Graduation Day

The last speaker at a high school graduation here spoke through tears for about half of her speech, wailing words incomprehensibly into the mic as she struggled to get through her remarks expressing gratitude to parents, teachers and classmates.

From an Asian background, she is one of the top students and received a strong and sympathetic applause from the audience gathered in the stands at the Santa Anita Park racetrack. I watched as she returned to her spot in the battalion of 370 graduates, where the kids next to her patted her with smiles and sympathy.

A small singing group sang a ballad while members of the string section from the school band played. Other students gave speeches — one started by shouting “I need a job” — while the principal, who otherwise was given high marks, gave a terrible address in which he mostly quoted from an obscure book about “being you.”

I was attending the graduation of my god-daughter from Gabrielino High School, where roughly two-thirds of the students were from Asian backgrounds and the rest from Hispanic backgrounds. I applauded the lone white kid I saw as he ambled along below our spot in the stands, his mortarboard covering blondish, curly hair, having just received his diploma. I’m sure there were a couple other graduates from his and my minority group here in California.

The school, as outlined by the superintendent, is a national standout, in the top 6% nationally with a champion debate team, a top band and a host of competitive accolades. The happiness of the graduates could be felt as they stopped, diplomas in hand, flashing big, natural smiles for pictures taken from the stands, before walking back around to their seats next to the racetrack. And their raw energy could be seen and heard after the ceremony was over, as they flooded outside into the open area where horses are normally paraded.

I saw one tall and striking graduate, Chinese by appearance, with straight black hair down past her shoulders, bold and confident in her dark-blue graduation gown and cap, wearing Doc Martens and holding a violin case, as she stood with friends for a picture. Parents were naturally proud.

While I sat in in the stands where punters would normally be watching the horses thunder past, and afterward outside with graduates and families finding each other, I could not help but think of the power of immigration in America, the way that force has shaped the nation’s identity since the Statue of Liberty was erected onto its pedestal in the 1880s and long before as immigrants from Siberia, Iceland, Spain and England came to America over the course of the last 15,000 years.

As the population now dwindles in countries like Japan which has highly restrictive immigration policies, here at this high school in Southern California, parents from China, Korea, Vietnam, Ecuador, Mexico and other places in the world were taking pictures of their kids with fancy cameras and cheering as their names were called out to receive the evidence of their rite of passage.

The number of special stamps they received on their diplomas and their achievements in science, music and debate said to me, and I think to anyone, that these kids will make contributions, and some of them likely great contributions, to the American society, making our nation stronger, more varied, more inventive and simply better.

Seeing the power of the collective energy in the kids made me realize that the force of immigration creates a condition of constant revolution in America, challenging the old, privileged, lines of class and wealth. It is not that wealth is being better distributed in our present day, quite the opposite, but its accumulation is regularly shifting and changing shape as people with desire and drive come to our land for a chance at a better life.