American Dreams

Show Description +

Below is a collection of stories, reflections, and photos from readers on their visions of the American Dream. Email hello@theatlantic.com and we’ll do our best to add your contribution to the ongoing series.

Sort Notes

Newest First Oldest First

Show 5 Newer Notes

9:59 AM / August 28, 2015

American Dreams: Emigrating From China

Getting meta with lady liberty on the @SIferryNYC. #atlanticamericandream #generationZ pic.twitter.com/y2hbYTdlFL
— Melissa Wantz (@mwantz) August 2, 2015

Atlantic reader XY Qian tells her story:

I was born and raised in Shanghai, China. I have heard about the American Dream often enough in my formative years that I wanted to experience it myself. I landed in the U.S. at the tender age of 23, taking my husband with me.

I received my doctoral degree in a small social science field from a Big Ten university close to the East Coast, and my husband received his Master’s degree in engineering from the same university. We now live in Minnesota, each having a full-time job that provides benefits. We own two good cars and a decent house in a great school district. Our daughter is four months old now, healthy and having received wonderful care, thanks to the very advanced medical resources available in our state.

So yes, on the surface, my American dream has been realized: advanced degrees from a good university, a full-time decent job for each one of us, a decent house in a good school district, two cars, starting a family.

However, why “on the surface”? Because for any “common Joe,” whether U.S. citizens or immigrants, to realize the American Dream, there needs to be courageous leaders, which has been in extremely short supply. Below is the list of things to start with:

Immigration reform: Every politician says it has been broken for years. I applaud President Obama’s efforts to reform it. However, the immigration system is at the point where an entire overhaul is much needed. Patchwork no longer works. Why is this relevant to my American Dream? Because, despite being highly educated and valuable to the American workforce, neither my husband nor I has received permanent residency yet.

Politics: The conservative right uses religion to hijack politics. This is so ironic, because the first wave of white people fled to the U.S. to avoid religious persecution and to pursue freedom. Why is this relevant to my American Dream? Because the GOP base, in my perception, is extremely hostile towards new immigrants like me. In fact, I am extremely grateful for living in the Twin Cities area—progressive, open minded, welcoming, and affordable with a high quality of life.

Tax system & health care: Why should the wealthiest Americans and the biggest corporations enjoy so many loopholes? Why should health care be so expensive and yet health outcomes so poor compared to other developed countries? Why is this relevant to my American Dream? Because the tax system and health care cost, together, have convinced me that, in today’s U.S., it is a lot more likely to become poor overnight than to become wealthy eventually—completely against my understanding of the Dream.

Racial issues: Sure, Asian Americans have higher median pre-tax household income than White, Black, or Hispanic households. However, as the smallest racial group in the U.S., Asian Americans have been constantly overlooked, because it is not a significant voting bloc. In addition, the treatment of Asian-American students by admission offices across top-tier universities is alarming. I once read a Black mother telling her Black son that he must be twice as good as White people in order to compete on the same level. Well, Asian kids have to be three times as good, and it still doesn’t guarantee anything, unless, of course, your family has connections or is a major donor. In fact, I already started to worry about my daughter’s future.

You must want to ask: Why don’t you go back to China? My answer: we have simply chosen the less bad.

Have your own story to tell? What’s your vision of the American Dream? Email hello@theatlantic.com. The above tweet was submitted by readers through our #AtlanticAmericanDreams hashtag. And check out all the great Instagram versions here. Emily just put together a great gallery of mashups of reader-submitted photos in collaboration with EchoSight. More on that series soon. Update on this thread from a reader who prefers to stay nameless:

There is a lot of irony in this woman feeling her dreams are threatened because people, who she perceives as being wealthy, relative to her high dual-income family, are inadequately taxed, while she says she is threatened by lack of permanent residency, while also being threatened by her ethnic group being too small in numbers to successfully lobby for race-based college admission.

Since she referenced the historical aspect of the American Dream, it is reasonable to inquire whether a black (or white) sharecropper felt similarly threatened in 1920 or, hell, 1950. Did an Irish immigrant, pretty fresh off the boat, and pressed into the bloodbath of Antietam, have a similar concept of what it meant to be threatened?

I’m personally very happy to have such a family living in this country, and I’d favor allowing them to have a much more clear path to citizenship, but I’d rather not read the whining about some people not being taxed enough, as this family inevitably reduces the bargaining power of families employed in the same industry, and the whining about their ethnic group not having the numbers to use state power in the manner of another ethnic group.

8:09 PM / August 26, 2015

American Dreams: The Promise of College

#AtlanticAmericanDream: Princeton through its arches

A photo posted by Allie (@nosoundofwater) on Jul 22, 2015 at 12:28pm PDT

In Matt Thompson’s short history on the meaning of the American Dream, he prompted readers to share “what the dream represents to you, whether your vision of the dream is dead, dying, or hasn’t yet been born.” Nicole Qualtieri, a reader from Bozeman, Montana, reflects on her struggle to keep the dream alive:

When I think of the American Dream, I think of a happy couple in a white picket fence neighborhood, with 1.7 kids and a golden retriever playing in the yard and two hybrid SUVs in the driveway. I think of financial stability and beach vacations and college funds and private schools. I think of 401ks, health insurance with low deductibles, masters degrees, mommy blogs, and Crossfit/yoga memberships for the whole family.

As the kid of a working-class family growing up in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, I was very much so surrounded by a trope of that American Dream, and I was raised on that American Dream to a point. College was the thing that was constantly held over my head, the thing to be aspired to, the mark of upward mobility that would elevate my status and create a sort of social promise—a promise that to me felt to be the crux of the American Dream.

If you go to college, doors will be opened to and for you. Then, work hard. That’s all it takes.

I eventually did get into college—a public, in-state, safety-school type of college. After six years of attempting to do it on my own—through balancing two to three part-time jobs, a full course load, and a club sport—I graduated, with a price tag of $40,000 hanging over my head.

As a first generation student with the highest level of financial need, I had grown up with money as a constant stressor, so I grasped onto loans like a life vest and it kept me afloat.

These days, at 31 years old, I view these loans very differently.

In stark contrast to the life support that they once were for me, they have become the turbulent water pulling me under. Like many millennials, I’ve worked my way through a multitude of resume-building jobs in which I’ve sought out creative fulfillment, career satisfaction, and a sense of stability. Those jobs have ranged from low-paying positions that are interesting and fulfilling to high-pressure high-paying jobs in which I had to sacrifice my life in order to be successful.

And all the while, even amidst the high paying jobs, I have felt the weight of that $40k sitting like a boulder on my chest. I’ve learned to see my student loans as a second income tax against my working-class status. As I made more money, I watched the loans take away more of it. I was never able to build the true kind of financial plan I envisioned or fully enjoy the money I was making, to put it away for safekeeping, to begin to legitimately save for a home or a new car or to invest the amount I should have been investing in my 401k.

Then, when I made less money, I’d watch the interest tack on all of those dollars that I had so dutifully put towards the balance. I watched as my country attempted to profit off my attempt to break out of my socioeconomic position. It’s an indescribable feeling, a veritable slap in the face to my own sense of upward mobility.

These days, I watch on social media as many of my good friends who didn’t have to pay for college are able to buy homes and begin to invest their lives in ways that currently seem unattainable for me, ways that mimic the American Dream I grew up with. Often this is done with the help of their parents, who paid for their college, for the down payment on their home, and who might have gifted them the hybrid SUV in their driveway.

And as they travel along on their paths of stability and privilege, I go on a date where the guy I’m talking with reveals that he has $60,000 in student loans, and I’m adding the numbers and the years of payments in my head and practically excusing myself from the table in the process.

I did everything right. This is where I start having problems with the social contract that higher education was supposed to sign alongside me. This is where I begin to really lose sight of that personal optimism that so many people seem to somehow maintain.

So what is the American Dream to me now?

I don’t doubt my own ability to be successful in the American sense. If I wanted to make the kind of money that could erase this issue, I could sacrifice a good portion of the youth that I have left to 80-100 hour work weeks in high pressure corporate sales—a track I was on for awhile—and maybe even afford a therapist to talk me through all of the nervous breakdowns that come along with that.

The other choice is to continue down the paycheck-to-paycheck path of creative fulfillment that I have crossed into since leaving corporate America two years ago, but it’s a path in which I know the payoff is precarious and hidden somewhere on a far-off horizon. It’s a path in which I consider getting a masters degree and possibly pursuing even more of the thing that weighs me down, all in hopes of what? Spiritual fulfillment? Creative agency? A chance for some sort of greatness amidst the chaos?

Hope is the key element lying within these rhetorical questions, but I don’t give it much credence these days. It’s a faint enough glimmer, a reflection of a young, enthusiastic, hard-working person who once believed in the American Dream enough to buy into its script, to follow it to the letter, and to end up with it strapping down my financial future and holding it hostage.

I’d like to think this is a story of eventual redemption, but I’m not so sure. To hang on blindly to the notion that picket fences and beach vacations are right around the corner seems to be the running of a fool’s errand.

But the one American tenet that continues to stick has been my ability to stay stubborn and resilient in the midst of the disappointment and the financial defeat. My red, white, and blue bootstraps are well worn and familiar by this point, so I’ll continue to bite my lip, pull myself up, gain some traction, hum a patriotic Toby Keith song, and hope that the straps don’t break entirely.