American Dream

The American Dream in the novel is both an invitation and a burden: it gives immigrant parents a reason to risk the familiar for their children’s future, yet can narrow the lives those children are allowed to imagine. Through the Kingsley and Bae families, the ideal appears not as a single destination but as competing hopes—acting, financial security, education, artistic freedom, and the right to remain at home. Its promise is powerful precisely because the characters work toward it, even when the economic and legal conditions around them make its rewards uncertain.

A family’s wager on a new country

Samuel Kingsley’s plan begins with a specific version of upward mobility. He moves to the United States two years before Patricia Kingsley and their young daughter, intending to establish himself as a Broadway actor. At first, living alone with an old family friend, he has no need to work and uses his savings for limited expenses. The separation is meant to last a year; it stretches to two, and Patricia eventually decides she cannot wait longer. The move therefore begins with a family already negotiating the cost of a dream: Samuel’s opportunity depends on distance from his wife and child, while Patricia must decide how long their lives can remain suspended around his ambitions.

After the family joins him, the dream has to meet the rent. Samuel takes a security-guard job at a Wall Street building and finds them a one-bedroom apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn. He chooses the graveyard shift so that he can audition during the day, but the arrangement leaves him tired when auditions come around. Parts do not materialize, and his Jamaican accent does not disappear despite his efforts. Patricia and Natasha Kingsley continue speaking with Jamaican accents, even as Samuel tries to teach them what he considers proper American pronunciation. The family’s daily speech thus holds two versions of adaptation at once: his attempt to fit the expected sound of the country and their continued connection to the place they left.

Rejection makes the acting ambition more than a practical plan. Samuel experiences it as an accumulating injury, and the narrative presents him as increasingly unsure whether he or his dream will endure. The American Dream does not simply fail because he lacks effort: he has crossed an ocean, taken exhausting work, and kept auditioning. Instead, the gap between the promised opportunity and what the labor produces becomes part of the family’s history. His disappointment also complicates the image of the immigrant parent as someone who has arrived with a settled, purely selfless purpose. Samuel has his own unrealized ambition, and it remains consequential even as he works to provide for his family.

Gifts, security, and the next generation

In the early years after the move, Samuel uses layaway to buy gifts the family can barely afford. He hopes that seeing Patricia and the children happy in the United States will help persuade Patricia that leaving their country, friends, and relatives was worthwhile. Natasha does not know or need to know that calculation at the time: the headphones her father buys become her favorite gift. Their emotional meaning changes with her understanding of him. They recall his hope that the move would deliver the American Dream, but also the distance between the father she once worshipped and the father she later struggles to admire. A material object meant to make migration feel worthwhile becomes an intimate record of affection, disappointment, and altered family feeling.

Dae Hyun Bae’s version of the same promise is shaped by a different past. He believes the United States offers opportunity and that his sons will have more than he had. As a child in South Korea, he was expected to inherit his family’s barely profitable crab-fishing business, where each season was a struggle simply to survive. His experience of poverty informs his insistence on security for his children. He wants them to go to school, become successful, and have money and respect; he imagines those achievements leading to the life he associates with the American Dream. The novel makes the protective logic visible without presenting it as uncomplicated: Dae Hyun’s fear of deprivation helps explain why he treats practical security as more important than what his sons want in the moment.

For Daniel Jae Ho Bae, that priority creates a conflict over whether he can abandon college for a life as a starving artist. He explains that his immigrant parents work constantly so that he and Charlie Bae can have the American Dream, and that choosing art could mean losing financial support for college. Daniel understands that his father would cut him off, but he does not interpret the threat as simple cruelty. He connects it to Dae Hyun’s inability to see past his own history and allow his children to have histories and ambitions of their own. The ideal that was supposed to open a future can therefore become a rule for selecting one: education and financial stability are treated as prerequisites, while artistic risk is cast as throwing the future away.

Belonging measured by law

Natasha’s experience exposes a sharper contradiction between the American Dream and the institutions governing who may stay in the country. She has lived in the United States since she was eight, attends a competitive science magnet high school, and is approaching her senior year. She wants the ordinary milestones of school—prom, graduation, and time with friends—and has begun assembling an application to Brooklyn College. Her mother has saved for two years to travel to Florida to buy a Social Security card bearing stolen numbers, which Natasha hopes to use for financial aid and, with a scholarship, perhaps to attend SUNY Binghamton or another in-state school. These plans are concrete and carefully assembled, but they depend on documents the family does not lawfully possess and on Natasha remaining in the country.

The family’s undocumented status turns the promise of education and belonging into a legal crisis. Natasha goes to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services building in downtown Manhattan on the day the family is due to leave, hoping someone might help, although she knows the agency is not the place with jurisdiction over her case. Earlier, when Lester Barnes explains the situation, Natasha resists treating her father’s DUI as a debt she must pay. In her account, his arrest led to the family being discovered, and discovery threatens to take away the only place she calls home. The chain linking one person’s action to an entire family’s removal makes the dream of individual advancement inseparable from immigration enforcement.

The family tries to use Peter’s United States citizenship as the basis for a cancellation-of-removal case. They learn that Samuel must meet requirements including ten years of residence and good moral character, and must show that removal would cause extreme hardship to a qualifying United States citizen relative. They hire the cheapest lawyer they can find and argue that returning to Jamaica would uproot Peter from his home. The judge denies the case: the family understands that return would not put Peter’s life in danger, and that the psychological harm of removing a child from the place he knows does not satisfy the standard. Their lawyer advises against appealing and recommends voluntary departure, which would at least leave them with some hope of returning rather than a deportation on their records. Jeremy Fitzgerald later cannot persuade the judge to overturn that voluntary-removal decision. The procedural distinction offers a possible future route back, but it does not save Natasha from leaving that night.

The promise and its costs

The novel places these family stories beside a definition of immigration grounded in hope, bravery, and sometimes desperation. The American Dream is not dismissed: it motivates Samuel’s move and auditions, Patricia’s sacrifices, Dae Hyun’s drive to protect his sons, and Natasha’s effort to plan for college. But the stories also show that the ideal is not a guarantee that effort will yield security or belonging. Samuel works and auditions without obtaining the acting life he sought; Daniel’s education is framed as a condition of support rather than an open choice; and Natasha’s plans can be interrupted by an immigration order even after years of schooling and social attachment.

That tension gives the concept its narrative force. For the parents, the dream often means escaping scarcity and securing a future their children will not have to fight for. For the children, it can mean either access to that security or the freedom to define success differently. For Natasha, the most immediate question is more basic than upward mobility: whether the country in which she has grown up will recognize her as someone entitled to stay. The ideal promises that a person can make a future through work and hope; the novel’s families reveal how unevenly that promise is distributed, and how often the pursuit of a better life requires choices whose costs fall on the people the dream is meant to protect.