When you go to the immigration interview they ask you if you need an interpreter. Answering no with pride and almost no accent doesn’t really matter inside the beige complex with America posters. You dont have to speak English to be part of this country, we’re all equal on paper.

We have an attorney there to speak for us. He wears a beige trench coat which goes perfectly with his golden curly hair and the hairpin-attached yamaka in it. Beige brown to the beige brown walls and chairs and image of the building, it all feels very cinematic. Like a set designer somehow beat us to it and made sure all the colors went together.

It’s not only the golden hair, the attorney’s skin is glowing and I’m thinking he must have been an actor in a previous life. It’s that 1990s shiny attractiveness, he would have been perfect as an extra in Twin Peaks or maybe even in a soft-core TV movie.

In the interview room we aren’t allowed to sit down at first. We have to put one hand on our hearts and hold the other one out, swear an oath and say ‘I do’. No matter the cheesiness of the whole enterprise, the rhetoric works on me, I would never dare to bend their rules. I think one has to have a death wish to do so.