When I came to the U.S. in fifth grade, my best friends were our two next-door neighbors who were around 70 years old. I called them grandpa and grandma and theirs became my adoptive home as I struggled with adjusting to life in the US. For the two years that we lived in St. Paul, I would go to their house after school every day. The relationship with grandpa and grandma feels emblematic of my relationships with old people. Both before and after I moved to America, they have been some of my dearest friends, even as I struggled to come to terms with a very different American notion of what it means to age. In America aging is seen and treated as a curse, both physically and emotionally. It is not considered beautiful and an array of cosmetic and surgical products promise to conceal the process and deliver artificial youth. The nursing homes at which many older people wind up isolate them from the rest of the society, to the point that many children only rarely interact with older people to whom they are not related. This largely Western system of aging creates a gulf between generations that is wider than in non-Western countries. I see it as both a factor in and result of depictions of old people in Western media, which largely shows them in the grave light of senility and anger. None of the older people I know fit this archetype, and I intend Youth to offer a counter-narrative to aging.