The transaction of immigration

I suppose I had an outdated, oversimplistic concept that immigration was a purely positive opportunity with no awkward consequences or unexplained limitations, where you had the chance to live in a better, developed, safe country with advanced healthcare, education, and employment with no downsides. I thought once I was here, it was all golden, all peachy. But recently, I’ve been unintentionally disillusioned, jaded, more ruminative of the fact that immigration comes at a cost.

Growing up, I never realized it was a culture dominated by white people. I could go months without once bringing up the topic of race in my tortured mind, whereas I now deliberate it on the daily. There are the obvious reasons- overt discrimination, stereotypes and networks, language barriers, cultural differences, the issue of history- but then there are the pernicious, unspoken ones- how people of the same kind instinctively bond together, how it has become systemic in our societies, families, and social circles to be primarily with your own race, how lifestyles are different and thus prompt further segregation. Even in a city as diverse as Vancouver, I would be surprised if anyone told me they didn’t feel it, perhaps not strongly but the lingering presence of a dull awareness. How true is it that an Asian person can really rise to the ranks of a white person, by virtue of their background, appearance, or public perceptions? How can it be true when a higher proportion of minorities come from upbringings laden with poverty and racism, when most senior executives are white, when there are already social frameworks put in place like wide-reaching familial relations, a long history of superiority and supremacy, and when the central, pervasive culture of media and livelihoods are Western?

Which brings me to the next point: how can I complain? We knew going into it this was a transaction. Canada was notoriously English and mostly white. What exactly did I expect, and how can I be bitter? I traded in my minority Asian culture full of taboo customs that I shouldn’t expect people to understand, and my native language, and my strange cuisine, and my Chinese name, for a better life, free of war, protest, strife, injustice. I gave up that sprawling landscape of comfort, social norms at home like using chopsticks, taking our shoes off upon entry, having bowls of rice with each meal, speaking in loud Cantonese with an almost rude abandon, and expecting shoddy service at questionable Chinese restaurants. I started hiding my identity so quickly to assimilate that I hated my last name for the embarassing shame of how it was unpronounceable and so blatantly foreign, refused to answer the phone with the Cantonese hello, and immersed myself in so much whiteness that I become essentially a white person, in taste, thought, and preference.

Further yet, I lied to make it easier, like casually stating I had turkey and mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving or that I liked Billy Joel when I only heard one song (of which I really do like), and avoided looking too Asian in any scenario, like befriending white people to strike a multi-cultural balance or shying away from groups of Chinese people to prevent looking too fobby, as the slang goes. As I write all this, I’m not proud; I’m racked with guilt for the self-judgment, pressure, and strange complex that I could solve decades of racial discord and division through my calculated actions. I’m disgusted by my fear of being “found out” (for what? Is it not already obvious I’m not white?), my Imposter Syndrome everytime I speak English as though I’m convinced I’ll mess some word up, my paranoia that I’ll be tragically shamed for being exactly who I am. I’ve even gone to lengths to avoid putting my parents’ names down, either because I don’t want them to be contacted as it’ll bely this humiliating truth of origin of mine, or that they reveal some concealed, debasing secret that I really am Asian born and bred.

I’ve struggled with this since I was in Elementary School, right when I learned being more white meant being more normal, liked, cool, and distressingly, successful. I’d like to say this is a conspiracy theory of mine, but lo and behold, I have a lifetime of living in this skin as anecdotal proof. I wonder what it is like to be white in a white country (as some would argue was natural). I wonder whether it would be easier to relate to everyone. My parents are working-class, initially low-income individuals, working odd jobs at Insurance agencies, accounting businesses that hire the marginalized, random administrative functions, and their story is inundated with fear, instability, and martial dysfunction. Sometimes, when friends talk about parents who have gone to school at local universities to study pharmacy, engineering, teaching, or whatever the hell else suitable and professional, and who go on to become consultants, mechanics, professors, I feel my self-esteem plummets a few notches, like I don’t deserve my desperate spot there.

Side note: I have also noticed the people who have travelled, interacted with different types of people, and adapted to unfamiliar environments, tend to be easier to talk to. They withhold judgment, hear your story with the comprehension that it is normal and not exotic, and ask questions without thinking you’re from another planet.

There is far too much for me to write on this subject that I’ll perhaps never have it detangled.

But there’s always the cardinal clash between who I am and who I pretend to be (and sometimes, want to entirely be). There’s this heinous, disquieted side of me that is acutely hyper-aware of my race and my disadvantage and who tries ten times as hard as a white male might to be respected and considered typical, and there’s the diminished, slowly waning side of me who is Asian at heart, with Asian roots, an Asian heritage, an Asian face that doesn’t comply with conventional beauty standards, who hates every part of it at times with the low-level panic that none of that is good enough.

At the end of the day, immigration isn’t free. For me, it was a rocky, life-altering, mind-boggling transition to abandoning an old culture to accomodate a new one. It was losing the crux of what my parents passed onto me, with unorthodox, abnormal traditions, practices, languages, and feeling a subsequent, subliminal aversion towards them as though they were demeaning and discredited my holy pursuit of whiteness. It was giving up a life where I would be normal, for a life that would be better.

As glorious as it all sounds, just think long and hard about the eventual and inevitable generational decay of your family’s culture, the way your kids will forget the sounds of your native tongue, grow increasingly compatible with a white-dominant society as a mode of social survival, and experience some identity coming-of-age crisis, before you proclaim the freedom of immigration.