Week 4: Psychosocial Experience of Immigration

Me at 4 years old in Sri Lanka, with my cousin and great aunt.

One example of "diet" assimilation I mentioned.

In my experience, I have met a fair amount of immigrant children, and I am the child of an immigrant, but I was actually born and raised here, so I had a somewhat normal childhood. However, when I was four years old, my mother moved back to Sri Lanka to visit family and ended up stuck there, so my parents gave me the option to choose where. Obviously I couldn’t just make the decision, given that I was four at the time, but the decision was made, with my vehement input, that I’d come back here after a year to grow up and go to school. Since I had two years before school even started to adjust, make friends and acculturate, I didn’t experience the real adjustment problems a lot of immigrant children go through, such as being tossed into a brand new environment in school that is completely foreign to them, and being forced to learn on the go. However, this did result in me somewhat losing touch with my culture in terms of my Sri Lankan heritage, as I quickly forgot the language through lack of use and moved on.  I think that immigration has a bit of a polarizing effect on people, as things may not always represent the expectations that immigrants tend to build up in their minds before they travel somewhere, and real adjustment can be very difficult in this respect. My mother, for example, came here with the idea of building a family and being very happy after that goal was accomplished, but that wasn’t how things actually ended up working out. After a few years here, she said that she experienced an incredibly intense desire to travel back to Sri Lanka and see her family and her brothers, as well as her father. Nothing could convince her at the time that any other course of action had priority, and sadly as a result she was stuck there and has been ever since. I think assimilation, when properly accomplished, into another culture can tend to make people, especially second generation immigrants lose touch with their own sense of identity and adopt a lot of new customs and ideas that they might never have been exposed to otherwise. Things such as diet and leisure activities are two particularly prominent examples to me, and another important aspect is longevity of ones stay. Take for example my mentee Kevin. He hasn’t been here for very long at all, and though I don’t how exactly how long, its apparent that he doesn’t yet feel comfortable with the formalities and niceties of our culture, most obviously represented by his less than proficient grasp of the English language. He makes it pretty clear to me that he prefers the culture of his home country, which I completely understand and sympathize with. To be essentially tossed into a completely new cultural environment would be very difficult to handle, especially for a young child such as Kevin. However, given enough time in his new environment, and the right kind of reinforcement of his heritage at home, Kevin will grow to see that he can have the best of both worlds in due time.