For Children of Diasporas, Home Is Hard to Find

Children of diasporas seem to speak a shared language — one that consists of a certain confusion about where we belong, a nostalgia for a place that may never have been our home and a sense of straddling two or more worlds.

In a new essay collection published by Book*hug Press, editors Taslim Jaffer and Omar Mouallem invited 27 emerging and established North American authors to reflect on their experiences of returning to their own or their parents’ homeland. The essays, which blend travel writing with memoir, invite readers to 24 different countries — El Salvador, Lebanon, Portugal, Hong Kong, Mongolia, India and Hungary, among others — to experience the shared questions of identity and belonging that shape them.

Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity and Home contains multitudes, from humorous accounts of cross-cultural (mis)communication to poignant reflections on the grief of immigration and being separated from family. The through line is a rich understanding of the complexity that underpins first- and second-generation diasporic realities.

My own parents are both immigrants, from two different countries: Mexico and the United States. They met in Vancouver in the late 1970s, when each had arrived in search of freedom from the worlds they’d previously known. Both were fortunate to land on their feet relatively smoothly, and to build rewarding personal and professional lives in their new city.

My sibling and I benefited from their luck and experienced a childhood of relative comfort and privilege. Still, their immigration coloured our existence.

We had no extended family in Canada aside from an uncle, aunt and two cousins on my mother’s side, in Manitoba. It was always just us: our nuclear family of four, spending holidays together as a unit in Vancouver when we couldn’t travel to see extended family in California or Mexico.

I spent my childhood visiting these two places, both so much warmer, climatologically and culturally, than Vancouver. I got to know my parents and my heritage through each.

In Orange County, where my beloved maternal grandparents lived in a suburban bungalow on a palm-tree-lined street, I rejoiced in the strip malls we’d visit, the enormous Tex-Mex meals we’d devour and the Spanglish I’d hear spoken all around me under the hot Californian sun.

I couldn’t believe how American it all felt. Just like in the movies, California seemed to me to be filled with bleach-blond surfers and skaters, fast-food diners and pavement that stretched on for miles.

In Mexico, when we’d take our annual trip to visit my father’s 10 siblings and their offspring in Guadalajara, it was a different experience altogether. While I delighted equally in the warmer weather and colourful cultural immersion, my outsider-ness felt insurmountable, a perpetual source of shame.

Like many children of non-western immigrants, I hadn’t learned my parent’s native language — Spanish — to full proficiency; attempting to communicate with loved ones felt stunted and awkward as a result. Additionally, being taller and fairer skinned than most of my family members thanks to my mixed heritage, I was immediately clocked as a foreigner on public outings.

Wandering through the bright marketplaces of Mexico, the women selling tamales and tortas and fresh produce would call me güera (“blondie” or “whitey,” also shorthand for foreigner). As I got older and made trips to Mexico on my own, I’d eventually learn that the word was meant as an endearing greeting to most everyone. But the sting I’d internalized early on lingered, marking me as other.

‘Not a one-way journey but an oscillation’

In several of the essays in Back Where I Came From, writers broach this foreignness they also experience in their parents’ home country or the country they left as children.

In “Ah-Ling Ge Lui Fan Lai La! Ah Ling’s Girl Has Come Home,” Edmonton writer Kathryn Gwun-Yeen Lennon describes a journey back to Hong Kong with her parents and sister for her maternal grandmother’s funeral.

The piece is immersive, like all good travel writing: Gwun-Yeen Lennon writes of the smell of brine that fills her nose as the ferry pulls into Cheung Chau, the small island off the mainland where her mother, Ah Ling, was born. She takes us past cramped three-storey walk-ups “so close to each other that you can watch your neighbour’s TV” and fishing boats jostling for room in the harbour.

Gwun-Yeen Lennon is mixed-race — second-generation Chinese on her mother’s side and Irish on her father’s; like me, she describes feeling out of place both because of her mixed cultural heritage and because of her physical appearance.

“I always assumed my Pau Pau (grandmother) never saw me as Chinese,” she writes. “With my barely passable Cantonese, my mixed-raceness, my gwai lo father, my Canadian upbringing.”

Her parents didn’t raise her and her sister to talk about race or to identify as Chinese. As a child, she would attend after-school Chinese calligraphy classes and field off-key remarks about China from white strangers, yet in Hong Kong, she wasn’t seen as Chinese enough.

On a trip in her mid-20s to live with her grandmother and attempt to connect more deeply with her heritage, she’s scolded for the way she uses her chopsticks, for not doing laundry often enough or for hanging out with boys.

“I thought it would be a way of rooting myself,” she writes of the trip. “To find my way out of the cloud of identity confusion and discomfort in my own skin that had been my experience as a mixed-race Asian woman. I would learn from my elders, connect with my roots, and reclaim my culture and language. Instead, it was an awkward, fumbling time, filled with conflict.”

After her grandmother’s passing, Gwun-Yeen Lennon feels uncertain about how she’ll remain connected to Hong Kong and to her culture and heritage. “I’ve lost my sense of urgency to learn the language. I am less sure of my right, ability or desire to lay any kind of claim to a Chinese, Cantonese or Hong Konger identity,” she writes.

“I wonder if im/migration is not a one-way journey but an oscillation. A shuttle on a loom. A portal opened between worlds for a shining moment. And I fear that with Pau Pau’s passing that portal has shut.”

Seeing parents in a new light

Family is another connecting force woven throughout these essays. Several contributors write about coming to know their immigrant parents more deeply through return trips with them to their homelands.

In “The Journey Home,” Nhung N. Tran-Davies writes of her return, at the age of 26, to Vietnam, the country her mother escaped with her six children during the Vietnam War, emigrating to Canada in pursuit of a better life.

“You could say my feelings were a potpourri of angst and joy, dread and excitement,” writes Tran-Davies.

“Not only was the political climate of communist Vietnam rather uncertain at that time, but my relationship with Mom was precarious too — complicated by years of turmoil in our single-parent immigrant home.... It was surreal for me to set foot on the soils of a land that only, up until then, existed in Mom’s stories, news reports, or my own nebulous childhood memories.”

Tran-Davies’ trip to her mother’s homeland reveals a side to her that she’s never previously witnessed, after a family life in Canada shaped by hardship and strictness.

As old friends and distant relatives descend on her family in Cà Mau to welcome her mother back home, Tran-Davies writes: “I saw Mom in a light that was a rarity in my younger memory — laughing and giggling over shared stories.... I was finally seeing this woman for who she really was. This woman who, back in Canada, toiled all day, all night making meals, washing dishes, sweeping floors, sewing clothes, doing laundry, and so much more.”

Tran-Davies realizes that her childhood experience of her mother was shaped by the trauma and poverty she had to endure in raising her and her siblings. In travelling to Vietnam and witnessing her in a different environment, Tran-Davies can understand her mother more deeply and appreciate what she left behind when she immigrated.

Connection and separation

Trauma, political upheaval and war frame many of the stories in the collection and have always been a driving force behind global migration. So too do feelings of responsibility, guilt and sadness at being confronted with the difficult realities many immigrant parents faced in their home countries.

Food and language also figure throughout as thematic links. Both can serve as points of cultural connection and factors of cultural separation.

In “Coriander, Chai and Canada,” Calgary journalist Seema Dhawan explores how difficult it can be to consider home a place that has ceased to be so through the process of immigration, and how food can create a bridge.

“It’s impossible to go back where I came from, because where I came from came with me. It’s in the black tea leaves I drop into my pot of water every morning, the charred liquid boiling chai as pieces of cardamom flip over,” she writes.

In her essay “Foreign Body,” June Chua writes captivatingly of how the food she incorporated into her childhood diet when her family migrated from Malaysia gradually shaped her new immigrant self — psychically and physiologically.

“When we first arrived in Canada, we soon began our journey of ingesting many more milk-based foods, which in time became an intrinsic part of our diet. It was converting me on a cellular level, altering my being. A Canadian friend once told me how simple it was to make butter; you just whip the cream until the fat separates from the liquid. I immediately thought of myself as the cream and the force of migration as the mixer, separating me into something new and shapeable.”

The new milky foods were slowly immersing Chua and her sisters into new, western habits, at the same time that the girls began to reject the curries and stir-fried vegetables their mother would prepare.

Throughout Back Where I Came From, deeper threads of similarity become apparent across a vast array of experiences and journeys. Immigration is both a process of disconnection and one of perpetual attachment.

We’re never quite cut loose from the places we’ve come from, these stories seem to suggest, nor from those of our parents and ancestors.

Though language, physical distance and cultural barriers may at times feel like they separate us, the cord of connection runs deep. It’s a bond that holds so much: pain, shame and grief, but also joy, love and belonging.

Reading through Jaffer and Mouallem’s collection, I felt profoundly witnessed and experienced a certain kinship with each writer, despite the specifics of our diasporic experiences.

As global migration continues to shape the world we occupy, and people are displaced both by political upheaval and circumstance as well as by choice, the experiences of immigrants and their children are invaluable to our shared cultural history.

We need to hear these stories — both to feel seen ourselves, and to bear witness to the lives of others.