The glass block sits on a shelf in Ayaan's apartment, the Manhattan skyline and Statue of Liberty suspended inside as if they were floating. His parents bought it from a souvenir shop in Times Square after arriving in New York in 2000, when his older brother was still a baby. Growing up, Ayaan could never understand how the buildings got inside the glass. He would turn it over in his hands looking for a seam, convinced there had to be some trick.His parents settled in Jackson Heights, where his father drove a yellow cab. Some of Ayaan's earliest memories are of hearing the apartment door close around five in the evening, then waking the next day to find his father just returning home. "That was the cost of the American Dream for my dad," Ayaan told me. "He gave up time with us so we'd have the opportunities he never had." To Ayaan the American Dream feels incomplete. He watched his parents work endlessly just to reach stability. Yet he also knows his father would say he achieved it by raising two sons who graduated from college and found a home in a new country.Instead, Ayaan believes in what he calls the "New York Dream." His parents didn't come here to become wealthy. They came so their children could be a part of all the worlds there were to offer. The glass skyline reminds him that New York has become part of his family's identity, from his father's stories behind the wheel of a cab to growing up amidst the diversity of Jackson Heights. Like the skyline inside the glass, belonging can look seamless from the outside, even though you never quite know how it was built.

– Ariba Hassan

Relationship:  Child of im/migrant Child of im/migrant