My supervisor woke me up this morning at 10:00am. I didn’t expect to see her name appear on my caller ID on a Saturday, so my immediate thought was that a document had been lost—or worse, a response had been incorrectly calendared and needed to be filed on Monday. To my delight, she was actually on her way home and just wanted to notify me of a favorable decision for a case I did a few weeks ago. Her M.O. is to text, but she was driving and didn’t want to risk forgetting.
This was the first wake up call I’ve welcomed with open arms. I got the case during the first week of my fellowship and it was in an area of the law that was completely foreign to me. The client came to our office because his public benefits had been denied months earlier. His case was more complicated than simply appealing an agency decision; by the time he arrived, a number of complicated procedural issues had also developed. After getting his intake file, I found a translator in the office who helped me communicate by phone. It turned out that the client received a number of notices from the agency responsible for his benefits, but in not speaking a squib of English, he never understood them. And he didn’t know who to turn to.
I remember my heart sinking when I read his responses to my questions, as rudimentary as they were. “No, I didn’t know what the notice said.” “No, I didn’t know that I could appeal.” “No, I don’t know why they did that to me.” It was only my first week, and I quickly learned that I my heart would sink again and again every week after. But that first moment of heartache would be memorable. My family’s first years in the United States were difficult in a similar way, even though I didn’t personally recognize the extent of our problems at the time. Being so naive and ignorant, I thought the world was full of possibilities for my family in this new country. I also believed my dad was the “most smartest” man in the world. It didn’t matter that my father had to stop attending school at third grade when the Revolution broke out; all that mattered was that he knew so much more than me, which led me to the obvious and logical conclusion that he knew everything—or at least could learn it all if he just wanted.
I remember approaching my father lap one night when I was 6-1/2 years old. He was sitting at this circular, red plastic table my grandmother had sent me and my then-toddler brother months earlier. My father was oversized in comparison, and the nondescript, puffy, yellow-tan jacket he was wearing (and always wore) made his lurch all that much more evident. As I walked toward him, he extended his arms and hoisted me up onto his lap to give me a glimpse at what he had been staring for quite awhile: a bunch of papers. I had started reading by that time, so I was able to sound out the words and syllables I saw in tiny, fine print: “af-fa-day-vit.” I couldn’t understand any of the it, of course, so I turned to my father for an explanation. That’s when I noticed that his eyes, which were generally bright and sparkly, were then deep and dark, and had narrowed in concentration till they were barely visible. I can picture myself admiring my father’s face, thinking how astute he was for being able to read so much of a foreign language.
Looking back, I realize my father didn’t understand the words on those documents. I now see details in his expression that manifested more than mere concentration. His furrowed eyebrows reflected his frustration in and regret of having left his home country without nothing more than dreams; the threads that flowed from the corners of his eyes told the story of an anxious man who feared that he wouldn’t be able to support the little boy sitting on his lap, to whom he wanted to give the world. Knowing what I know now, I would’ve done anything to pull the creases away from my father’s face and tell him that, in time, he would learn enough English to get by, and that he would eventually succeed as a parent too.
You can imagine my surprise when the client, whose limited education had also made his life so hard, appeared at my office in my father’s likeness. The two of us finally met face-to-face when I had to prepare him for his hearing, many months after our initial correspondence. He was already standing by the time I stepped out into the lobby to greet him. On first impression, my client bore no resemblance to my father; he was much taller and his face was much fuller. But still, he had a familiar quality. Then we shook hands. As my client smiled in amusement at the little boy in front of him, I immediately saw it. His smile. It’s the kind that appears when you see the first signs of relief. The kind that you give when you escape a war-torn country to a new land filled with promise and hope—it was the same optimistic smile that came into sight on my father’s face when we arrived in America. It’s also the same smile that drowns under unbearable hardship and fades away when asked about how those hardships have hurt its keeper. My client and my father shared that smile. And coincidentally, wrapped around my client was the same nondescript, puffy, yellow-tan jacket that my father once wore. It stood the test of time.
I know my client is a father with children of his own. He told me so when we met. But a small part of me would like to believe that he’s also the father I knew from those early years. Perhaps in his struggle to make ends meet, my father willed his energies in all ways to reach out for help—across land, space, and time—maybe even as far out as to his son at a point when his son would have enough power to make a difference. And in case that was what happened, I’m relieved my client won his appeal.
