It is almost too much to see the pictures. Almost unbearable to see so clearly the passage of time, the circle of life and the line of death. I see my mother and father in the days when we didn’t know each other.

As I keep turning the pages, I reach pictures from a more recent past – arriving in Canada, a family of four with two, school-aged daughters. I see how the awkwardness of our particular ages coupled with the profanity of westernized life and the financial impossibility of immigration cast an ugly grey color over everything.

Their smiles have lost that unmistakable brightness of hope, the hope of being newly wed with two fun and funny toddlers in a familiar world around everyone they love. I see instead winces of pain and frustration at the corners of those aging adult mouths, and the wrinkling of foreheads, and the sullenness of eyes. The only hope now resting in the little children – that they grow up healthy and capable in a world hopefully less foreign to them than their parents.

After a rather heartbreaking talk with my mother during which I evoke my strongest most resilient self so that she can be weak and vulnerable, I am left with the utter pain and reality of our immigrant life and the way it affects everything I am and will ever be.

It’s hard to try and express the feeling without enumerating all the ways in which my family has been challenged and won’t really ever catch a break.
 
But right now, it makes me feel like the entire direction of my life is very explicitly formed upon the opportunities and safety nets I did not and will not ever have. I have to make my identity my life, and my life the result and resolution of the story of our immigration, of trying to build a life in the most basic ways, by the most essential of definitions; a place to call home that is not constantly threatened to be taken away, the right to go places, the right to have the job you are qualified for, the right to LIVE without having to receive permission from the government on a yearly basis, the right to live without fear. To live near family and to feel rooted to at least one place you can return to. And reliable sources of financial security for ones children and now for ones aging parents, retirement? Pensions? Please. Retirement is a dream my parents never had the time or energy to dream up.
 
 
 
 
 

Vancouver, 1998


 But my parents dreamed and they dreamed big. Our whole life has been a dream: there are more songs and dances in our family repertory than in any company’s history. There are more pictures of birthday parties, holiday gatherings and plain old dinner times at home than any normal person would care to document. Simply because every moment of our lives has felt exceptional, a privilege that could be revoked in an instant. My parents walk outside and praise the heavenly trees in our backyard. My mother sings the glories of the public library. We give gifts because we feel so blessed for the people in our lives. There is not a moment to take for granted. We can’t afford it.
 
And so, as I face the realities of our current situation evermore, and am instilled with even greater responsibility to build the stability my parents never had, I feel so averted from spending time with people who cannot understand that life can be so heavy and light at the same time. I’m tired of trying to have working relationships with people who come from such a different world that they have never had to face the struggles that make me who I am. I don’t care, that for some life is a breeze. Because I think it gets impossibly difficult for everyone at some point.
 
And I wonder what sort of orientation I would have to life if it wasn’t such a motivating game to play. If I didn’t have to work so hard to survive, live, work, and feel secure that in the future everyone would be more or less okay. If these are the things that govern the shape of my life, so be it. If I can’t fuck around, loping until something meaningful turns up then fine. I accept that shit is real now, and this just happens to be the way things are for someone I call myself.
 
 
 
The Making of an Immigrant Life | 2013 | Uncategorized | Comments (0)