The New American Dream | Sophie Chan | TEDxWinsor School Youth

At five years old, arriving from Beijing with almost no English, Sophie Chan believed in the American dream before she even had a word for it, picturing a white house with a picket fence. That dream came true, and then it complicated itself. By her early teens, she was translating hospital forms for her mother and standing in for her father, a published data analyst in China, at the supermarket and the Home Depot. In this talk, she traces her journey from that starry-eyed arrival to a sharper reckoning: that the American dream so often celebrated as a story of self-made individuals secretly runs on the invisible labor of immigrant children. Drawing on personal history, literature, and film, she makes the case for retiring the myth of the "self-made immigrant" and replacing it with something more honest, and more achievable, for everyone. Sophie is a Junior at Winsor from Needham. She has a passion for research and writing and does so as a criminal justice and foreign policy analyst with a youth institute. In her free time, you can find her reading, knitting, or spending time with her cat. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx