The Dinner Table

A short story by Andrea Chow

“I’m not going to eat it, Papi. Liver is nasty.” “Pues, who do you think you are? In Nicaragua, we ate everything that was put on the table. You’re lucky to even have food for dinner tonight.”

For most of my childhood, I did not understand. I thought that both my parents were just bitter about the stark contrast between my privileged 21st-century upbringing and their childhoods in crime-riddled, war-torn, developing Latin America. In retrospect, the memories of their dinner table lectures remind me that in America, educational opportunities, freedom, and work ethic are all that I need to build a life for my own.

Mere decades ago, Nicaragua, a small Third World nation in Central America, was in the middle of a bloody civil war. My dad was born in the eastern Nicaraguan jungle town of Puerto Cabezas. He lived on a little farm where his family raised an assortment of animals that probably made lots of loud noises and smelled horrible. When my father's hometown was bombed in his early teens, his parents made the life-altering decision to flee the country. All my life, I have heard snippets of what life was like there - devastating earthquakes, martial law, machine guns echoing in the middle of the night. And years later, by fighting his way as a native Spanish speaker through American high school and college to become an engineer, he has shown me that determination is the only tool necessary to manifest dreams into reality.

The values and humility instilled in me from a young age become evident whenever I hop on every scholarship application I come across or study late into the night when I know Netflix is calling my name. I grew up in a predominantly white community where oftentimes, I am the token Latina, especially in educational spaces like classrooms and debate competitions. In a nation polarized by a plethora of political issues, especially immigration, there is a lot to prove to a neighborhood with its eyes on me as the daughter of once-undocumented immigrants. Anything less than straight A’s is proof of my laziness. Of other immigrants’ laziness. Of our undeservedness of the freedom and asylum and opportunity that my parents risked everything so I could one day have. And there is a lot to prove to my mami and my papi - that I am strength, I am resilience, I am living, breathing proof that their sacrifices were worth it. I am the American Dream not because I am simply American, but because I remember where I come from and spin gold from straw.

The dinner table lectures that I grew up with became much more than just a history lesson. They were the lens through which I viewed the rest of my world. They were knowledge, and everybody knows that knowledge is power. Power to do, and learn, and see, and create, and change.

“Recuerda, mija, de donde eres. You have a lot. Don’t waste it.”