Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Six
Sabrina
“Kid, things are always fucked, this is one certainty in life,” Eva said, handing Sabrina another pile of pink case folders.
Sabrina had created a master Excel spreadsheet for all the cases new, old, and active that Eva worked across, and they called it “the Nerve Center .” Sabrina had created wide columns outlining each case: dates, actions, challenges, appeals, further appeals, and rarely, the outcomes of just a few that conceded defeat and were labeled closed.
Eva did not like to lose. Sabrina began to see problems that were once theoretical words on a page as realities when she studied profile pictures of the people who depended on Eva, and some she met in person when they came to the office.
They were dealing with deportation, no health care, groundless evictions.
“The people who have nothing get zero help, and the people who have everything hold on to all their everything. I’m generalizing, of course. America is also home to some of the greatest philanthropists in the world. But you see what I’m trying to say.”
Sabrina thought she saw, but at the same time, she had a mother who worked every hour of every day given her, and still ended up having to buy her food from the discount aisle and clean bathrooms for a living.
Lee Lee had no help. She had the kind of job her CHA school friends would have either laughed about or looked away with uncomfortable embarrassment, for Sabrina , not themselves for their inability to recognize just how lucky they were.
“How often do you get through though? Like, how often can you make a real difference?”
Eva took her glasses off and smiled at Sabrina.
“Kid, I’m a Rottweiler. I can’t perform miracles—some cases are hopeless.
Let’s take this one. The Wdjadjas. Got here on legit visas, overstayed.
They have a kid who is really smart. But now we have a battle because we gotta find a way to help him stay here to have his education, even if his parents may be deported. ”
Sabrina felt the temperature of her entire body rise.
“But I’ll fight to the end. And you’d be surprised how far you can get when someone’s willing to fight for you. Sometimes it’s all you need, actually. A person who’s willing to fight for you. Also, I am real good at getting people to do stuff—stuff they didn’t think they wanted to do.”
“How? I mean, how would you do it?”
“Get this kid to stay?”
Sabrina nodded.
Eva paused and Sabrina stopped typing into her spreadsheet. She pressed save, just to be safe.
“People rarely understand another person’s situation when it’s presented to them on a piece of paper.
Or if it’s someone they can’t relate to—someone so far removed from their own reality and life.
You have to get good at telling the story so that the person listening is invested, so they see a case become a living, breathing person .
Life is full of coincidences, and you’d be surprised how many people will find a small thread that relates to them, and the walls come down.
Isn’t there some Chinese saying, ‘No coincidence, no story’?
” She made quotation marks with her fingers. “That coincidence can be the lifeline.”
Sabrina was silent.
“There’s something else you want to ask me, Chen. Go ahead.”
Sabrina didn’t speak. She didn’t want to ask.
Eva Kim did not continue to look at Sabrina when she saw that she was uncomfortable.
She respected her emotional state. It was one of the things Sabrina liked most about her.
It must have come from years of speaking to people who had suffered trauma, Eva only pressed when there was a willingness to give her the information.
“I don’t blame my mom for the choices she’s made. She has had a tough life. I really love my mom, even if it’s a little hard to see that sometimes.”
“No, kid, it isn’t. I can see you love her.
We just don’t say these things, right? It’s just not how we do things in the East is it?
It’s certainly not the way I communicated with my very conservative Christian Korean mother.
I’m guessing maybe that is the case for you too.
It’s not all hugs and I’m so proud of you, honey , all the time? ”
Sabrina laughed, she couldn’t even imagine Lee Lee’s mouth forming the shapes required to say those words.
“It’s funny how suddenly it all changes when you get to a certain age. Like, I used to hug my mom. I used to share her bed. I mean I probably shared her bed for longer than most white kids do with their moms. I don’t know if my friend Kit ever shared a bed with Mrs. Herzog.”
“Right, we definitely have this weird contradiction, right? Like we sleep with our moms but we don’t show them affection.
We don’t talk about love, everything is about duty and respecting the elders.
But duty and respect are just different forms of love.
And you can’t have love without respect; they coexist. Do I make sense? ”
“Yeah, exactly. But also, I feel like the respect thing holds me back from being able to tell her what I really want sometimes. And that, along with the fact that I just don’t want to think about things that aren’t possible.”
“Like what?”
“Like going to Princeton.”
Eva took off her glasses and folded them neatly beside her desk.
“Right, like going to Princeton. Exactly.”
Sabrina nodded. “Well, I had an offer in April.”
“Why didn’t you take it?”
“How could I possibly afford that? I don’t even know why I applied.”
“With financial aid.”
Sabrina snorted. And regretted it immediately.
“Well, I never thought I’d get anywhere on that front. I missed the deadline. I guess I was just a realist about it. There are a lot of other kids with better grades even than me, and I think it would have been tough. And now I have another problem, you know, so it’s an even more impossible idea.”
“Yes, I know, you are undocumented. There are ways, kid. Ways we can get around it. But now we have the problem of getting your place back at Princeton. You haven’t even put up a fight yet. Can’t give up yet.”
“I don’t know, Ms. Kim…”
“Eva.”
“Eva, I don’t know. I don’t know that my mom could deal with it all, and I would have to move away. And well, it’s a lot. Plus, in real terms, I don’t even know that they would give me my place back. I’m sure they’ve given it away.”
“Never say never. I still know some people over there,” she said, smiling.
“It feels like a huge leap.”
“I think it would be, yes. Great things are a leap. But also, it would be cri-mi-nal”—Eva wrapped her lips around every syllable dramatically— “if you left it hanging and didn’t give it a good old college try…. Ya see what I did there?”
Sabrina laughed. Sometimes Eva made her feel like she could do anything. That the invisible borders that had always kept her inside were just faded lines of paint on the sidewalk that she could leap over at any moment.
“But that means I gotta understand the whole picture too. Your mom, her situation. All of it. You understand what I mean, right?”
“I just don’t know if my mom will talk. It’s never been something we really talked about, honestly.”
“Well, like I said, you never know what I might have in common with her. Bring her by next week. No coincidence, no story.”