This year is only the second time in their lives that my parents have voted. Until 2016, I don’t think they understood what voting in America really meant.
Settling down in always-blue California after arriving in the United States in 1992 meant that presidential campaigns never reached their front door, and learning about the importance of voting wasn’t part of their citizenship tests: It was more essential for them to memorize how many amendments there were to the Constitution than how to go about amending it.
Voting in India, where both of them were born and raised, looked very different from voting in the United States, but still seemed pointless. One year, my grandfather was assigned to work at a polling station on election days in Faridabad, a suburb of New Delhi. When he came home that day, my father could see that he was visibly shaken. A group of men, all carrying rifles, had walked into the station and had each voted 10 times. No one working there dared say anything, and the men walked out and drove away — presumably to the next polling station.
I grew up with a much different view of what casting a ballot meant. To me, it wasn’t a hopeless attempt to change a rigged system; it was a rare moment where you could directly affect the future of the entire country. I had learned that voting was a civic duty for every citizen upon reaching 18, and I took that job seriously even before I could cast my ballot.
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I wanted to be prepared when the time came, so when my high school history teacher went through every single proposition on the ballot during class the day after the 2016 election, showing us how we could learn more about the politicians who supported a certain initiative and who was funding the ad campaigns we were seeing on TV, I carefully noted down the website that he referred to and took notes on the strategies he had for decoding the ballot language.
I knew that voting was a privilege, and it was frustrating to see people my age not recognize that. It frustrated me even more that Asian Americans of all ages also didn’t always realize it. My parents were part of this problem, though I didn’t blame them for it — no one ever sat them down and explained how voting in the United States worked.
Until 2016, when a slight push from me helped the country gain two new voters.
The media frenzy around Donlad Trump’s campaign meant that the election was always on our minds, and it was impossible to ignore what the stakes were on Nov. 8, especially as the date got closer. We didn’t want a racist, xenophobic reality star running our country, and if we didn’t vote, we might as well be saying we didn’t mind if that was the outcome.
