Where have all the flowers gone?

FORTY-EIGHT years ago, my mother, my sister, and I arrived in the United States as political refugees from General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. Though we came from Latin America, no one accused us of being rapists or of eating cats and dogs. Immigration officials were kind. After we found a small apartment, the neighbours brought us pies, and the lady upstairs offered to teach me how to touch-type.

Good things kept coming our way. My father was hired to teach at the local university; I was awarded a scholarship to attend private school. We even received H-1 visas – the kind the Maga (Make America Great Again) crowd now wants to abolish.

In a few months I fell in love with the US. Schoolteachers kept pulling me aside to make sure I was fine. The librarian took an interest in me and fed me books (F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man made an impression, as did Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible).