This is the story of my family's journey into a brand new world as they took an unthinkable risk for a better life.

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It all starts in January of 2000. I was about 2 and a half years old at this time. My father was running his own business putting together computers and selling them. It was thriving, he had recently taken on two more employees. My paternal uncle had moved to America a year and a half earlier where he had made a friend who was a recruiter out of New Jersey. He passed along my father's contact and soon enough, my father would receive an interview for work in IT consulting (something that was pretty far out of his element). America's market was booming, DOTCOM and Y2K were pushing industry and stocks higher and higher. The recruiter was confident he could find my father work within a month and offered him a job. My father weighed his options as leaving behind everything he'd ever known to take a risk on the American Dream seemed like a lot.

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Ultimately, he shut the business down and arrived in New Jersey in August with 2000 dollars to his name (far more than many of the other immigrants). The stock market would come close to its peak on September 1st before beginning one of the biggest recessions in American history. My father lived in a sponsored motel during this period and found it increasingly difficult to find work. The language barrier proved to be a far bigger hurdle than he had anticipated. For two months he went to interview after interview that ultimately never led to anything. His salary was cut from the recruiting agency as they sensed the market downturn and he was told his sponsored housing was being pulled and he would have to find his own place to stay.

He saw an ad looking for roommates at his local grocery store and moved in with two other Indian immigrants. He ended up finding a job at a call center although it was less than ideal. The pay was not good and the hours were not either. Eight months had passed since he'd left me and my mother behind and it was starting to become apparent that my mother and I would need to make our move to America soon but my father didn't know how he would afford that. He sent me and my mother to Detroit to live with my uncle. After 15 days, his friend heard about what was going on and graciously offered to house our entire family indefinitely while we got on our feet.

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We stayed there for two and a half months. My mother learned to drive during this time. She started going door to door at stores looking for work until she found a cashier position. She would have 10 hour shifts with only a fifteen minute break for lunch. This fifteen minutes were the only time she was allowed to sit down. My father says she would come home with her legs shaking. My father didn't want to overstay his welcome and decided to move us into a basement area he found. Rent was cheap but the living area was small. Money started to run out, even with all this, it was difficult to make ends meet.

My family was down to only enough money to afford plane tickets to go back at this point. They decided to call it quits and go back and restart their once successful business. Oh well. They tried. But before they pulled the trigger, my father would receive a phone call from an interview several months ago he had long forgotten about. They had work for him at Fannie Mae in Herndon, VA and they needed him to start within 2 days. So my family moved once again. My mother wanted to find work again and started asking everyone she met. She ended up working at a daycare making far less than minimum wage. Soon, she would be pregnant with my brother.

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About a year and half after my brother was born, my father recognized we needed more space than the apartment and moved us into a townhouse. My mother would soon study up and get the appropriate licenses to begin her own daycare to keep earning money while she raised me and my brother.

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During this time, my mother got fed up with being inside all day and started looking for other work. She found some through a connection but knew no English for what was essentially a transcribing position. The first three months were rough, she was under-performing and still trying to take night classes to learn the language better. But she stuck with it and got better. The company went through a downturn and started cutting staff till she was the last remaining employee on her shift. She decided to learn again and spent all of her free time learning QA testing and getting the appropriate certifications. She would interview around for six months until a company finally took a chance on her. Again, she had no idea what she was doing and essentially learned on the job.

My parents had applied for our green cards in 2002. It would take seven years in a post 9/11 climate for a family with the last name of Shah to get approved.

Today my father is a Senior Systems Engineer still at Fannie Mae. My mother is a lead QA tester. Both are proud American citizens. Their hard work and resilience is something I don't think I could ever match but has offered me a life where I don't have to. I wanted to share their inspiring story in the land of opportunity.

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