To My Immigrant Parents

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 13:50:31 -0500
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The following post was written by Ojuswani Phogat, a third-year student at UMBC.

Positionality Statement: The letter below is a message from me to my immigrant parents. It is reflective of only their experiences and mine but is being shared with you all with an understanding that the immigrant experience can be a wild, scary, intense, fulfilling, and beautiful one. And that someone, somewhere, may relate to this story on more than just the surface.

To My Immigrant Parents

Dear Mumma and Papa,

It is rare for me to think of the lives you led before I was born. To think of you as children, young adults, or parents of a singular daughter, instead of two. I cannot fathom a world where I do not exist, despite the remnants of your past lives that hide in the crevices of our home. The ones you pull out of dusted boxes underneath your bed and from the back of cabinet corners to show to me from time to time. The pictures of you both wearing school uniforms, eyes shining, and faces plastered with bright smiles showing off two missing front teeth. The sindhoor¹ your mother gave to you the day of your wedding, tucked away into a patterned cloth nestled inside of our household mandir. The ceramic chai cups, lovely little things, adorned with arrangements of blue flowers your cousins gave to you on your 24th birthday. I do not consider these mementos of your life’s most cherished moments until I do. Until I see them with my eyes, smell them in all their aged glory, feel the weathered edges of the containers that store them, and sip chai from them, and it dawns on me that there is a whole part of your story that I do not know the intricacies of. And yet it defines my very existence.

I can’t imagine the courage it would take to leave behind … a culture, a language, a home.

To say farewell (or at the very least see you in a while)…

To the very khets² of green that sustained your childhood, where you gulped down sugar cane juice and stole neighborhood fruit off of tall, lusciously beautiful trees as your grandmother called for you to return home.

To the patches of dirt where you gathered with your friends to play cricket and kabaddi³, laughing and bonding for hours.

To leave behind everything you have ever known.

To leave behind a community enriched with thousand-year-old traditions rooted in a fundamental understanding of what it means to be Brown and thrive in a place with people who look just like you.

The experience of leaving home must be undefinable. It seems, in a word: scary. In a few words: completely, utterly terrifying. An experience that I am almost certain you would never allow of me. And yet, here I am, existing in a land completely new to the both of us. One we navigate with excitement and curiosity but mostly caution for a hesitancy of the unknown.

In reflecting on my time in this place, I think of the hill just a few feet behind our old house, my own khet² of radiant grass and luscious trees on which you took my sister and I to fly kites at the age of 4. The same one that I glared at through my bedroom window with my eyes stinging with tears as I spent my freshman year of college cooped inside a house that was wholly consuming my sanity. I think of the gravel-covered playground in our community that we went to each year on the last day of summer, spending hours swinging and playing games. The same park I watched with a feeling of despair as I sat in our green minivan packed to the brim with clothes, appliances, and toys. As we drove away from friends, family, and the community you created for us towards our new house in New Jersey, where a second such community would never be built.

In leaving your home, you have rendered me without a concrete one. I exist in this place but have not found the ability to claim it as my own. It is not mine, despite my residing within it. How can one belong to a place when their physicality, spirituality, and culture remain under speculation, only being accepted in bits and pieces when it suits the visions of the white man?

It is here in this environment that I exist within two distinct worlds. I am an American, born and raised, but what marks my presence in this place is my othered identity. It is the Desi part of me, the one defining my brownness, that I am legible through. It is here where I exist in limbo between the cultural and social markers of my two communities. It is in this middle ground is where I am accepted by neither community.

You would think then that in reconnecting with your home, I would be accepted as one of the pack. I would be revered as one of the community, a missing piece of the puzzle that renders it complete. However, the gap between you and me and, by extension, me and them is one that cannot be closed by sheer will. It is not solely a gap of distance; it is one of the mind: of experience, of speech, of perspective by which physicality is completely transcended. Such a gap, while marked physically by the Atlantic Ocean, is one that I am ridiculed for despite the role I did not play in its creation. My removal from my location and also the location of my ancestors is what renders me without a base. It leaves me without a place I can cherish and savor with my whole being.

It is understandable that your instinct is to protect those who you have created. That in lieu of favoring our exploration of this place, you have prioritized the notion of safety. A notion you then fed to us: it is not you we don’t trust; it’s others. This phrase, a manifestation of the fear you have undertaken to live within your reality. The fear that you have for your own safety and mine. And while that itself does not excuse the excessive control you have chosen to operationalize within our relationship, there can be an acknowledgment of the fact that you are more like me than I have ever thought before. That you are human, and your instinct to protect kept me alive in a way you found my instinct to build community and thrive in a place I considered my home never could.

1: vermillion-colored cosmetic powder made out of saffron and red sandalwood. Is worn in a long stroke on the top of the forehead and into the hair part by married South Asian women

2: plot of land typically with crops (a field or farm)

3: South Asian sport