My husband and I finally saw Hamilton last week. We were lucky to be in Los Angeles on vacation when the touring cast was in town and to be available on Wednesday night – both the day and the fact that it was the touring cast helped lower the ticket prices significantly. It feels like everyone’s been talking about Hamilton for the last decade (though I guess they only premiered in early 2015) and it’s been hyped up so much that I went into the show expecting to be disappointed. But I loved it. It even brought me to tears.

It’s hard to say anything about the show that others haven’t said already. I mean, if the NYT theater critic says that it might be worth it to mortgage your house and lease out your children to see the show, I guess you pretty much have reached the zenith. It has all the ingredients for a perfect musical: a tragically flawed hero who clawed his way from rags to power, super-talented performers throughout the cast, pulsing music and pithy lyrics throughout.* It breathes new life into what was always a compelling true story but almost forgotten by centuries of history. From the perspective of entertainment and aesthetic value, it’s already a superb piece of work.

But as lovely as the storyline and performance were, it was something else that delivered the emotional punch, the part that revisited me again and again for days after the show. What got me teary-eyed is witnessing the cast – who are overwhelmingly black, Latino, and Asian – claiming this piece of foundational American history as a part of their own. It was the reframing of the history associated with the founding of this country as something akin to the experience of immigrants and underprivileged in today’s America. To those who have established themselves in this country for many generations, it is a plea to remember that this is where you come from and it’s not too unlike the stories of those you may feel unkind towards now. To a recent immigrant like me, it delivered the kind of emotional power that comes when a belief you privately held onto, despite the unspoken or explicit rejection of that idea by others, gets confirmed in the public sphere. Or you see others who also believe in that same idea have courage to claim it. In this case, it’s the belief that as an American, even as a 1st generation immigrant and minority, the story of the American revolution is also a part of my own history.

There is a minor incident from about three years ago that this whole discussion brings to mind. My husband and I were in the car with two other friends, one of whom is also Korean-American and the other white. We were on our way to church on Sunday morning and we got stuck behind a traffic barricade that was set up for what appeared to be a local race. After sitting in the car for about 5 or 10 minutes, I got out and walked up to where the traffic barricade was set up and asked the few folks who were standing there what the event was, if there was any plan to let traffic through, and if there were any detours we could take. One of them, an older white man in a white T-shirt and blue plaid shorts, told me to get back in my car without offering me any explanation. When I asked again if he thought they would let the cars through, he became agitated and told me that I should “go back to where I came from”, accompanying it with a string of racial slurs, confirming that he didn’t mean I should go back to Los Angeles where I grew up or to my home in Cambridge. Perhaps I would have just turned around and gone back to the car at this point, had there not been a second younger man apparently related to the older man, standing by him and snickering, egging him on. Somehow that increased the impact by a thousand fold. There was another person at the intersection, a younger black woman but she looked the other way. I don’t know why I engaged but I started telling them that they really shouldn’t say things like that, that I was a US citizen who contributed to our community, that they are the ones who should be shamed for calling me names. Then I walked back to the car, got in and started sobbing uncontrollably. Some people reading this might not understand why I had such an intense reaction to this encounter. After all, I’m a very well-educated professional woman in my 30s with a wonderful family and life. Why would I let the words of some random person on the street bother me so much?

The fact is that even for me and for many other immigrants who work hard to establish themselves and contribute to society in the United States, our sense of belonging and acceptance can still feel fragile. Even as we adopt this country as our home, we aren’t always sure if we are adopted back. It goes beyond the material and legal stuff of financially establishing oneself and gaining legal status – it’s also like a family relationship where you aren’t sure if someone you call your sibling or your parent (or something akin to that relationship) would call you family in return. Despite many many Americans of all backgrounds and ethnicities treating me and my family with kindness, generosity and affection throughout the many years I’ve lived in America now, at times my confidence of this acceptance and belonging can be overcast by undercurrents of racism and rejection that still pervade our society. And when there are events that puncture the relatively happy day-to-day relationship with America that I believe many immigrants have- a racist comment by a stranger at the grocery store, exclusion by classmates, xenophobic rallies on the news, a politician who downplays the darker sides of American history in dealing with ‘others’- it only reinforces immigrants’ fear that the usual calm of our lives is not really how things are. But like many who have adopted America as our home, I hold onto the generosity, kindness, decency and integrity of most of the people I’ve interacted with in this country as the more dominant reality and to the fact that this is my home. But this story central to my identity is not always an easy one to believe, which is why I am equally liable to get emotional when someone tells me the opposite or affirms it.

I don’t think I was the only one to feel this way in the theater last week. Perhaps this was more so because I was watching the show in Los Angeles, the city that I grew up in and love for its crazy amalgam of so many different cultures, but the crowd was so diverse. There were Hispanic teenagers with their grandmothers, black yuppies, Filipino middle-aged ladies, white grandfathers dressed to the nines, all among the audience. I’ve been to several other theater performances before in Los Angeles and usually the audience is more than 60% white in a city that is less than 30% non-hispanic Caucasian. So when the audience cheered and clapped enthusiastically after each superb number and wept [SPOILER ALERT] during the death scene of Hamilton’s son and then again during Hamilton’s death, I think it was more than just for the great singing and dancing. The crowd’s enthusiasm was amplified by the fact that the show was – to borrow a phrase from one of the songs – telling and affirming our stories at a time when it can feel more in peril than any time in recent history.

*As a side note, one question I had after watching Hamilton is why there have been so few musicals with stronger hip-hop influences? The NYT review says “…’Hamilton’ is making its own resonant history by changing the language of musicals. And it does so by insisting that the forms of song most frequently heard on pop radio stations in recent years — rap, hip-hop, R&B ballads — have both the narrative force and the emotional interiority to propel a hefty musical about long-dead white men…” I agree with everything written in the review but this sentence made me pause. Umm… I mean, haven’t we already known that rap, hip-hop, R&B have the “narrative force” and “emotional interiority” equal to any other genres out there? Do I only feel this way because I’m a minority millennial who grew up in Los Angeles listening to the golden age of hip-hop in the 90s?