The Immigrant Struggle

As you can tell by my very exotic name, I am not of this world. Kidding, I’m just South Asian. I am also an only child and the daughter of immigrant parents who refuse to assimilate with the dominant culture, which has been… great. JUST. GREAT. I hope that sufficiently denotes my sarcasm.

This means I have been in a decades-long tug-of-war between my very Indian parents and the western culture I feel most free and happy in.

I need to add context so we can understand my parents’ perspective. They are highly-educated, metropolitan people, completely fluent in English. However, for as long as I’ve been watching Bollywood (i.e. Hindi-language) entertainment, the western world has been depicted as a value system of loose morals and regular debauchery. In contrast, all Indian protagonists are pious, patriotic heroes. Despite India being the rape capital of the world due to generations of sexual repression (yay!), these media representations of “gore log” (which means “white people,” sorry, white people) have skewed the perceptions of older Indians, that North America is a gateway to unabated drug use and taking yo’ panties off. Furthermore, there’s a very common Hindi saying that essentially translates to: you can take the Indian out of India, but you can’t take the India out of an Indian (“phir bhi dil hai Hindustani,” iykyk).

Just like any other prejudice, the more you stick to only what you know, the more these biases get cemented into your psyche. I was blessed to have a diverse mix of friends all through elementary and high school; this really helped me integrate into a new country with strong friendships. While I was attending university, I would get annoyed at international students who would cling to each other in groups on campus, sneering at others in their own language. I can appreciate having a familiar community, but the inability to extend those borders beyond language, nationality, or ethnicity will clip your wings.

Before I come across as a brown-skinned bigot, I understand that someone can be both Indian and Canadian, an Indo-Canadian, if you will. I acknowledge my Indian heritage and respect it. In fact, for most of my formative years, I heavily engaged in desi culture by immersing myself in performance arts. I was part of a professional Indian dance troupe as an extracurricular all through post-secondary, and almost exclusively watched Hindi-language movies and TV shows.

However, once I left home after graduation, I expanded my pop culture reach and continue to do so. Whether educating myself on the MCU or playing more Nintendo Switch games (classic Caucasian culture, amirite), I decided to dip my toes into different activities that help me connect with others. The unfortunate byproduct is that I relate to my parents less and less as they stubbornly watch Pakistani soap operas and think superhero movies are vapid. You know what? I think they are, too, but let my Indian ass participate in the megacorporation-fuelled hysteria. Thank you.