Parents as a Source of Reassurance as My Little World Crumbled

The year 2000 started well.  I was an ecstatic little boy graduating from elementary school in provincial Japan.   Finally, I was joining the “big boys” at the middle school across the street, donning the cool uniforms that I observed in pure envy for the past six years.  Change was afoot, and I was so ready to embrace it.  Instead, the change was much more radical than I had ever imagined.  Instead of moving across the street, father came home one day and notified that our whole family is moving to the USA, thousands of miles away. 

“Anxious” did not even begun to describe how I felt.  No friends, no knowledge, no language skills.  All the sudden, six years of schooling was tossed out of the window, completely useless in a new land.  That shock was not something that the tears of a young boy can compensate for.  Mother remained calm while I grew dumbfounded by the news.  She remained nonchalant while I felt a constant daze.  She didn’t make conscious effort to comfort, because she knew I cannot be consoled at that moment.  She simply said, “a smart boy can succeed in any country, any environment.” 

It was a line that she would not repeat again until I graduated from Yale a full ten years later.  It was her calm and quiet belief in my success that turned the English-less teary immigrant boy into an elite college graduate in his new adopted homeland.  The psychological support, just as important (and likely much more so) than the material and financial support, ensured that I would overcome being in a strange new land, surrounded by people with no common interests or language, and often unsympathetic or even outright hostile toward previously taught values and beliefs.

Of course, it was not easy for my father either.  Whatever I was feeling at the time, there is no doubt that he felt ten times worse.  At least a middle school student has plenty of time to acclimate in a relatively tolerant setting.  People knew the immigrant is not going to understand the culture or speak the language, so they would not mind the immigrant making gaffs and mistakes that would be considered completely intolerable should they come from non-immigrants.  By being tolerated and corrected after making those gaffes and mistakes, I learned.

But the immigrant adult, as a working professional, had no such kind environment to acclimate.  Given the competitive nature of the medical research field that he was in, he was very much expected to perform at the same level as his “native” American coworkers from day one.  Surely he had language and cultural barriers as well, but in the workplace, those are not sufficient reasons to underperform.  Every person in the work place, immigrants included, is paid the competitive American salary as every other person, so to keep the job, he had to perform at the same competitive American way.

That meant more pressures, less excuses, and more conflicts.  As much as he would refuse to talk about it at the home setting, there is no doubt that his eventual decision to return to China for work had many reasons rooted in displeasures with the workplace.  People, as expected, would have been highly intolerant of slowness associated with not understanding the language or the work culture.  The level of getting beat down over differences in how to think about and do things would have been much more apparent to the working adult than the middle school student.

Such stories of struggling immigrants are one repeated millions of times over in the US and across every locale that migrants find themselves.  Every immigrant family would have similar tales of struggling in adversity, lack of understanding, and an unsympathetic “native” population.  And for adults, those struggles, psychological and financial, mental and physical, are ones every immigrant can relate to in some degree and non-immigrants can never truly understand.  The resulting toughness (in good times) and disillusions (in bad ones) define the migrant psyche.

On this Father’s Day, and any other day related to parents, I would encourage immigrants like myself to think about what their parents, working for money in completely foreign environments, faced in terms of sheer adversity.  It is their willingness to keep going despite all the negatives they face every day that bought valuable time for immigrant children to thrive in foreign lands.  Those struggles are ultimately worthy of our gratitude, and valuable for our own current and future struggles as working adults facing unfamiliar situations.