by Gemma Cohen, 16
My favorite movies are the ones I have already seen. I hate the discomfort of watching an unpredictable movie, but I love the irresistible thrill of piecing every clue together and guessing what will happen before it does. My dad says it’s my talent to predict a movie’s plot. When I was nine, I watched The Matrix for the first time. As it played, I told him how I felt the characters were like those in Alice in Wonderland, falling down a rabbit hole. A few scenes later, a character said almost those exact words. I felt like an investigator who cracked the code, and ever since then, I have been looking for more to predict and solve. I love that feeling, the satisfaction of finding the last puzzle piece, and seeing it click into place. Spoiler alert: Understanding my father’s immigration story did not work that way. No scripted ending waited for me to predict. Instead, the story of his immigration to the United States of America from South Africa unfolded slowly and uncomfortably, made up of fragments and unexpected emotions.
Before this investigative project, I only knew a trailer of his immigration story. A project I did in first grade on nationalities forced me to celebrate my family’s nationality. I learned my dad and his family are South African, and he immigrated to Dallas when he was just five years old, with my Nana, Opie, and my uncle, or to him, his older brother Brendan. That was all I knew, simple facts; I was naive to the historical context, tension, and uncomfortable emotions I would soon feel. This project challenged me to watch the full movie, not predict or solve it, but to sit with discomfort, understand it, and feel its weight.
He immigrated as a child; he “only lived [in South Africa] for five years.” When speaking about his home, he cleared his throat and slowed down. For him, his house was “beautiful, with lots of land.” He confidently remarked, as a child, that South Africa was “a fun place to grow up, I had lots of family and friends around me. My parents were third-generation South Africans… we lived in a very close community.” Despite his “fun” upbringing and “close community”, many others didn’t experience the privilege of peace. He slowed down, as he told me, South Africa “wasn’t perfect. In the 70s, there was a lot of violence and political distress in the system due to apartheid.” Apartheid was the political system of the National Party in the 1940s–1990s. In Afrikaans, apartheid means apart. Extreme segregation occurred, white people got to live an expensive and large life, and people with darker skin lived in poverty and oppression.
Dad knew this system was so terribly flawed: “While my childhood was peaceful, I think around me there was a lot of stress in society.” My dad said the violence ” influenced my parents to immigrate to the US to give them a brighter future with, I think, less fear of violence.” Even though he benefited from it as a white child, as an adult, he strongly rejects the apartheid system, and as an adult, recognizes his privileged childhood came at the cost of oppression. He looks back on his immigration as an adult and now understands his family’s decision to immigrate: the chance to leave the violence caused by oppressed people and resistors, who began being violent “due to” the corruption of the National Party.
After our interview, I felt conflicted, like I felt like I had a grip on what his immigration reasons were, and that I understood his perspective. Despite my understanding of his answers to my questions, I found it hard to treat my analysis of his answers through an investigative journalistic lens. I can’t unsee my dad or any person I am personally connected to. So when I dissect his words, and I can’t just see his immigration story through an unbiased lens, I can’t view them like a journalist would if they were conducting a professional interview. I view him as a role model and my parent. So my analysis of his immigration story is mainly based on my feelings or reactions as a daughter and student trying to understand his move to America.
When I think about how the interview made me feel afterwards, I feel guilty knowing that my father was able to grow up comfortably while so many others suffered under apartheid. At the same time, I felt relieved, knowing my father openly rejects the apartheid system as oppressive, and he understands how the government’s oppression was the real root of the violence, which threatened his family’s safety. Hearing his opinion was relieving for me because it was what I wanted to hear. Prior to the interview with him, I conducted lots of background research on South Africa, and I read horror stories of racism and violent white oppressors. I really wanted my dad to say that he had no part in any of it. What a relief!
Normally, I love debating, sharing opinions, and challenging ideas. These skills I learned and practiced at school during the Debate Club and the Young Democrats club. But during this interview, those skills felt out of place. I was not speaking to an opponent or criticizing a politician; I was interviewing my parent, whose story is not mine to debate or correct. This allowed me to listen to his perspective more intently. In my head, I formed opinions, but did not distract from his perspective by sharing them out loud. After listening and knowing that his views aligned with what I wanted to hear, it made it easier to keep looking up to him with the same respect.
My dad immigrated at such a young age, so most answers were from the perspective of who he is now instead of how he felt as a five-year-old; his answers were like explanations of a movie after watching it instead of actually playing the movie for me to watch. However, when I asked him, “What’s your first memory in the U.S?” his answer made me feel like the movie unpaused, after the climax, and I was watching it play. He told me how he “remembered going to a grocery store and walking in and having the electronic doors open, which really freaked [him] out. It was exciting! We didn’t have that in South Africa.” To me, automatic doors are something I barely notice, but to him, it was a magical scene. The scene: a young white boy walked, and a door opened, but this time it magically opened. In America and Apartheid South Africa, the power structure was built by white men; life for them was intended to make them feel like they had all the power in the world, like magic.
He also remembers “moving into [his] house, which was really, really small compared to our houses in South Africa, but it was really exciting.” I automatically assumed that moving from his first large home to a smaller, unfamiliar home would feel like a downgrade, but hearing him describe it made me realize he was not measuring his excitement by size or comfort. He was measuring it by adventure. The way he said “really” over and over stood out to me, because the habit of respecting speech is one I normally would be reprimanded. As the youngest in my immediate family, when I get the chance to speak, I get excited to share all my thoughts, so I will speak really fast and say “like” a lot. To him, when I say “like” repetitively, I seem unintelligent. Hearing him speak, out of character, and in a childish, unintelligent way, made me smile. I found myself seeing him as a different character than usual. Instead of just my dad, I saw him as a little boy, excited and curious.
Traditionally, I would not ask him about the impact of a door opening or his move into a smaller house. In movies, these would be unimportant – bathroom break scenes. To me, I would assume those scenes to be ordinary, but as a child, my dad experienced so much joy to the point where the experience became a core memory he could recall 40 years later. This made me realize that immigration stories can have huge plots and plots that can be easily misinterpreted if you have a predetermined judgment. Within the plots, the smallest details you thought were insignificant can hold the most raw human emotions.
Emotions and facts within a story are two themes explored in Tell Me How It Ends, a book by Valeria Luiselli, about being a translator for child immigrants fleeing violence and seeking safety in the US. Luiselli realizes that interpreting the answer for its facts is important, but in order to understand the full scope of an immigration story, one cannot disconnect the story’s emotions from the facts and events, meaning personally feeling emotions attached to the memories being told is what’s key to understanding immigration. Both Luiselli and I took on the job of interpreting immigration stories. She translates the language and the emotions, and I investigated the story and found emotional responses to my dad’s immigration story. Luissi’s job is to “translate [migrant children] stories from Spanish to English,” which sounds straightforward, yet “nothing is ever that simple” because what words the child says and what she hears are delivered with “distrust, always with fear,” and she has to transform them into “written words, succinct sentences and barren terms”(Luiselli 7). Meaning the translation of immigration stories can be written like facts and less like actual people’s experiences. When translating the facts correctly into English, it can be grammatically correct, but without feeling the emotional weight each experience carries, one can’t fully understand a child’s immigration story. My dad and the children in Tell Me How It Ends, immigration stories, get interpreted with empathy and emotional connection because Luiselli and I care about giving their stories justice in accuracy and in feeling, and in facts. I view my dad’s experience on an emotional level, instead of how an unbiased and unemotional journalist would. Although Luiselli interprets children who are strangers to her, and I view my father’s story through my own perspective, we both rely on a mix of head and heart to understand a child’s immigration experience. In the end, whether translating a child’s words or listening to a parent’s childhood immigration, truly understanding an immigration story means feeling it as much as knowing it.
My dad says it’s my talent to predict a movie’s plot. If I can predict a movie’s plot, maybe I can try to predict America’s future. I predict that every person in America, especially people who are against immigration in America, will watch more movies about immigration. My dream prediction aligns with my dad’s final interview response. He delivered his slowest and calmest response in broken up breaths, saying, “I want you to remember that [America is made up of] immigrants.. [That is what makes the] U.S. special, and I feel like we’re kind of losing that as the government becomes more restrictive on immigration… I think, you know, if we lose that, um, we lose some component of what makes [the U.S] special. You know?” My response to his question is that I know that. Does the American government know that?
I recommend immigration movies to the American government. If someone were to ask me for my personal all-time favorite movie, I would say Enola Holmes Two. This movie focuses on Enola, Sherlock Holmes’ younger sister, who is a private investigator and strong feminist. Enola is searching for answers for where a missing match worker went; she uncovers corruption and political power used to silence working young women. A scene that lingers on my mind is when Enola’s mentor, Edith, a martial arts trainer who is an advocate for Black feminism, tells Sherlock Holmes, “You don’t know what it is to be without power. Politics doesn’t interest you, why?” Sherlock says, “Because it is fatally boring.” She says, “You have no interest in changing a world that suits you so well.” Edith’s confrontation with the famous and powerful investigator, who is a white man, struck me because in so many cases out of the movie, people given political power do not even realize they are privileged, and do not care enough to change a system that benefits them, regardless of the injustices it inflicts upon others. In other cases, when political power is given to people who only set it up to benefit themselves, they lack empathy for others, and the place they control becomes corrupted. Like in Apartheid South Africa, the National Party set it up to only benefit the white people. Today in America, immigration has become a fractured system, meant to discourage diversity and to be a grueling and challenging process, benefiting the affluent. When those with power enforce harsh immigration policies, they fail to empathize with the people affected because they prioritize selfish power.
Wanting to learn more about my father’s immigration story led me down a rabbit hole until I realized that to truly understand immigration, you must do more than figure it out. You must listen to the plot and understand feelings of discomfort and nuanced emotions. Understanding immigration is like watching a movie; you cannot skim it or turn it off once you think you know the ending, or focus only on predicting the plot. To understand a movie, you have to stay in the scene and feel the emotions of the characters, until the plot stops being something you analyze and becomes an immersive experience, one where you feel the emotions of the characters, as if the movie’s plot is your own.
New York City, New York
This piece won HONORABLE MENTION in our 2026 Voice & Verse Writing Contest, prose ages 15-18 category.
Judge’s Note: The way the author takes us through their father’s immigration story feels strong and intentional, especially through the “movie” metaphor that shapes the entire piece. The personal voice also makes the emotional shifts throughout the interview feel real and easy to connect with.
Bridge Ink 