Homeward Bound

Immigration Trauma and the Endless Search for "Home"

An Arctic tern flies over Greenland. Photograph by Carsten Egevang for National Geographic

Arctic terns are one of the most fascinating birds, having evolved to pursue the endless summer. They make an annual 8,641-mile flight from the Arctic Circle to the Antarctic Circle in search of sunlight. Migratory behavior has long fascinated me. African Elephants, Arctic Terns, and Great White Sharks make some of the most remarkable journeys on Earth; migrating by land, air, and sea in search of food, better conditions, or mates. I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit in the context of human history, my personal history, and the recent news of Afghan refugees making their migrations to foreign lands in search of a better life.

Migration differs from immigration in two important ways: First, migration happens seasonally, and immigration does not. Second, migration involves a return journey while immigration is generally one-way. As an immigrant myself, I have long grappled with this search for home and what this metaphorical “return journey” might look like for me. With the United States leaving Afghanistan, many photos of Afghan refugees, especially children, reaching safe havens such as the United States have shown up in the media. The refugees are usually wearing traditional clothing and have a smile and a familiar glimmer of hope in their eyes as they disembark the aircraft. The comments section of these articles usually garner thousands of likes and comments such as “Welcome to your future,” and “You’re safe now, buddy.” While I understand this optimistic impulse, it is important to understand that a person’s mere arrival in a safe haven country, while necessary for their wellbeing, is no guarantee of it. To be a refugee is to find yourself uprooted from all that is familiar, to lose your homeland, which in and of itself, is a form of trauma.

My family immigrated to America by choice; we were not forced to leave India due to war, persecution, or natural disaster. All of these things would most certainly have heightened the trauma of being uprooted. However, the loss of family, community, and social networks, financial limitations, learning a new language and culture, all compound into a traumatic experience that is endemic to all immigrants. The prevailing narrative around immigration is usually “you’re lucky” if you had the opportunity and means to move to countries such as the United States, Canada, or England, which have served as safe havens for many people within the diaspora. While I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment and am grateful for having had the opportunity to come to America, the move nonetheless was a loss. Modern thinking is often based on binary oppositions; things exist as either “good” or “bad,” “fortunate” or unlucky,” “right” or “wrong.” But in reality, things often take up space in both realms. I was lucky to leave India because our family wasn’t privileged with the opportunities afforded mostly to the wealthy there, and I also experienced the loss resulting from the rupture in connection to my homeland.

Photograph of my brother (age 11) and I (age 9) a couple of months after arriving in the U.S. It was taken in San Francisco, 1989.

Third Culture Kids

While my parents and I are both first-generation immigrants, our experiences with the move were vastly different. Unlike those who immigrate to a foreign country in adulthood, I’m part of a subgroup of immigrants referred to in sociology as Third Culture Kids (TCK). TCK are people who were born into one culture (in my case India) but raised in another (which for me is America). We are essentially not “from” anywhere. According to Merriam Webster,

The "third culture" to which the term refers is the mixed identity that a child assumes, influenced both by their parents' culture and the culture in which they are raised.

When I first learned about this, it put into context this feeling that I’ve always had, which is that I’m very Indian in many ways, traditional in my values and certain belief systems but I’m also not quite Indian enough in other ways. In middle school and part of high school, my brother and I spent some summers in India visiting with extended family. I suppose it was our mother’s way of ensuring that we would stay connected to our Indian roots and our father’s way of making certain that we would stay out of trouble for the summer. I remember my brother and I stepping off the plane with our oversized sweatshirts and Adidas flip-flops, suddenly hit by the humid yet balmy Mumbai air. It was a disorienting feeling — one of belonging and yet not quite being able to blend in among the other 18 million brown bodies. I never feel more American than I do when I go to India. No matter how much I try to haggle with street vendors in an effort to belong, everything from the way I dress and carry myself to my accent and inflections in Gujarati or my limited Hindi, betray my connection to the land where I was born and lived in for almost the first decade of my life.

Nevertheless, I loved my time in India and looked forward to summers there. I remember one time that I came back to the U.S. wearing a traditional shalwar kameez (now considered boho chic, but back in the 90s just considered “other”) and my Dad who picked me up from the airport biting his tongue and trying his hardest not to say something or revoke my passport for the next summer. For him, as I now realize may be the case with many young professionals who immigrate in adulthood, assimilation sometimes means shedding the outward vestiges of “otherness” to integrate and not stand out. I packed away the shalwar kameez, brushing it aside as my “Indian summer” memorabilia. This was yet another way that the immigration process for me was marked by a loss of self.

Code-Switching

Having moved with limited financial means, we lived and went to school in an immigrant hub in San Francisco that consisted primarily of Black, Filipino, Mexican, Vietnamese and Chinese people. This allowed me to forge an identity that has fragments of many different cultures and taught me to code-switch as a means to navigate these interracial relationships. In linguistics, code-switching is defined as¹:

[the] process of shifting from one linguistic code (a language or dialect) to another, depending on the social context or conversational setting…[it] is used to shape and maintain a sense of identity and a sense of belonging to a larger community.

In short, code-switching is a means of fitting into the dominant group. It occurs any time one combines different languages as in Spanglish (Spanish + English), or shifts between different dialects, accents, and mannerisms in order to be socially accepted. President Barack Obama was often attacked by his opponents as being "phony” or inauthentic in instances where he was simply code-switching. Here is a famous GIF you may have seen where he offers a conventional handshake to a White basketball coach before dapping up Kevin Durant and greeting him with "My man!” Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was also recently lambasted by the media for essentially code-switching. In her defense, linguist John McWhorter, explained²:

Few find code-switching surprising when Latinos do it between English and Spanish, alternating between the two languages within a single conversation or even sentence. The concept perhaps seems less familiar when done between dialects of the same language, but this, too, is extremely common. For example, what an unfortunate number of Americans think of as black people slipping into “errors” when they speak is, in the scientific sense, people code-switching between standard and Black English, the latter of which is an alternative, and not degraded, form of English.

When we first moved, I had a strong Indian accent, would often mix up my “v” and “w” sounds (and still sometimes do when I’m nervous), common for many people from India. All this prompted the school to put me in an English as a Second Language class, which was ironically taught by a kind teacher who had a thick Filipino accent. So, briefly, I began trading the “v” for “b,” as in “Happy Balentine’s Day,” which was how she pronounced “v.” Upon learning that my Indian accent was now being replaced by a Filipino one, my mom had the school put me back in the other 3rd-grade class. All this to say, while language has a communicative function, the nuances in the style of speech (including accents and pronunciation) are a form of cultural capital, which signal not just one’s identity but also their position within the social order. The more “legitimate” that people view your use and fluency of the language, the higher up you are perceived within the social order.³

Like many Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), I code-switch depending on whether I’m in the company of friends versus colleagues. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review, explored the notion that while “downplaying membership in a stigmatized racial group helps increase perceptions of professionalism and the likelihood of being hired,” code-switching also comes with a significant psychological cost. More specifically⁴,

Seeking to avoid stereotypes is hard work, and can deplete cognitive resources and hinder performance. Feigning commonality with coworkers also reduces authentic self-expression and contributes to burnout.

While it may come naturally to many of us, code-switching is exhausting and psychologically damaging because the underlying rationale for it is that you are not accepted as your true self. When we moved from San Francisco to a predominantly White New Jersey suburb, it was the first time since leaving India that I became friends with other Indians. Some of the first questions I remember being asked were why my brother dressed like a “hoodie” and why we “talk like that.” It hadn’t occurred to me that other People of Color (“POC”), especially Indians, would self-identify closer to the dominant White culture or didn’t code switch. As the saying goes, “Not all skin-folk are kinfolk.” It was also the first time I had even heard the term “hoodie” (which I believe is mostly used in the east coast suburbs) short for “hood” or “ghetto.” While it felt offensive at the time, it took me until now to unpack how truly disparaging that word is.

Loss of Community and Demands of Family Life on Women

Aside from code-switching, immigration is fraught with other stressors that are not always apparent to those who have never experienced them. While I was grappling with my sense of dislocation, my mother was also trying to find her place in a new country. The loss of community and social networks is especially difficult for immigrant women, such as my mom, who find themselves isolated and forced to deal with the demands of family life in a foreign place. I distinctly remember coming home one day from school and finding my mother serving freshly made rotis to a stranger she had just befriended. My mother was so hungry for companionship in those early days when she did not have a work permit and my dad was working long hours to support our family, she would ride the city bus just to be around other people. On this particular day, she ended up chatting with a woman who said she loved Indian food, so naturally, my mom invited her over for dinner!

Restructuring of Gender Roles

The restructuring of gender roles is another challenging area for immigrant families. Sometimes, due to work permit requirements or licensing limitations, men aren’t able to continue working in their chosen fields upon arriving in a host country. While this was not the case for our family, I’ve known immigrants who were professionals such as doctors and engineers in their homeland but couldn’t work as such in the U.S. Their pride prevented them from accepting lower-paying jobs and so their wives ended up taking them and supporting the family. This reconfiguration of the wife becoming the family breadwinner became a new source of strife because it challenged traditional gender norms.

Cultivating and Making Space for Authentic Self-Expression

I am currently enrolled in an online writing class. The students live all over the United States, except for one writer, an Indian woman who lives in Delhi. I mention her because her short stories are exclusively Indian, the characters, the setting, the themes are all very Indo-centric. She has no qualms about using foreign words, nor does she explain what these words mean. During our critiques, while many of the White writers praise her for the “exotic” world she paints, they also usually offer her the advice of appealing to a broader audience by italicizing or explaining some of the words that take effort for westerners to look up. Yet, she shows up unapologetically Indian every single time with zero explanations. It reminds me of something Toni Morrison once said when a journalist asked her whether she would ever write about things other than race. In discussing it with Charlie Rose, she explained how she admired African writers like Chinua Achebe and Bessie Head who could,

Assume the centrality of their race because they were Africans and they didn’t have to explain anything to White people. Those questions were incomprehensible to them, those questions that I would have as a minority living in an all-White country like the United States.

This was central to her rejection of what she refers to as "the White gaze” — the assumption that the reader is White and so the writer must center the White experience in their writing. Toni Morrison, in saying that the question of whether she would write about things other than race was insulting, explained,

As though it’s a desirable thing to do to write about White people. That it’s a difficult thing to do, a higher level of artistic endeavor or a more important thing to do…as though our lives have no meanings and no depth without the "white gaze.”

The first time I heard this, I realized that I’ve been reckoning with this my entire life — the not quite being able to assume the centrality of being Indian while in India or an American anywhere, the code-switching, and my writing, which attempts to wrestle with issues of race, gender and identity politics.

The Beginning of a New Journey

Circling back to migratory behavior in other animal species, while some animals forage along their migratory routes, most feed intensively before departing for their journey to boost their fuel reserves. This behavior, known as hyperphagia, is seen in wide-ranging species, including the monarch butterflies caribou, and baleen whales.⁵ When humans immigrate, we often do so with less than optimal emotional fuel for our journeys. What I mean by this is, there is usually some traumatic event — in extreme cases, it is war or persecution, but there are often distressing events in many less extreme cases, which lead to the decision to move. Unlike other animals, we are not always stocked with reserves to make the journey and upon arrival are rarely met with the type of abundant resources needed to refuel. While mental health services are not financially feasible for most new immigrants, the need for them is critical to the healthy functioning of any society that welcomes immigrants. While seeking therapeutic support is stigmatized in many cultures such as mine, and so many immigrants may not engage even given the opportunity, we would greatly benefit from having trauma-informed school counselors, especially in urban cities which tend to have higher rates of immigrants. My parents did not have the resources to seek the type of support that I needed when we moved, and I was too young to be able to articulate my needs. I can tell you now with near certainty, having therapeutic support in those early years would have served me in ways that I can only now appreciate. When I see the photos of Afghan refugees, this is exactly what comes to mind — this idea that trauma reverberates for generations — what types of emotional support systems can we set up? Their physical migration may have ended with a new “home” on new soil but as a member of the diaspora, the one thing I’ve learned is that it is also the beginning of a new journey. Just as the Arctic Tern eternally pursues summer, the immigrant is also on an endless quest, one involving a return journey “home.”

1. “Code Switching.” Britannica. Accessed September 6, 2021 from https://www.britannica.com/topic/code-switching

2. McWhorter, J. (2019, April 10). It Wasn't 'Verbal Blackface.' AOC Was Code-Switching, The Atlantic. Accessed August 20, 2021 from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-code-switches-black-english/586723/

3. The idea of linguistic cultural capital was developed by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Check out his work if you’re interested in learning more about it. In the meantime take a look at this video to see how your perceptions change about a person based on their accent.

4. McCluny, C. L, Robotham, K., Lee, S., Smith, R., & Durkee, M. (2021, January 28). The Costs of Code-Switching, Harvard Business Review. Accessed September 3, 2021 from https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-costs-of-codeswitching. 

5. Nebel, S. (2010). Animal Migration. Nature Education. Accessed August 20, 2021 from https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/animal-migration-13259533/.