It was a hot, dry afternoon, sometime in the spring of 2009. I was wearing an oversized T-shirt and a pair of shorts twice the size of my waist, held up with a piece of wire. I sat beneath a tree across from the bamboo office of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), waiting.
My heart pounded as sweat rolled down my face. Every few minutes I looked toward the dirt road, hoping to see the white van. Finally the blue IOM logo came into view, and within seconds, dozens of people were running toward it.
A man wearing a white shirt with the blue UN emblem stepped out carrying a stack of papers. Without saying much, he pinned the pages to the wall outside the office.
The crowd surged forward. Everyone searched for the same thing: a nine-digit case number that would determine their family’s future and fate. Some people burst out with joy. Others wept. A few walked away in silence. Years of waiting, interviews, background checks, and rumors had all come down to a few sheets of paper taped to a bamboo wall.
I squeezed through the crowd until I found our number.
Destination: Cleveland, Ohio, USA.
That was the first time I realized my life was about to change.
I ran as fast as I could across dense forest, over the narrow canals, and through the dusty paths of the refugee camp until I reached our hut, sector A, number 63.
My mother was inside, putting away the dishes and preparing dinner from whatever we had leftover from early morning.
“Mama,” I shouted before I could catch my breath. “We’re going to Umerica.”
I didn’t even know how to pronounce America. But the word already felt like it belonged to me. For the first time in my life, it wasn’t just the name of a distant country. It was something I could claim as my own, something I could say without lowering my voice or wondering whether I belonged.
I was born in a refugee camp in Nepal after my family was driven from Bhutan during the campaign of ethnic cleansing that forced more than 100,000 ethnic Nepalis from the country.
Growing up, I belonged nowhere, both logistically and legally. To the Bhutanese government, I was a child born in exile. To Nepal, I was a refugee confined behind the boundaries of a camp even though I spoke the same language. The barbed wire fences that surrounded us did more than mark the edge of our settlement: they defined the limits of our world. Every document I carried identified me only as a refugee. I had no country to call my own, no passport, and no state that claimed me as its citizen.
To me, Umerica or America meant possibility – another beginning. I imagined schools, streets I had never seen, a life beyond the bamboo fences of the refugee camp. I imagined, though I could not yet name it, the chance to belong somewhere.
My mother heard something different that day.
She had already buried four children. She had lost her parents, the home she built in Bhutan, and nearly everything that had anchored her life. America did not simply represent a new beginning. It also meant leaving behind the last fragile threads that still connected her to the life she had once known and built.
Standing in our small hut that afternoon, we were both looking toward the same country. I saw a future, possibilities, and unprecedented access to freedom. She was quietly mourning a past that was still fresh in her memories. I was happy for what was ahead of me, and she was happy for me, at least as I perceived it.
But two years later, after medical screenings, multiple security interviews, and years of waiting, the paperwork changed. My family boarded a plane headed not to Cleveland, but to Twin Falls, Idaho, a small rural town I had never heard of, in a state I couldn’t find on a map. America remained the destination. Everything else was uncertain.
More than 15 years have passed.
I am a naturalized American citizen and a journalist. Over the past two years, I have reported on a Rohingya refugee whose death, after he was abandoned by US border patrol, was ruled a homicide. I have sat with mothers separated from their children, interviewed refugees returned to the countries they once fled in fear, and watched the refugee program that gave my family a second chance grind almost to a halt while making an exception for a small group of white South Africans.
Reporting those stories forced me to confront questions I never expected to ask. How do you love a country whose government sometimes fails to live up to the ideals that first drew your family here?
And there was a harder question beneath it all: how do you continue loving the neighbors and friends who welcomed your refugee family with extraordinary kindness, then later voted for leaders or administration whose policies might have kept that same family from ever entering the country?
The answer lies in how we define America. Politics and public policy undoubtedly shape how we experience this country, especially for those living on the socioeconomic margins. But we should not confuse America’s governing institutions with the ideals that have always challenged those institutions to become better.
I learned this truth from two different Americas.
The first was a small town in Idaho that welcomed my refugee family and taught me what belonging looked like. Neighbors taught me how to drive, how to change a tire, how to fill out college applications, and even how to ask someone out to the school prom. They invited us into their homes before we had much to offer in return. They became part of our family long before the United States became my country on paper.
Many of those same people later voted for Donald Trump, whose immigration policies I now investigate and often criticize. Holding those two truths together, loving the people who helped raise me while opposing some of the choices they made at the ballot box, has never been easy. But democracy has never asked us to choose between honesty and grace. It asks us to practice both.
The second America revealed itself through my reporting and my education. I saw the generosity that had welcomed my family reflected in volunteers, teachers, lawyers, bishops and neighbors who continued opening their doors to strangers. I also witnessed government decisions that separated families, turned refugees away and closed doors that had once been opened to my family. Those experiences taught me that America has always contained both extraordinary compassion and profound contradiction, be it the country’s history of slavery or its recent politics of exclusion.
Loving this country has never required me to ignore either one. It has required me to hold them together. That, to me, is the deepest form of patriotism.
That, to me, is America.
It is the America my family waited years to reach. It is the America that transformed a refugee child into a citizen, a journalist, and someone free to criticize his own government without fear or intimidation. That freedom exists only because generations of Americans insisted that this country remain faithful to its constitution and to the promises it makes.
The measure of our patriotism is not whether we pretend that promise has already been fulfilled. It is whether we continue the work of fulfilling it.
I have never known another country as my own. This is my home, even if some people have told me otherwise because of my accent, the color of my skin, or the place where I was born.
They were wrong. This is my country, too.
Some of the people who once told me to “go home” are still my fellow Americans, and I have chosen to keep talking with them, not because it is easy, but because I believe our democracy depends on our willingness to see one another as more than political opponents. We do not preserve this republic by agreeing on everything, nor should we. We preserve it by refusing to give up on one another, by believing that our fellow citizens are always capable of growth, and by continuing to work toward a country that is better for ourselves, our neighbors, and the generations that follow.
As we mark the 75th anniversary of the 1951 refugee convention, at a moment of extraordinary political division, I hope we remember what has always made the US remarkable. It has never been perfect. Its greatness has never come from claiming to be perfect. It has come from its capacity to welcome the stranger, expand the circle of belonging, and keep reaching toward ideals that remain just beyond our grasp.
Somewhere, another child is standing outside a refugee camp office, waiting for a list to be posted on a bamboo wall. I hope that when they whisper the word “America”, even if they cannot yet pronounce it, they are still whispering the name of a country that believes impossible beginnings can become ordinary lives. That is the America the little boy who shouted “Umerica” was waiting for. It is still the America I believe in.
- Lok Darjee is a former refugee who writes on immigration, identity and democracy