First Person is where Chalkbeat features personal essays by educators, students, parents, and others who think and write about public education.

The night I returned to New York City at age 5, the city felt surreal—lively, vibrant, and intimidating. As my parents, older sister and I got into the taxi, the lights of the city seemed to converge and become one. Everything seemed bigger here. As the taxi slowly pulled away from the airport, so did my sense of reality. From the towering buildings to the flashing signs to the rushing cars, everything was so different from the villages in Fujian Province, China.

The taxi took us to Borough Park, Brooklyn, the apartment where we were going to stay. When I entered, there were boxes, furniture, appliances and bicycles crammed into a living room of about 144 square meters. How can anyone live like this? I thought.

My family of four slept in an even smaller room, crammed with a bunk bed, a square table and two chairs. As the clock struck midnight on what would be my first full day back in New York, I sat on the bottom bunk and ate takeout. I was full of curiosity and excitement, but there were certain nuances to my feelings. Who were my parents? Why had they come all the way to a foreign land? And most importantly, why had I lived so far away from them?

I was 7,000 miles—and a virtual world away—from Fujian, where I had lived by a lily-covered pond, where the breeze blew across my face, where the sound of crickets pierced the otherwise silent night, and where Grandma plucked chickens for us to cook and eat. . Everything was quieter and quieter there, on our block with only a few houses.

I soon found out that I didn’t always live so far away from Mom and Dad. My parents explained that I was born in Flushing, Queens, less than 20 miles from Borough Park. But like many immigrants, my parents worked hard schedules at minimum-wage jobs—my mother in a nail salon with minimal training and my father as a cook at a Chinese buffet. Overstretched and unable to support a family of four, they sent my sister and I to live with our grandparents in China.

For my parents, America—a nation that claims to value individual freedom, growth, and prosperity—became nothing more than the place they lived in as they saved money to bring us back to them.

All of this makes me what some researchers call a “satellite child”. Lacking affordable childcare, many Chinese immigrant families send their American-born children I live with family members in China. When children are ready for school, around 4 or 5 years old, many of these satellite babies return to the US

Thanks to this arrangement, I had the joy of meeting my grandparents. But it came at a cost: I didn’t really know the people who created me. We were family and we were strangers—so close yet so far apart.

In the months after I returned to my parents, I was often nostalgic for my simpler life in China. I would think of the small shop in town where my sister would buy the most useless toys and the local theater where performers dressed in elaborate costumes and painted their faces to tell the story of an emperor’s favorite concubine. This longing is what happens when you are caught between two worlds – one that holds the happy memories of your childhood and another of a new and confusing land.

People sometimes ask me if I could go back, I would do it all over again. My answer will always be yes. These memories are memories of a time when I was younger, but when my heart felt a little fuller.

In Borough Park, my parents enrolled my sister and I in school. As a little Chinese “immigrant”, I didn’t speak English. I hadn’t developed a sense of independence either and often cried when my mother left for work. In America, life felt like a rollercoaster, terrifying yet thrilling.

By fifth grade, however, I stood on the podium at Vincent D. Grippo PS 69 in Brooklyn and gave a valedictorian speech. Somewhere along the way, the naive village boy had become a hardworking student in the big city. I couldn’t understand how quickly my life had changed.

Now, about a decade after I left China and returned to New York, I am a student at Staten Island Tech, one of the few elite specialized high schools in New York City. Sometimes I wonder: Does my success mean that my parents’ hard work has finally paid off? Does that mean they are proud of me?

I feel constant pressure to succeed. Not for my classmates, not for my teachers, and not even for me, but for my parents, who are still working menial, low-wage jobs. This pressure doesn’t come from them urging me to “do what makes you happy,” but rather from within. Sometimes the very opportunities that should set me free feel more like a burden.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. Many children of immigrant parents experience this overwhelm. For us, the American dream can feel like a the debt we can never repay our parents.

We were family and we were strangers.

When I first came back to America, I didn’t even know what the American Dream was. I soon came to understand that it is the idea that if you work hard, you can succeed. I now know that it is not that simple, that factors such as personal and professional networks, perseverance, health and luck also play a role. However, I always tell myself that I could work a little harder, like when I finish a test and feel pessimistic about the result despite having studied so much.

The pressure could be something with me millions of children of immigrantssurf all our lives. We learn to coexist with it. Success in high school and beyond feels like a given. And working in a field that doesn’t pay well or waiting for the perfect job isn’t really an option because we want to provide comfortable lives for our parents, who never lived such lives.

I feel the weight of it all because deep down I know I am a big part of my parents’ American dream.

Ocean Lin, member of Chalkbeat 2024-25 Student Voices Fellowship class, is a high school junior who wants to pursue a career in chemistry. He hopes to make a difference and share authentic stories. Ocean started the Tide Tales Instagram poetry account to give marginalized groups a platform for creative self-expression.