Ball Knowledge

 Unlike physical weights, you can’t keep training to lift the weights of the past. Instead, the best way to lift them is to drop them. While that sounds really dumb, if you keep working to lift burdens that aren’t even a part of your life, you’ll constantly be fighting someone else’s fight, not your own. The best way is to just drop them; but it sounds so simple, yet it can be harder than lifting any physical weight. Growing up an immigrant, you always feel these implicit pressures on your back from your family. You have to do well in school; you need to make your family proud; you need to honor the sacrifices your family made. While these external forces aren’t bad and have pushed me to work hard, there comes a point where I start to wonder about my own life; am I doing this for myself, or am I doing this for someone else? While I was flying to Texas, I started reading the last chapters of The Best We Could Do and realized how severely the weight of the past impacted Thi Bui. S...

 While I was reading The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, the events her family went through felt surreal, yet at its core, I realized many of the dynamics within my own family parallel it in two main ways: cultural assimilation and Thi’s cultural confusion with my own. My family may not have had as dramatic a journey as Thi’s to America, but once they got here they had to fit into a completely new world just like Thi’s parents. Rather than sailing the sea to get to America, my parents took my older brother and flew from India for my dad’s new job, starting fresh and leaving everything behind. They had to learn to adapt to American life while still holding onto their Indian roots. Today, my family has built their own life in America, reaching their “American Dream,” building not only wealth but an Indian community that has made America feel like home. Unlike my brother, I was born here in America, so my life has always been a confusing mix of Indian and American culture. For most c...