*This dream is a post-project artifact, courtesy of Emily Steinberger.

Tula Goenka
Tula Goenka poses for a portrait in her backyard, holding a framed photograph of her parents, her in-laws and her children. The words she wrote read: “My American Dream is bittersweet. I sacrificed my parents and the land of my birth for a new land – and a new family. I have a lot of regrets.”

“I was born and brought up in India. I was part of the majority there. I was urban, educated. My family was upper middle class. We were North Indian, Hindus, upper caste. I was very privileged.

After coming to the U.S. for grad school, I suddenly had to face the fact that I am now the other. I am no longer part of the majority. I am a person of color, a minority.

To be honest, my BIPOC identity has really affected everything I’ve done. The movies I’ve worked on, the social justice work that I have engaged in, where I have chosen to live in Syracuse. I have a steady job. I am a college professor. I am a cisgender woman. So, I do still have more privileges than many.
I’m also a breast cancer survivor. Because of the lived experience of diagnosis and treatment, I have created a visual storytelling project called the Look Now Project. It addresses how a fatal disease like breast cancer can make women question if they are really women at the end of it all. It’s not only a disease that you have to fight and be treated for, but it makes you question your own sense of femininity and what it really means to be a woman with or without your womanly parts. There is so much pressure to look “normal” and to get reconstruction, etc. We definitely live in a very patriarchal world. My breast cancer survivor identity is not something that I talk about a lot, but it is a big part of my life.

Tula Goenka
Tula’s U.S. passport alongside the photograph of her family. She said she decided to apply for U.S. citizenship after nearly 10 years of having a green card and living in New York City because she wanted to vote in the U.S. elections.

I’m an international first gen woman of color. I came to study at Syracuse University in the mid-1980s. I ended up falling in love and marrying somebody from Watertown, New York, not too far from here. I gained a whole new American family, a whole new American life, and a lot of opportunities opened up for me.

In India when you get married, you don’t only marry an individual, you marry an entire extended family. And that’s the way I saw it. I gave up day-to-day interaction with my Indian family to become part of a new American one.
We were together for 22 years. We had two beautiful children. But now I’ve been divorced for more than 15 years, and it’s a different life.

The American Dream, I guess, is coming to this country and starting from scratch and making a life and a name for yourself. I have definitely achieved that.

I lost my father just a couple of weeks ago in New Delhi and it has really made me question my choices. Actually, for the last few years as my parents have aged and I’ve lived so far away from them, I have often thought about what is the price that first gen immigrants pay for leaving their homeland behind to create a new and foreign life here?

“What is the price that first gen immigrants pay for leaving their homeland behind to find a new one here?”

I think it’s also very complicated because it’s not so easy to make
a home in America if you are not from here. My story is a little different because my children are half-white and they have provided an in for me into American society.

But I know a lot of my immigrant friends and family struggle with where home is. In fact, I have also struggled with it, especially
after my divorce because I lost my American family in one fell swoop. And so ‘What is home?,’ ‘Where do I belong?” “Was it worth it?’ are questions I ask myself all the time.”