I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir

I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir (2019) is a graphic memoir illustrated and written by Malaka Gharib. She is a journalist, cartoonist, and graphic novelist who has been published by NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Catapult, The Seventh Wave Magazine, The Nib, Saveur Magazine, The Believer Magazine, and The New Yorker. She works as a reporter for NPR and as a digital editor for the NPR podcast Life Kit, where her work covers Filipino cultural practices, helping children understand climate change, and global reproductive rights. Her reporting for NPR has won two Gracie Awards. She previously worked for the global education charity the Malala Fund and the anti-poverty advocacy group the ONE Campaign. In 2022, she published her second graphic memoir, It Won’t Always Be Like This, which delves further into the summers she spent with her father and stepmom in Egypt, something she details briefly in Chapter 3 of I Was Their American Dream.

I Was Their American Dream received an Arab American Book Award and was named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, and the New York Public Library. As a memoir and coming-of age story, it details Gharib’s experiences growing up as a first-generation American with Egyptian and Filipino parents. Throughout her childhood, teen years, and young adulthood, Gharib struggles with reconciling her different cultural identities, the pressure to assimilate to white society, and messaging from both inside and outside her family that she is “other.” She uses humor, detailing her crushes on white boys and her failed attempts to learn belly dancing from her stepmother. She integrates interactive games and activities such as a DIY zine, a cut-out paper doll of herself, and a bingo card of microaggressions. Gharib’s use of these components complements the serious questions she asks about race, growing up as the child of immigrants in America, and the struggle of identifying with one’s culture.

Note: This study guide preserves Gharib’s use of the final -o in “Filipino,” which she uses to identify herself, her family, and her mother’s culture. The graphic memoir uses a curly underline for textual stress, which this study guide conveys in italics. This guide replicates Gharib’s use of “United States” and “America” as interchangeable, though it recognizes that “Americas” applies to all North and South American countries. It also replicates her use of the phrase “people of color,” though it uses more specific language where possible.

This study guide refers to the 2019 Clarkson Potter paperback edition.

Plot Summary

Chapter 1 depicts Gharib’s parents’ immigration stories, meeting, marriage, Gharib’s birth, and her parents’ eventual divorce. Her mother did not want to leave the Philippines, but her family felt unsafe under the authoritarian presidency of Ferdinand Marcos. Gharib’s father was born in Egypt but fell in love with American movies and always wanted to immigrate there. Gharib’s parents meet at a hotel, marry six months later, and have Gharib a year after that. They have conflicts about how to raise Gharib and conduct themselves in America; soon they divorce.

In Chapter 2, Gharib puzzles through her diverse identities. Her mother works several jobs to afford a middle-class life and her Filipino family helps raise her. She notices differences between her Filipino and Egyptian families and is especially confused by the different religions—Catholicism and Islam—her parents devoutly follow.

Chapter 3 follows Gharib’s childhood and teen summers in Egypt, where her father returned after the divorce. She is close to her stepmother Hala, who teaches her about feminine things. In Egypt, she witnesses war and extreme poverty unlike anything she sees in America.

Chapter 4 follows Gharib’s years at Cerritos High, where students are of diverse races and ethnicities. She loves American media; she wants to meet more white people in real life and wants white boys to like her. She thinks white people have better lives, jobs, food, and clothes than she does. Her peers call her “whitewashed.” She doesn’t feel like she fits in with Egyptian, Filipino, or American culture.

Gharib attends Syracuse University, which is a primarily white institution. Throughout Chapter 5, she realizes that media hasn’t taught her anything real about white people. She doesn’t understand her peers and they don’t understand her. She follows different social cues and customs, which sometimes offend her peers. Gharib tries to assimilate to white culture but misses her home.

In Chapter 6, Gharib gets her first job in Washington DC, where she tries to assimilate like she did in college. Despite this, she is subject to repeated microaggressions. She eventually begins to wonder what’s wrong with being herself. She begins to hold people accountable for pronouncing her name right and reaches out to a Korean man at work to share experiences. She starts to learn more about being a person of color—in her case, being American-born Egyptian and Filipino—in America.

Chapter 7 depicts Gharib’s courtship and marriage to Darren, a white man from Tennessee. He teaches her that “white culture” varies by region, and she notices many similarities between his Southern white culture and her Egyptian and Filipino cultures. Though her father is disappointed she does not marry a Muslim man, she and Darren have a “big, fat, Filipino-Egyptian-American Southern Baptist-Muslim wedding” (139).

In the final chapter, Gharib and Darren try to integrate their cultures into their new life together. Gharib is distressed by how many cultural practices she doesn’t know, forgot, or ignored. Occasionally, her and Darren’s cultural differences cause minor conflicts in how they operate in daily life. When she and Darren go back to Egypt, Gharib reflects on what it means to connect with one’s culture: For her, it isn’t knowing her parents’ first languages or understanding cultural practices, but rather, feeling a deeper, sensory connection to people and places.