The Best Part of Being a Son of Immigrants

Three months before I was to enroll at Boston University, my father secured a second job driving customers through the Denver International Airport in wheelchairs. “It’s only temporary,” he said one evening during dinner.

Guilt surged through me, as I assumed that he was working the second job to pay for my college education. Grants and loans paid for the majority of my tuition and boarding, but there were still two thousand dollars that would have to be accounted for by my family.

“How long is temporary?” I asked.

“I’m thinking just the summer, but I don’t know,” my father said.

“Oh,” I said. “I guess that’s not too long.”

Of course, I would have preferred that my dad not add on more to the load he was already carrying. He was fifty years old, practically ancient according to standards set by an eighteen-year-old kid. At age fifty, dad was spending three-quarters of his days toiling at the airport during the height of the summer, leaving me worried about his physical and mental welfare. Dad brushed aside my concerns about the eventual toll working eighteen hours a day could exact on his mind and body. As a Nigerian immigrant who’d worked two jobs while raising a family and securing his multiple degrees, managing a nearly impossible workload was just a part of life.