It’s midnight on a Friday night. I’m a college student. Maybe others are out drinking, playing beer pong. Something like that. But not me. I’m at work.

I’m in the kitchen with the dishwashers and prep cooks, who just moments ago were peeking furtively from their tiny quarters, scoping out the remaining customers in an effort to predict how much longer they will be kept hostage. It’s getting late. It’s cold. Their kids and wives are home, in Queens. In the Bronx. Sleeping.

They are from Guatemala. Mexico. Ecuador. Their dark skin is beautiful, even under the harsh florescent lights. Their black, mischievous eyes gleam with perpetual want. Their teeth are always showing. Their happiness, it seems, it unfaltering.

“Michelle, do you want pasta?” they ask me. This late at night, with everyone gone, they always throw together some midnight snack to share.

“Que typo?” I ask in my horrible spanish. What kind?

“Con carne,” Maynord answers, showing me the contents of his frying pan with a characteristic giggle. With meat. The spaghetti glistens with chile oil and big hunks of dry-aged steak.

“Ok…si, si,” I say, giving in. And we eat together. Five people. Stuck, at least temporarily, in the same fate: working in the restaurant industry in New York City. A dead-end job that I’ve spent my whole working life in, since age 16. As I eat the pasta, twirling it on my fork, I slyly look around. Their eyes are focused on the food. But thoughts race behind those eyes just as behind my own. Intelligence, trapped behind their language barrier, longs to reach out and touch me. We communicate in smiles and broken tongues, intermittently littered with no comprendes and Que? Que? Que? And then I’m lost again in my own thoughts, which are something like a stream of: I hate my job…I have more to offer than such mindless drudgery! And: don’t worry, Michelle. Have patience, Michelle. Someday you’ll ascend.

I look around once more. Their plight interjects my selfish thoughts, and demands I confront its enormity. Why can I ascend through hard work but they cannot? the timeless voice asks. They, with minds as fit to be trained as mine? With potential buried deep in the “wrong” language? They, with a birthplace as random as mine? But mine, being in The United States of America, as Robert Frost would say, has made all the difference.

They finish the pasta, take my empty plate from my hands and continue washing, as my eyes wonder far from the comforts of my American life, and brushes only the topmost depths of their perspective. For them the washing may never end. For them, I am as fleeting as a Spring day. Long after I’m gone, they will still be wintering here in this dish room, sharing a silent meal.

Look around my restaurant and you will see much of the same. In fact, I am the only American in the place. I sometimes wonder: who is the foreigner? I sometimes wonder: why is foreigner a concept at all? The hostess has a PHd. The busboys: master’s degrees in finance. The waiters: parents of young ones they have sacrificed everything for in order to give them the gift of citizenship. To give them what they themselves could never have.

Intelligence. Potential. Selflessness. Motherhood. Fatherhood. These are banners under which all human beings strive. But out of all these beautiful souls, it is only me. The American. Who’s college degree will have precedence in this great country. Who will rise above the poverty she was born into. Who will struggle for a better life and be rewarded extensively for that struggle.

Who will transform herself from the server into the served.

I reach out. I try to bridge the depths of such rifts. Why did you come here? I ask. The hostess: “my husband….he had a political problem…” she trails off, her beautifully exotic eyes flash with a moment’s apprehension. But I don’t press, just let her talk. Since she moved here from Albania, she hasn’t seen him. She elaborates no further. “I’m in the process of trying to convert all of my [college] degrees,” she says, “but I understand there’s not much opportunity here without the papers.” Or Norbert, from Poland: “I expected a better future, a better life,” he says. “But I don’t enjoy myself like I used to, with my family being away.”

How did you get here? I ask Valdocindo, from Guatemala. A translator from Ecuador assists our conversation in the dish room. Valdocindo looks down. “Si,” he says solemnly. Yes. It was hard. “Tuve que cruzar el desierto.” I had to cross the desert.

Why? I ask him. Why did you come? “Because,” he says. “I need money for my family and relatives. Yes,” he says, beating another dirty dish into the garbage. “The life here is much better.”

Regardless of age, creed, political preference, economic status, bias, or agenda, it is easy, from these responses to feel the current of solemn, unwavering humanity that resides within us all. It is an inexplicable emotion. An intense desire to progress. To work. To protect the ones that we love. It is the reason the coyotes are paid. The deserts are crossed. The dishes are washed. The husbands are left behind. The educations are sacrificed. The tradeoffs are made. The long hours are worked. The privileged are served.

The reason survival treks into new territory.