Asenhat Gomez used to peer out the windows of her childhood home in the Dominican countryside and relish a landscape of willowy palm trees and verdant fields where her extended family would gather for daylong reunions.
In her new home in Brooklyn -- a cramped apartment on Williamsburg's South Side -- the windows frame a claustrophobic vista of brick walls, and the few relatives she has in this country are so preoccupied with making ends meet that family get-togethers seem as long gone as the father who died a dozen years ago.
It has been nearly a year since Asenhat was reunited with her mother, who six years before had left her children with their aunt and illegally entered the United States in search of the opportunities that had eluded the family in the Dominican Republic. Longing for Home
But the immigrant journey of Asenhat Gomez is only beginning. For 18-year-old Asenhat, the joys of reunion are constantly tempered by the struggles of life in a hard new land. Hundreds of miles from all that was familiar, unable to shake her longing for home, she tentatively ventures into a future that beckons with equal measures of promise and fear.
In many ways, hers is the oldest of immigrant stories, played out time and again by wave after wave of newcomers to America's shores. But for today's immigrant children, in places like Williamsburg, that process of adjustment is made all the more difficult by the modern plagues of drugs, guns and recession.
Asenhat, a shy girl, has become even shyer since arriving last May, the strangeness and the frustrations coalescing in a sometimes overwhelming feeling that she is trapped. 'Sense of Confinement'
"Everybody talked about the sense of confinement," she said recently, recalling her first weeks in New York. "I expected that, but just not so much.
"Lying in bed I would think about what I left behind. There you got accustomed to visiting people, my friends from school, since we were infants. The whole place was different; you could go out to play. I miss my school."
Williamsburg -- its bumpy narrow streets lined with age-worn two-family homes and apartment buildings closed in by the shadows of hulking waterfront factories and the Williamsburg Bridge -- can seem forbidding to someone used to the easy freedom of the countryside. The family's two small bedrooms are shared by six people who subsist on meager earnings.
Still, even as she bridles at her confinement, it has become her defense mechanism in a city whose ways and language are not her own. She seldom ventures beyond her neighborhood, partly from fear of getting lost on unexplored streets and subway lines and partly from fear of drug dealing and violent crime on nearby blocks.
"It makes you feel insecure," said Asenhat, a short girl whose floppy ponytail and baggy jeans give her the look of someone just entering her teen-age years. "You can be going down the street and not know what can happen."
She has few friends, feeling that she has little in common with American-born teen-agers, who she says are too "liberal" -- so preoccupied with boyfriends, clothes and the latest fads that they squander the opportunities available to them.
She has tried, and failed for lack of English, to find a job. Even her hopes for improving the family's lot through education are in limbo. An honor student who breezed through high school and a year of premedical studies in the Dominican Republic, she plans to continue her studies at Hunter College in Manhattan. But she has been forced to sit out a year while she learns English and qualifies for financial aid.
In her own reticent way, Asenhat (pronounced ah-seh-NET) will admit to a certain disappointment with her new life. "It's been more difficult than I thought," she says. And while she allows that "there are more opportunities here," she is quick to add that "there, people looked out for you."
Still, she resolutely hews to the immigrant dream.
"After a while I'll feel better," she said. "Especially after I learn English. After I begin school. I like to study, and that's the best way to progress." Death on a Farm
Asenhat Gomez was born in the countryside near Moca -- a farming community in the Cibao region of the Dominican Republic -- where her family owned a comfortable three-bedroom house, with a big yard filled with fruit trees, on land where her father and uncles grew plantains and cassava.
She still recalls how on weekends, her father, Vicente, would take her and her friends to fairs or for a cool ice cream, or how they would all gather with relatives to spend the day eating, talking and playing.
But there were hints of darker times ahead, she said; her father suffered from depression that seemed to feed on itself.
"When he got sick with that problem, he would get depressed because he could not work," she said. "He went into a clinic." 'There Was No Other Way'
When Asenhat was nearly 6, he accidentally shot himself to death while cleaning a pistol, the family says. She was in the room when it happened. She talks little about it.
With three children and no husband, Asenhat's mother, Esperanza, tried in vain to keep the family afloat, getting money and food from her in-laws. But seven years ago, she took the children to her sister's house, told them she was going to take a nursing course in a nearby city and slipped off on a nine-day journey through Guatemala, Mexico and California and finally to New York.
"There was no other way," she says now. "A mother does it only thinking of her children."
Working as a live-in maid in Brooklyn, she would send money back home, promising to send for the children as soon as she had legal residency, which happened last year.
Esperanza had told them some of what they could expect, but she knew, too, that her advice could go only so far.
"Talking about it," she said, "is very different from living it and seeing it." Arrival Disappointment, 4 Flights Up
Asenhat had barely arrived in New York last May when the disappointment hit. In her new home four flights up a dimly lighted stairway, she and her 20-year-old brother, Harold, shared a bedroom with their sister, Amalia, 14, who had preceded them to America by several months. Her mother slept in the bedroom off the kitchen with her new husband, Jose Aybar, and their 3-year-old daughter, Josephine.
"This house looked so strange to me," Asenhat said. "It was so confining, such a big building with so many people and such little apartments."
Life inside the apartment, with her new family, was strained. At first, Josephine would jealously cry "Mami mia!" whenever Asenhat approached her mother. Relations with her stepfather have remained cool.
"He is almost illiterate," she said. "We don't have that much in common." They barely speak.
"I would like to talk about my dreams," she said. "Sometimes I miss my father a lot because he was close to us. He was very caring, very sweet with us." 'I Don't Go Out Alone'
For a while, however estranged she felt, fear of what lay outside, of being speechless in an English-speaking city, kept her imprisoned in the apartment. She spent her days reading the Bible or absent-mindedly watching television. She lost weight.
"There are no places for people to go around here," she said. "I don't go to the park. I don't go out alone."
While her block is relatively calm, the surrounding streets have seen an increase in drug dealing and violence. There was a shooting at her sister's school. Sometimes, she hears gunshots at night.
She remembers how in Moca, gunshots were sometimes heard ringing out in celebration of some holidays. "Here," she said, "it's not because people are happy."
The one solo venture she made early on -- to enroll in a summer youth program -- ended in tears in Bushwick after she couldn't speak English with the person taking her application, who angrily shouted at her. Her frustration and fear only increased when she wandered outside and quickly got lost.
"I was scared to ask for directions because I didn't think anyone spoke Spanish," she said. Finally, she got up enough courage to ask a Spanish-speaking passer-by.
"He said I was lost," she said. "I knew that."
Even now, her daily schedule is an unwavering routine played out within six blocks of home: a noontime visit to her mother's job, English classes, several hours at a local youth center and back home to her family.
Asenhat's confinement can be as much emotional as physical, made worse by being sidetracked in her schooling. While her parents were never able to go to college, they wanted to make sure their children would. Asenhat's belief in the bedrock American value of success through education seems absolute. When she talks about becoming a doctor, "a professional," her face brightens and she sits up a little prouder.
Both Asenhat and her brother Harold -- who studied civil engineering and worked in a medical laboratory in Santo Domingo but now works six days a week at a bodega -- plan to attend the City University of New York. But they have had to wait a year to qualify as New York City residents for the cheaper tuition and to learn English.
The only studying she does now is in her daily English class at the Brooklyn Public Library, where her afternoons are filled with children's songs and dialogues.
"It's like being little again," she said of the class, though she might have been describing the entire humbling experience of learning English.
Asenhat also realizes that while the constant presence of Spanish in her neighborhood makes it easier to adjust, it makes it harder, too.
"It's more difficult to learn English here because everybody speaks Spanish," she said. "If you hear more English, your ears get used to it faster."
A few nights ago, Asenhat slowed down as she approached her building, where two boys boxed playfully. As she got nearer, one of the boys smoothly pulled out a knife, opened it and feinted a slash at his friend. She barely blinked as she sweetly asked them if they had a key to the wrought-iron lobby door that always is locked.
After 11 months in Brooklyn, she still finds it hard to decipher the rituals of her American-born counterparts.
"For me the most important thing is to study," she said. "For them it's boyfriends, going places and buying clothes. That doesn't matter to me. A person's worth isn't what they wear, but what they are and how they feel."
Her friends at home, she insists, were different. "We were more united over there," she said. "I think sometimes that those who grew up here are more superficial. There may be more opportunities here, but over there people looked out for you."
Even the people she meets at El Puente, a youth center two blocks from her home, don't always understand what she is going through. Some don't even understand her language, although they are children of Hispanic parents. Her closest friends are Lilin Fong and Danilda Torres, both of whom came from the Dominican Republic several years ago.
The three are active in a natural healing class at El Puente, and they often sit together, chatting in Spanish. Lilin thinks Asenhat is adapting as well as she can.
"I used to count the days I had been here," she said. "I knew the hour I arrived."
Asenhat nodded. "I count the months, too," she said. "I wanted to return home." She lowered her voice. "Sometimes I still feel like going." Dona Mercedes Dispensing Advice To 'Daughters'
Good thing Mercedes Mendez didn't hear that. The last time Asenhat revealed her homesickness, Dona Mercedes -- as she is known to all -- looked at her as if she were insane. "Don't even think of going back!" she scolded. "You have to be with your mother."
Each day, Asenhat passes by Dona Mercedes's apartment for lunch and a brief visit with her mother, who works as a home attendant caring for the 71-year-old Puerto Rican woman. Dona Mercedes, who walks stiffly because of knee replacement surgery a dozen years ago, busily looks after Asenhat, calling her "one of my adopted daughters."
Dona Mercedes is one of several women who have rallied around Asenhat, intent on making sure that nothing keeps her from her goals. Dona Mercedes, who came to the mainland in 1946 and worked for years packing tomatoes and cooking for the field hands on a New Jersey farm, often regales her with tales of how hard her life was when she arrived. She cautions her against talking to strangers or following the crowd. Mother's Worries
"Most of all, take care of your virginity," Dona Mercedes admonished. "Don't wander off with boys; you can get easily lost out there."
Esperanza nodded in agreement. But far from worrying that her daughter will be led astray by friends, she frets that she spends too much time alone.
She also wishes Asenhat would be a little more accepting of her new husband, who, she says, has had a hard enough time coping with his extended unemployment and his mother's illness.
Asenhat would like to get a job, to help the family out. She has looked a few times, to no avail.
"She talks about work, anything she can do," said Cecilia Figueroa, a health coordinator at El Puente. "But there's not much she can do with no language and no experience. She doesn't have anything."
Esperanza says she only wants her daughter to keep striving toward her goal of becoming a doctor. To help her learn English, she is buying her a $950 set of language cassettes, on the installment plan.
"There are few mothers who would do what Esperanza did," said Dona Mercedes. "She's only had God's help."
And the help of Esperanza's sister, Mirope Ortiz-Lisardo, who took in the three children when she came to the United States. Asenhat is so close to her aunt that she calls her "Mami," and after almost a year apart, she could barely contain her glee during Mirope's recent visit.
When it came time to leave, on a bitter-cold Saturday, the house grew quiet. Mrs. Ortiz-Lisardo walked up to Asenhat and reached out to her. They hugged, gazing into each other's eyes. A kiss, another hug, and then her aunt stepped into the hallway and began her journey back to the friends and places in the homeland her niece had left behind.
Quietly, Asenhat flopped onto the couch and sank into a corner, clutching her sister's talking teddy bear. Her mother sat next to her and stroked her arm. The girl shook her head when asked if she was sad.
Asenhat hugged the toy, and its voice broke the silence.
"Dream with me," the bear sang in tinny, electronic tones.
She hugged it tighter.
"Dream with me."
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