How an Undocumented Immigrant Made Me the Luckiest Sportscaster in the World
Escaping poverty in Hong Kong to have a shot at making it in America
My phone buzzed on Memorial Day. It was an update in a text chain with my cousins. I clicked on the image of a document, brown with age, and discovered a letter addressed to “The Honorable Robert Kennedy.”
The letter described a family surviving a Communist regime, a “husband” — my grandfather — working aboard a ship that docked in Baltimore, Maryland. Apparently, he’d gotten lost in the city and did not return to his boat. According to the letter, that same man would surrender himself to immigration officials. He did not want to violate laws.
My grandmother, or rather the person who knew English well enough to type this for her, wrote:
I appeal for your kindness and sympathy to intervene on our behalf and to exercise and execute your power and authority by notifying your immigration authorities to temporarily revoke, resend, or at least shelf their order of deportation and, instead continue to let my husband stay on just a few yers [sic] longer until such he will have saved a little money to return to Hong Kong to start a little business of our own in order to keep us all alive.
