The "Immigrant Experience:" Why We Need to Tell it All.
I had an extremely happy childhood. My parents created a world for me and my brothers that was filled with love, security, and endless moments of play. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling I had that I was an “other.” It was a feeling that would underlie every moment I spent outside of my home. I felt it when I was in school, when I played with my friends, when I went to the grocery store with my Mom. This feeling carried on with me throughout my teenhood. By then, I had figured it out; I was different. I was different because I was a person of color. I was different because I was an immigrant. I was different because my parents spoke broken English.
At the time, I chalked it up to my surroundings. I grew up in predominantly, often exclusively, white spaces. Everyone seemed to come from a larger puzzle I could never fit into. The peak of this isolation came when we lived in rural America, where the only people of color were the five people in my family. I told myself it was just the town, the people. So, I was ecstatic when my family announced our move to Chicago. I daydreamed about the community I would find there, somewhere I could fit into. At last, I would find my own puzzle.
Did it happen? Yes and no. Once the initial culture shock of the diversity at my new high school subsided, I made friends from various backgrounds. I was particularly excited about the new Asian friends I had made. I wanted to share my experiences of hurt, loneliness, and discrimination with them. I expected them to not only empathize, but immediately understand me.
But they didn’t understand. How could they? They didn’t grow up in rural, white America. They had always moved in diverse spaces and communities. Furthermore, I realized that I couldn’t understand them. There were key elements to their Urban Asian American experience that I couldn’t relate to. I didn’t know what it was like to have parents who worked from 5 AM to 10 PM, or to have parents who have been held at gunpoint of the convenience stores, dry cleaner shops, and nail salons they worked at. Even the one commonality we shared, experiencing racism, had manifested into completely different experiences for us. I realized that community isn’t about finding people who share your exact experiences. It’s about drawing on the themes you share and building solidarity through support.
We live in an extremely complex world that attempts to make sense of itself by generalizing issues, experiences, and people. It happens everywhere. We hear these generalizations from our world leaders to the people in our communities. What happens, instead, is we inhibit our ability to properly understand each other.
Issues like immigration and diaspora are no different. So many factors go into shaping each narrative that comes from migration. These factors include race, religion, country of origin, gender, sexual orientation, economic class, immigration policies, political climate, and so much more. You could have two immigrants who are from the same country but have vastly different experiences. Two different perspectives on immigration. Two different relationships with the immigrant identity. Two individuals who could never be placed into the same category. Why would you want to?
This is why we need to tell each and every story. When you elevate the individual narratives of immigrants, you’re not only made aware of the rich complexities and differences, but the ways in which we all share common ground. When you hear these stories, you hear about love, hardship, happiness, and conflict. While the narratives themselves may not be relatable, the themes behind them have the ability to connect you to the person telling the story. That’s how we can understand each other. This is how we can start to build our own communities of solidarity. The immigrant experience is not universal, but the human experience is.
