When people ask me if I identify as an immigrant I think about the man at Kent State who called me a souvenir.

It was 2018 and I was a high school junior touring colleges with my family. He was probably in his 60s, he wore a mustache and had a kind face. He looked like the type of professor who liked to chat about his personal life for half of the lecture.

He made small talk with my parents for a while as my father explained that Kent state was not on my list of schools, but a place that he wanted to visit. As a student protestor of the Vietnam War himself, he wanted to pay his respects to those killed by the national guard. The man glanced my way and cheerfully asked my dad “did you get a souvenir?”

At first none of us understood what he meant. Surely he was referring to the gift shop. In our confusion he elaborated “I adopted two daughters from Vietnam” he said. In our shock we awkwardly chuckled, and made our way back to the car. Having coasted through life up until this point without confronting my origins, I shoved the encounter down into the recesses of my mind until senior year of college.

In the spring of 2024, Columbia University threatened to call in the national guard on their student body for setting up camp on the main quad to protest the institutions complicity in the Gazan genocide. I was sitting in my tent at my own college’s encampment when I came across a headline on my phone warning that “this could be another Kent State.” The memory, like a boomerang, returned as swift and sudden as the day it happened. This time I dissected it in a poem.

This time it was different. My poem was my home turf. I inhabited the lines on the page, moving around words, changing borders and boundaries of meaning at my whim. Curiosity was my scalpel as I picked apart the word souvenir, peeled back the layers of the encounter, searching for meaning.

A souvenir resides in one place as a reminder of another place. Before it leaves the country, it has not yet become a souvenir. Like an immigrant and an adoptee, the act of leaving, of moving, creates its existence. The souvenir is bittersweet. Sealed inside of us is the intangible nostalgia of a different time and place, as well as the grief that you can never fully return or replicate that moment. In this way I do feel like a souvenir. But that is not all. Unlike the souvenir, the immigrant is not a static object but a person confronting daily life, impacted by the history that they represent and deciding how to define themself.

In my poem, I sought to prove this. I wrote that I come to my father “not as a keepsake but for the sake of those kept away from their land.” I called attention to how the very presence of the displaced immigrant is a statement. They are the runoff, the pollutant, the residue, reminding the country that their hands are never clean. Not here by choice but by necessity. Not here to take but to regrow what was deprived of them. And so the country tries to remove, assimilate, and erase the realities of the immigrant journey and personhood. When the immigrant calls attention to themself, when they speak their mind, when they are more than subservient, they must be punished and become the scapegoat for the country’s failures.

We adoptees are a special case. Unlike the immigrants whose faces resemble our own, we did not play the game of life that is meritocracy. We did not face hurdles of citizenship tests, working papers, and minimum wage jobs to scrape by in a new country. As long as we learned the language, showed attachment and interest in our new family and surroundings, our white parents helped us skip to the finish line.

For this reason, many of us believe that we should keep our head down in gratitude. We were given the golden ticket and should not squander it. When we criticize, when we protest against a nation that took us in, when we point out the colonial history that our family is built on, we are ungrateful. Perhaps it is easier to encase our past within ourselves, and look away from the headlines of people who look like us, who could be us. To remain just a cute palatable memento, when in fact we are a memorial.

But before the word souvenir was a cheap item at a gift store or a bobble head on the dashboard of a car, it meant a memory. It comes from the Latin word sub venir, to come from below, to rise from our subconscious. No matter how much a country tries to suppress the history of its inhabitants. No matter how much those inhabitants push down the pain of that history. It all lives, in our depths, and it will inevitably find a way to resurface.

My poem was addressed to my father, paralleling our campus protests, and the return of a history that we try to forget. The poem ends with a question “what will you do now?” While it initially seems directed towards my father, the question on a line of its own, calls to a broader audience. It is a reminder that none of us are not idle souvenirs, but active participants of the present. In this land that we do not possess but inhabit, we all carry the responsibility of the future.