My immigrant parents love Donald Trump. It’s important you understand why

“Banani, banani,” my friend and I would scream like maniacs, running to greet our fathers if they were lucky enough to procure a box. As Soviet children we were allotted one a day — the adults got zero — since the fruit (berry?) was so hard to come by. 

Little did I know that when the Soviet Union would fall a few years after my family escaped it, my friend would write me the sole letter I received from her and never answered —  about how our beloved bananas had become available everywhere but they cost more than she could afford. I wish I’d told her that in America bananas were cheap but didn’t taste as good, that I would spend a lifetime tossing out the rotting ones we failed to eat in time.

That is how I internalized this country: the rotting bananas summed it up for me. While my parents’ generation lauded it as the land of opportunity, I could clearly see the other side of the coin: the runaway consumerism, the waste, the shallow definition of happiness. As a little refugee girl in post-Cold-War America, I experienced bullies and xenophobes who made me feel unwelcome and self-conscious, as well as a culture that taught me to question my body, my face, my name. My experiences were so divergent from my folks’, who enjoyed the rewards of their hard work, and reveled in all the food and the endless choices — the very same choices which stagnated and overwhelmed me, the very same food that I couldn’t stop binging and purging.

But I understood where my parents came from, as well as the babushka (grandma) who raised me — her father, an ardent communist, spent years in a Stalin camp in Siberia. They mistrusted big government and its promises, they mistrusted anything that remotely resembled communism. So I got used to Fox News always being on in the background, and Rush Limbaugh before that. I had my own problems to deal with anyway — mainly figuring out how to make a life here, where ambition was king but where I could barely get out of bed.

With time it was spirituality that helped me, rather than patriotism. “Not knowing is true knowledge,” I read in the Tao Te Ching, “presuming to know is a disease.”

I let go of the ideals of the past: the clearcut American Dream, the belief that one path — or political party, for that matter — was good, the other bad. Eastern philosophy taught me to see the yin and yang of every situation.

Still, I was slightly shocked this year when my parents’ support for Trump grew. I mean, they had to know he was out of his mind, right?

“As Trumpushka said, ‘If you wanna wear a mask, wear a mask; if you don’t wanna wear a mask, don’t wear a mask,’” my mom chuckled a few months before the election.

“Umm, did you just call him Trumpushka?” I asked, the “ushka” part being a Russian endearment normally reserved for little kids or cute characters.

Wow, I thought, I guess they’re Trump fans now, but I didn’t say anything. We had a rule by that point — no political discussions in order to preserve our relationship. They knew how I felt; we’d already had some shouting matches about the subject. 

I don’t know why these always became shouting matches; I can’t explain it. What I do know is that my parents and many of their Soviet immigrant friends are not alone. Fifty-five percent of Cuban immigrants in Florida also voted for Trump this time around, similarly influenced by the communist demons of their past. And while I won’t deny there are Trump voters who are racists and gun-toting fanatics, I also realize there are many just like my mom and dad — people scarred by their own history who’ve listened to fear-mongering pundits for far too long, or those who bought into the rhetoric of some mythical greatness that never existed.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful to be here in this very imperfect nation that my parents bent over backwards to bring me to. It is, after all, a country where a first-generation American (which is what my own daughters are) has just been elected vice president. I now have hope that while we may not know the answers, most of us — or at least enough of us — are willing to find them collaboratively. Even within my own family, divided as it is between those who admire Trump and those who breathed a sigh of relief as soon as he was voted out, peace is possible.

Regardless of opposing views, most people’s needs are one and the same: freedom, respect, opportunity… and, of course, some affordable, yet tasty, banani. And that is what I will keep in mind as we step into a Biden-Harris administration, one which has promised to govern for “all Americans” — including people like my parents.