By Tony Kim I began ripping off the wrapping paper and my eyes widened as the edge of the box…

by Katherine Nagasawa I pressed a cloth napkin into my lap and looked up to a table full of strangers….

DACA recipient Sofia Rivera is setting off on a path that Victor Martell has walked before her. Martell, a Salvadoran living and working in Chicago, was granted Temporary Protected Status 11 years ago, and he still feels in limbo.

As we gathered around the cake and she blew out her candles, I became aware of the one piece that was missing: my mom. Just a few days before my sister’s birthday party, my mom left our home in the Philippines to begin our family’s new life in the United States.

“Quien lo hubiera creído?” (Who would have thought?), she says, and suddenly I’m getting the story I had missed years before.

When an eight-year-old walked into the principal’s office asking why she wasn’t admitted to a school she knew she deserved to be, they couldn’t lie to her. Even more unusual than a child standing up to authority would be for them to lie.

I was in high school, at an age when I could grasp the things around me in India. I thought about how different my life would have been growing up at home, where my parents met, surrounded by most of my extended family.