Tuesday 30 June 2026 5:20 am  |  Updated:  Monday 29 June 2026 11:36 am

I’ve lived the American Dream but as the country turns 250 I’m watching it die

By: Lewis Z Liu

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The American Dream is being snatched away by regressive economic policies and predatory capitalist practices that prioritise the interests of the ultra-wealthy over the well-being of the median American, says Lewis Liu

I am the quintessential product of the American Dream.

My first memory is of meeting my father at three and a half. I can still see it: the green sleeper train carrying me out of rural Hubei toward Beijing, my first flight aboard a Boeing 747, and then the man himself who had left for a master’s scholarship in Belgium shortly after I was conceived, and gone on to a PhD in New York. My mother had joined him when I was one, and for two years I was raised in the way many rural children of striving, emigrating Chinese were then: passed from relative to relative across our village.

While my father finished his PhD in financial economics, he washed dishes and delivered pizzas through Times Square; my mother folded clothes in a laundromat. Home was a basement studio in an unfashionable corner of Brooklyn (though in those days most of Brooklyn was unfashionable). I understood none of it at the time. Only later would I see that this was the American Dream itself, quietly under construction.

After his doctorate, my father went into finance and climbed his way up Citibank. His ascent gave my mother room for her own: a master’s degree, and then a career as one of the first data scientists, wrangling vast databases of numbers at AT&T Bell Labs. In time, like upwardly mobile families everywhere, they bought a house: a small one in Short Hills, a wealthy, leafy New Jersey enclave 30 minutes from Manhattan with one of the finest school districts in the country. And........

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