An immigrant’s emotional journey

America in the late 1990s seemed a happy place. Or perhaps it was just my exuberant naivete. Having recently arrived in the country in my early 20s as a science student, I lived contentedly on a graduate stipend of $15,000 a year, watching network news and sitcoms every night to understand America. One evening, I burned my hand while cooking, and the next day the nurse at the students clinic took a look at it and said, “Honey, what on Earth did you do to yourself?”

I replied, rather shamefully, that I had been watching the coverage of the Clinton impeachment and wasn’t paying attention to the bursting oil. The nurse guffawed and told me that she wanted to be the one to inform the doctor of this accident, as she could not wait to see his face when he heard the story.

How bad could a country become when there was so much laughter around? The economy was strong, wars and genocides happened on other continents, and a mother not far from where I lived gave birth to seven babies. The biggest fear, as the turn of the century drew near, was the millennium bug -- remember Y2K? -- but the millennium arrived with fireworks and without any disaster. George W. Bush became president, but at the time even this looked like a laughable joke to the circle of foreign students living in our apartment building. So we laughed, not understanding how Americans could have made such a decision.

Happiness is like childhood, always ending before one is prepared. Two years later, I found a part-time job in a lab in a hospital basement, where fluorescent lamps buzzed in the windowless room. My job -- rather appropriate for an aspiring writer, which is what I was by then -- was to assist in research on the formation of voice. Twice a week I would go to a cardiology lab where an exchange scholar from Bangladesh running cardiology tests on dogs would, at the end of the experiments, turn off all the switches that stopped the circulation of blood. The dogs, still warm to the touch, waited to be dissected.

My companion at this ordeal was Sanyukta, a doctoral student from India whose dream was to become a professor in America. Neither of us wanted to perform the dissection alone, even after we had honed our skills. Having a fellow sufferer did not lessen our individual pain, but we clung on to each other’s presence in those days, and walked back together to the basement with plastic bags containing the dog’s vocal tissues that we had managed to cut out, and which we later tried to culture in petri dishes.

On other days, when we received a phone call from the autopsy unit alerting us that a human patient had agreed to donate vocal tissues, we would walk across the hospital with a bucket of dry ice and wait for the precious tissue. It was on those days, when we felt happy that we did not have to open up a dog, that Sanyukta and I began to talk about our lives, and our conversation, inevitably, would turn to America and its current state. Our biggest fear then was that four years of a Bush administration would be a turning point for America. We understood each other’s concern well; after leaving our native countries, both of us had made the decision to make America home.

“Never in history has there been a superpower that could remain a superpower,” Sanyukta liked to say.

“For every empire that rises there will be a journey going downhill,” I would agree. “Take China, for example.”

“Take India,” Sanyukta agreed. “Take Britain.”

Toward the end of the next summer, I decided to quit the job, which, like America and its policies, was becoming depressing. On my last day, Sanyukta bemoaned the loss of a companion to the cardiology lab. “Ask someone else from the lab to accompany you,” I said, but she replied that the Americans in the lab, as dog lovers, would be too sensitive to take over the responsibility.

“The humility of life. That’s what I think they don’t know. The country has not been invaded, and the people have not been ruled by another people,” Sanyukta said. “Americans don’t understand humility.”

Bush has remained president for eight years, rather than four years as Sanyukta and I had hoped, and these years seem to have confirmed our fear in that basement lab that America is going downhill. Bad news is prevalent, both from within the country and outside: the national debt, the questionable tax cuts and now the financial crisis; wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with human costs as high as the monetary costs; disasters of foreign policy and public diplomacy. America, at some level, reminds me of China in the late 1800s, when the country proudly considered itself the Middle Kingdom at the center of the world.

America no longer seems to me to be the euphorically happy place it was when I arrived. This is to be expected, as, after all, I am no longer a young Alice, eyes widened by the discovery of a marvelous wonderland. Still, America, which I now consider my home, has taken on a soberness that would not have seemed the right mood for the country eight years ago, and perhaps this soberness will accompany America in its ongoing journey, whether it is one that goes uphill or downhill.

Yiyun Li is the author of “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.” Her first novel, “The Vagrants,” will be published by Random House in February.