I’m a big fan of any story that tells of the true hustle to live the American dream. I especially love it when it’s told from the immigrant perspective. We all know there are many misconceptions about people who come from abroad, whether legally or illegally, to make a better life for themselves and their families. But the story we rarely get to take in are the ones about what happens when that dream falls apart. When the expectations and the reality are just so vastly different, one can’t imagine trying to move forward. One of my favorite books in 2014 was The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henriquez, which shared that experience from the Latin American perspective. And my favorite book of this year is Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue, which shares a similar heartbreak from not only the Cameroonian perspective, but the American one as well.
In it, we follow Jende Jonga and his wife Neni as they try and adjust to life in the United States, particularly, in probably the hardest place in the country to survive: New York City. The year is 2007, and after working as a cab driver, Jende lands a gig as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. As Jende succeeds in his role for the successful exec, his wife is even offered opportunities working for Edwards’s wife, Cindy. Despite their humble lifestyle in a one-bedroom apartment in Harlem, the Jonga’s world is soon filled with trips to the Hamptons, designer clothing, a healthy salary for Jende, and the chance for Neni to finish studying to become a pharmacist. They are ever so close to showing their son and newborn daughter a better life. Neni finally gets to live the way she’d always imagined she would in America and Jende finally has brought his family stability.
Sadly, the worlds of both the Jonga and the Edwards families implode as Lehman Brothers collapses and subsequently, the 2008 financial crisis begins. And while the money, power and influence of Clark Edwards allows him to bounce back (can’t say the same for Cindy), Jende and Neni aren’t as lucky. What follows is marital discord, violence, working menial gigs just to keep the lights on, crippling stress that leads to medical problems, and dangerous decisions made for the sake of family.
You’re probably thinking, this story doesn’t sound like it has a happy ending. Well, it does. It just depends on what you deem a success. Is success found in money? Is it found in status? Or is success having a sense of peace when you close your eyes at night?
Behold the Dreamers is about many things, including the lengths that people will go to achieve that sense of peace when life, and the people in our lives, tell us it’s simply in materialistic things. The characters, who at one point or another are filled with both joy and sorrow, find it in everything from something as scary as drugs, to something as innocent as writing poetry while staring off into the water. But in the end, they find it most in family. They find peace after realizing the importance of putting family first, even if in doing so, they have to make some serious sacrifices.
Many people tell you that to achieve the American dream, you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and make a way out of no way. But Imbolo Mbue’s stunning portrayal of both the struggling immigrant as well as the status quo successful American family experience reveals to us a lot. That includes the ugly side of things that many of those “bootstrap” proponents always gloss over: The sacrifices, the friction, the depression, and the reality that trying to achieve the American dream can be an absolute nightmare.
