. This country was expensive, and confusing in a way that had nothing to do with language.
There was no driver waiting for us downstairs. The car my parents ordered took longer to arrive than planned, so for a while we took taxis. Once, a driver slowed down when he saw us, then sped off as my father raised his hand.
“He didn’t see us,” my mother said.
“He saw us,” my father answered firmly.
When the money for taxis became too much, my mother took a bus for the first time in her life.
She stood at the bus stop in a coat that didn’t quite fit the weather and asked a woman next to her, “Does this one go to downtown?”
The woman glanced at her, at her scarf, at the accent at the end of her sentence, and turned away like she hadn’t heard. On the bus, my mother stood when there were empty seats, afraid of sitting in the wrong place. The route map above the windows looked like a language of lines and colors she had never been taught to read. When she asked another passenger where she should get off, he shrugged.
“I don’t know,” he said, without looking at her.
She couldnt belive the dismissal of these people, as if they werent on the same bus as her.
After a while, my parents started looking for work.
Back home, work had come to them: people brought contracts, proposals, business cards. Here, they sent their resumes into a void that responded with nothing or with offers that looked like jokes.
My father, who had been called “Chairman” and “Chief” and “Boss” by grown men in good suits, put on his best jacket and went to job interviews where boys who could not pronounce his name told him he was “overqualified” for everything that paid enough and “underqualified” for anything that matched his experience.
In one office, a young manager leaned back in his chair and said, “You’ll have to start at the bottom here, you know. We do things differently in the States.”
My father nodded, because he had flown across an ocean to hear that sentence. In that office, people spoke to him in the slow, careful voice usually reserved for children or pets.
“Do you understand how to send this email?” a woman asked him one day, enunciating each word.
He had been using email since before she had been born. Still, he said, “Yes,” and kept his anger in his chest thumping.
They did not call him “sir” in that office. They called him by his first name, chewed it up, spat it back half-chewed. When he corrected their pronunciation, they apologized half heartedly.
“Your name is hard,” they said.
It had never been hard before.
My mother, who back home directed staff, negotiated contracts, and organized events that required entire hotels to adjust their schedules, now stood behind a counter in a store where her manager told her to smile more.
“People like it when you smile,” he said, patting her on the shoulder as if she were a child who had done a simple thing well.
He mispronounced her name every day.
“Can’t I just call you something easier?” he asked once, laughing.
She laughed too, because she needed the job. At night, when she took off the uniform, she sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her hands.
“They talk to me,” she said, “like I don’t understand human beings. Like I’m from a place where no one has manners.”
School was no better.
The private schools we had attended back home cost more than I can say here. But the teachers there had been trained abroad, they had taught us to write essays, to solve equations, to think critically, to speak confidently.
None of that mattered here.
At the new school, the counselor smiled at my parents and said, “Your children will have to repeat a grade. We’re not sure their previous schools were up to standard.”
My father took a breath. My mother folded her arms.
“These schools were known—” he began.
“It’s just how our system works,” she interrupted, still smiling. “It will be good for them. Help them adjust.”
In class, we were older than most of our classmates. The teachers spoke slowly to us when we answered questions, praised us for things we had learned years before, and acted surprised when we knew more than they expected.
“Your English is really good,” one teacher told me, genuinely impressed.
It was the only language she had ever heard me speak.
Our classmates were not impressed. They were loud in a different way than kids back home, rude in a way that was not funny, cruel in ways they did not even think of as cruel.
“Do you have Wi-Fi in Africa?” one boy asked.
“Did you live in a hut?” another girl wanted to know.
The word “Africa” erased every particular thing about us. A whole continent stamped into a single, childish drawing of a place without electricity where lions crossed the road on the way to school. They had less money, less education, less curiosity about the world than my parents had sacrificed to give us, but here they were the standard. We were the ones who needed to catch up.
Sundays in America had nothing to do with perfume and gold jewelry.
There was laundry to do, floors to mop, meals to cook in advance. My mother learned the difference between detergents, between softeners, between “regular” and “heavy duty.” My father chopped onions at the kitchen counter,, “Be careful with the knife,” my mother would say, half teasing, half tired.
“I have held sharper things,” he would answer.
We cleaned the bathroom we shared. We vacuumed the carpet. We argued about who would take the trash out into the cold. Nobody had sports practice anymore. There were no drivers to shuttle us across town; the bus route to the nearest sports club was long and confusing, and the fees were too high. Our hobbies became survival: cooking, cleaning, catching the bus on time, working double shifts, pretending everything was fine.
We called home on video sometimes. We made sure the background behind us looked good: the window with the city lights, the corner of the couch that looked almost luxurious if you didn’t look too long.
“How is America?” our relatives asked, eyes wide.
“Oh, it’s good,” my mother would say quickly. “People are polite. Everything is organized.”
My father would nod, adding, “The children’s school is very strict. It’s good for them.”
We did not mention the manager who refused to learn my mother’s name. We did not talk about the boy in my class who asked if I had seen a real car before coming here. We did not talk about my father being told, by a man with far less experience, that he should “work on his communication skills.”
We kept the old story alive for them: America, land of opportunity, where good people who worked hard got what they deserved. We owed them that dream, because they had believed it with us. We owed it to ourselves, because if we admitted to how we were treated, we would also have to admit that we had traded respect for humiliation and called it “a better life.”
Back home, if anyone asked how we were doing, my mother would send pictures: us in front of a tall building, us in heavy coats, us standing under a sign with the word “University” on it.
“God is faithful,” she would write.
“He has done it,” they replied.
Everywhere felt hostile in a way we could not have imagined when we were sitting in first class, choosing what to eat from a menu.
At the bank, the teller spoke to us like we were trying to steal something that belonged not to us but to America. At the coffee shop, the barista smiled at the person in front of us and inched the smile off her face when it was our turn. At the few restaurants we went to celebrate the little wins, waiters disappeared when we needed them.
We had come from a place where people looked up when we walked into a room. We had arrived in a place where we were expected to be grateful for being allowed in at all.
This is what equality looked like in the land of the free..
Sometimes, when my father is very tired, when his hands smell of the cleaning spray he uses at his second job, he will sit at the table and close his eyes. My mother, her back aching from hours of standing, will lower herself into the chair next to him. The television will talk to itself in the background about freedom and justice and the latest election.
“Do you regret coming?” I asked him once, late at night, when the apartment was quiet and the city glittered outside, indifferent as always.
He opened his eyes slowly.
“We left a place where we were treated like human beings,” he said. “We came to a place where we are treated like a problem. But here, they tell us we are free.”
He smiled then, a small, ironic thing.
“Freedom,” he said, “is an interesting word.”
My mother laughed, a low, tired sound.
“In our country,” she said, “we had everything except this freedom. Here, we have this freedom—and nothing else.”
We sat there, all three of us, surrounded by the proof of our success: the visa stamps in the drawer, the American bills in my father’s wallet, the school ID on my chest. Somewhere, back home, someone was praying to be exactly where we were.
This is the part of the story that doesn’t make it into the movies, that never appears in the glossy tourism ads. The part where my rich African parents got their American dream, only to discover that in the land of the free, nobody is obligated to see you as fully human.
Still, they get up every morning. They go to work. They ride buses where no one bothers to answer their questions. They cook their own meals, mop their own floors, smile through the slow, condescending sentences spoken to them by people with less education, less money, less imagination than they possess.
And every Sunday, somewhere between the laundry and the grocery store, we will put our knees to the floor, and amidst our prayers we will be thankful that we could make it here.
After all, this is America, land of the free.
Everyone here gets exactly what they deserve.
Thank you for reading.
This piece has been sitting on my heart for a long time. It is fiction but it is not imagined out of nowhere. It was born from conversations. From the cleaning old man at my university who moves through hallways silently often unseen. From the aunties and uncles who once held titles, companies, authority and now hold mops, name tags,..
I wanted to capture that fall, the feeling what it means to live at two opposite poles of dignity. If it unsettled you, if it stayed with you even a little, then I have done what I meant to do.
I hope you enjoyed it. And if you did, subscribe and support me!
“Everyone here gets exactly what they deserve” SHIVER ME TIMBERS!!! This was a READ en tout cas. It’s so real and raw and still fictional. I love this so much. Thank you Enza for once again blessing us with ur writing❤️
You gotta drop a book noww!!!! 🤧