If you don’t know where you’re going any road will take you there

Boy George

In 1986 I was sixteen years old, and my future was settled. As soon as I graduated from high school, I was going get a job at UPS or FedEx, the benefits were solid, and I would work there for 20 years and then retire. One October morning John Jaques, my history teacher at City-As-School, asked me to write an essay about growing up in New York. I don’t remember anything about what I wrote, but I do remember knocking it out over lunch and handing it to him before I headed out to work at Ben & Jerry’s on sixth avenue and 4th street. Two days later, John informed me that he had entered my essay in a school competition, and I was one of four students selected as a winner, and I was heading to West Berlin, Germany.

America likes to romanticize its immigrant communities. The hard-working pull themselves up from the bootstraps theme is constantly reinforced with stories about a person who came to America with only a dollar in their pocket, and now they are worth billions. The truth is that for every outlier story, there are thousands whose every tomorrow sees the sun setting earlier on their hopes of getting out of the ghetto. For new immigrants, their hopes hang on longer. Their memories of a world before the ghetto make it harder for the rust of despair to build in them. For those born in the ghetto, the rust builds on fast and early. You don’t see a world outside the ghetto because you are the ghetto.

I arrived in West Berlin on a cold November morning in 1986. The German family I was staying with greeted my schoolmates and me at the Tempelhof Airport. After some introductions, we got my bags and were off to their 13-room apartment in the center of town. The family was wealthy and extremely pleasant. I was a complete curiosity to them, and I did not mind. I found them curious myself. Back in 1986, a kid from Brooklyn’s most extensive knowledge of Germans was goose-stepping Nazis from PBS’ World at War. I was Jane Goodall, and West Berlin was my Tanzania.

My time in Berlin was short, and conversations were limited because I couldn’t speak German, and the family I was with had a limited grasp of English. But the impact of the experience was exponential. For the first time in my life, I was not the ghetto; I was George. I could see beyond the limitations imposed on me. Nothing material was told to me. Nothing material was given to me. But I experienced a world of what was possible. When I came back home, back to the ghetto, I no longer wanted to be a driver for anyone but myself. I had no idea where I was going, but I knew that any road I took would take me there.