“Opportunities”
meant better jobs, schools, amenities, and the higher standard of
living that she always heard about from my uncle and others who returned
to India for a visit. One would be a fool to miss an opportunity to
move to Canada, the United States or the United Kingdom, my parents
thought. So, with the promise of a better life, my parents set off
to Canada, a country whose geographic location was a mystery to them.
It is at this point in my mother’s retelling of the story that
I invariably interject with, “How could you just up and leave
for a place that you couldn’t even locate on a map? Didn’t
you do any research on Canada before you came here? Did you know how
much colder it would be? Did you know anything about the way of life?”
The answers? Unequivocal nos. This lack of research eventually came
back to haunt my mother, as it did many parents who immigrated to
the West, with little more than hope and a dream.
My parents, like many immigrants, were not prepared
for the cultural clash between eastern and western values. As Sikhs,
for example, my parents expected my siblings and me to never cut our
hair. This expectation was especially difficult for my brother, who
had to keep his very long hair in a jura (bun) on the top
of his head. Being the only South Asians at school was tough enough
without looking so different. My brother was teased all the time about
his hair, with kids calling him names like “bunner” and
“stick shift” (because his bun supposedly looked like
the stick shift in a car). When my brother entered high school, he
cut his hair despite my father’s objections. My sister and I
soon followed suit. As an adult, my father, who wore his turban with
religious pride, couldn’t relate to the teasing my brother had
to endure. My father had heard racist remarks himself but was already
confident, whereas my brother was a child who was still unsure of
his place in the world and was doing his best to straddle both the
East and the West.
When it was time for school photographs my mother
would dress me up in a salwar kameez to have my picture taken.
She thought girls always looked so much prettier wearing Indian outfits
rather than American clothes. But I absolutely hated it. Not only
did I have long braids but now I was going to be immortalized in my
class picture wearing a bright, shiny outfit that made me look like
a character out of a segment of the “The Big Blue Marble”
television series. Even when I would bring the class picture home,
it never occurred to her that I was the only child that looked different.
This issue continued into my teenage years, at which point I was old
enough to flat-out refuse to wear whatever she told me. But she was
not happy to see me wearing mini-skirts or other revealing clothes.
“A good Indian girl does not wear clothes like that,”
she would say with an obvious look of disapproval. “You always
look so good in Indian clothes, why can’t you wear that when
you go out?” And it continued into my twenties...“Why
don’t you wear a salwar kameez to the office once in
a while? You have so many and they look so great on you.” “Mom
I can’t wear Indian clothes to the office!” I would protest.
She just didn’t understand that all I ever wanted was to blend
in with my environment, not walk into a room with a bright red beaded
salwar kameez and turn heads.
Immigrant parents often do not realize the fine balancing
act their children must perform in their everyday lives. These parents
expect their children to live by the moral and cultural codes of the
countries they left, and not the countries they have adopted as their
new homelands. Often, they do not venture outside of their own culture,
even while living away from their motherland. These parents socialize
mainly, or even solely, with others of their culture, resist learning
the language of the adopted country, eat their own ethnic food, and
wear their own cultural garbs. How many times have we seen a South
Asian woman at the mall in a sari?
As their children get older, they are expected to
stay within this cultural circle as well. Many South Asian parents
expect children to embrace South Asian culture and values, even if
their children were born in North America. The children, however,
do not have the strong ties to the South Asian culture that their
parents do, and may feel they have more in common with the value system
of the place in which they have been raised. This is most evident
in the social practice of marriage. Many parents living in the West
hope that their child will marry a suitable South Asian from their
own community, but are frequently disappointed.
In the West, South Asians are exposed to a larger
variety of cultural and ethnic groups than in India. This has created
quite a bit of anguish for South Asian immigrants, who might have
had arranged marriages themselves. Neetu has had to accept that both
her son and daughter did not marry South Asians. “It is very
upsetting to realize that your family’s South Asian heritage
may eventually disappear in coming generations,” she notes.
“My son-in-law and daughter-in-law do not know anything about
our ways. What will they teach my grandchildren? In America, you cannot
control what your children do or who they choose to marry.”
Over the years, my mother has learned to give up
some of the control that South Asian parents are used to having. For
example, she now understands that I don’t want to be the only
one wearing Indian clothes at a non-South Asian event. Like many South
Asians that made their way from East to West in search of a better
life for themselves and future generations, she has come to realize
that by migrating to Canada the cultural rules also changed along
the way. There was much to gain, like better schools, jobs, and living
conditions. But there was also much to lose, like cultural and family
ties, children marrying outside their race or religion, and the general
rejection of the South Asian way of life in favor of Western mores
and customs by future generations.
Tina Soin Sharma is a manager in the Planning & Development Department
of a media company. She is an Indo-Canadian transplant adjusting to
life in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The views expressed in this section are those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ABCDlady.
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