have a friend of mine named Vy. She came here from Vietnam when she was 19 years old, and comes from a small village and grew up very poor. She came here with almost nothing and worked at a vietnamese restaurant, not understanding a word of english and was being paid $3/hour because she didn't even know about minimum wage and her employer was taking advantage of her, and would ride a scooter home at 3am in a bad neighborhood. She then worked jobs as waitresses where they wouldn't even pay her how many hours she worked, she worked for a week and they paid her $50 and fired her because they ''didn't need her''. She works 40 hours a week doing low paying jobs now (atleast $9 or $10/hr) and still goes to school full time. Since coming here, she has learned english fairly well, and is studying to be an electrical engineer. She is my SI leader for my physics class, which stands for supplemental instruction, which is basically group study. She works so hard to help us understand the concepts and do better in the class, and she worked so hard just to get through the engineer major level physics class (I am a biology major, so we take a toned down version of the engineer physics class) and has the sweetest personality and is such a genuinely nice person. However, she has had to overcome A LOT of obstacles, and that continues to be a problem for her to this day. In California where we live, school cost a lot more for international students than for citizens. She has had an incredibly difficult time being able to pay for her classes, and when you are an electrical engineer major, its almost impossible to work and study and have good grades, but she has managed to keep a high GPA. We are at a community college which is a cheaper route, there is no way she could ever go to a university to study.
Now one thing I noticed is that she is a very pious christian and studies the bible a lot. She is what every christian should be, never would harm a fly or do anything mean to anyone. However, I can't seem to understand how she can possibly be fucked over by the system so much, and still have such a positive attitude. She must look to God as the reason why she can take so many difficult courses, keep good grades, and fight everything that the system throws at her. However, she is getting ready to go to a university, and much to my despair she can't afford to go to any school of high caliber, even though she is the highest caliber of a student, and has to settle for a lower rating university, nonetheless can still be an engineer, but I still feel like its an injustice. Every year she will have to pay $15,000 to go to the university that would normally cost an american citizen $5,000 a year. She can't even take student loans because she isn't an american citizen.
I look at myself as somehow who has been pampered all my life and everything was always taken care of, and only now after I had a few hours chat with her did i begin to scratch the surface of how spoiled rotten I am and how much of an asshole I am for not studying my hardest and trying my best at everything I do, I feel honestly like a waste of air. Am I supposed to just sit here and get everything I want while others have to fight and claw for just a little bit of money that I could throw on the ground and walk away from, or do I need to put myself into a situation like these people are to finally realize what it means to achieve the american dream?
