A Tribute to My Parents' Perseverance: From Bangladesh to the Bronx

In April 1996, my parents arrived at JFK Airport with twenty dollars, two suitcases, and my mother eight and a half months pregnant with me. They had left everything behind for a country they'd never seen, where they didn't speak the language, and where even basic appliances were new to them.

My father was four years old during the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence. His earliest memory is hiding in a rice field with his grandfather while Pakistani soldiers burned down their village. When they came out of hiding, their home was gone. Everything was gone.

For the next five years, eleven members of his family lived in a single tin shack. When it rained, the roof leaked. The floor was dirt that turned to mud. But it was shelter, and after losing everything, that mattered.

Despite the poverty, my father was brilliant at mathematics. By age nine, he was tutoring older students to help his family buy food. To pay for his own school fees, he climbed coconut and jackfruit trees before dawn, selling the fruit at the local market.

In the evenings, he studied by kerosene lamp. He taught himself calculus from an English textbook—working through a language he didn't understand to learn the math he loved.

He became the first person from his district of 100,000 people to earn a Master's degree in Mathematics. Even now, thirty years after leaving Bangladesh, people in his village remember him. He showed them what was possible.

My mother was in college when she won the green card lottery. Around the same time, she met my father. They were both well-known in their villages: he for his academic achievements, she for her intelligence and ambition. They married and began planning their future together.

Then my mother became pregnant with me, and everything became urgent. A child born in Bangladesh wouldn't automatically have the right to immigrate with them. The immigration process for a newborn could take years, with no guarantee of success. They had to get to America before I was born.

My father earned eight dollars a month as a teacher. Two plane tickets to America cost four thousand dollars. The math was simple and crushing: it would take over forty years of saving every penny to afford the trip.

But he didn't have forty years. He had months. So he did what seemed impossible: he borrowed from everyone he knew, sold family jewelry, tutored day and night, called in every favor. How he gathered that money is still a source of amazement in our family.

They landed at JFK with two weeks to spare before my birth. After paying for tickets and visas, my father had exactly twenty dollars left. They knew no one. They had no jobs, no home. My mother had never seen a refrigerator before. Everything was unfamiliar.

My father had a nine-months-pregnant wife and nowhere to go. So he walked up and down Steinway Street in Astoria, begging passing Bangladeshi immigrants for a place to stay. One family said yes. They let my parents sleep on their living room floor, and two weeks later, I was born at Elmhurst Hospital.

My father found work as a hot dog vendor in Manhattan. The man with a Master's in Mathematics now spent twelve-hour days making change for tourists. His English was broken, but every day was progress.

My mother stayed home with me, teaching herself English from television. We watched Sesame Street together—both of us learning the alphabet, her at twenty-three, me as an infant.

They saved money with fierce discipline. Every dollar that didn't go to rent or food went toward our future. My father studied for certification exams after his vendor shifts. My mother stretched every dollar she could.

Slowly, things improved. The hot dog cart led to driving a taxi. The living room floor in Astoria became a shared two-bedroom apartment with another family, and when I was four, we moved to Woodlawn in the Bronx. Their English got better. They made friends. They learned the city. My parents are still in the Bronx.

Today, my parents own their home. My father works in technology. My mother is a healthcare professional. They put me through college without loans. They've helped other immigrant families get their start. They built all of this from twenty dollars and determination.

But the money isn't the point. They came here so their kids would have options they never did, and they made that happen.

They didn't do anything dramatic. They just didn't quit. That's what they passed on to me.