Identify is fascinating, scary, and important. In a time when the world is encouraged and forced to be multicultural, I am instead addicted to the discovery of home, a definition I lost a long time ago when I immigrated to the United States. I am addicted to the feeling of owning one’s passport, articulating one’s origin of birth, displaying an unambiguous accent, and living a lifestyle that seemed to have always existed.
I am addicted to a feeling I probably will never obtain, again.
I claim to leap across cultures with ease and security, as if two very different cultures are both mine. But despite being a product of cultural integration, I feel the pain of Eva Hoffman when she writes, ” I am a hybrid, and a complete oxymoron.”
The anxious expression of newly arrived immigrants pains me. Their confused yet hopeful eyes seem to harbor the darkest secret of this Paradise, and so I avoid their eyes like those that came before me have avoided mine.
So the psychology of immigration is one I want to explore in this blog. Because immigration is both a choice and an inevitable displacement. Because the immigrating experience shifts the fundamental plates upon which we believe how life should be. And Because immigration is like a dislocation of time and space, rendering us clueless how we got to be who we are, today.
The immigrant experience is a journey that has defined as much as obliterated my identity, and others who really are at the core of what it means to be an American, and what it takes to live in America.
1892, Ellis Island, New York, New York, USA --- Mentally ill immigrants were detained in this psychiatric ward of the hospital at Ellis Island. -- Image by © Jonathan Torgovnik/CORBIS
Filed under: Immigration, Personal, Psychology Tagged: | Immigrant Experience, Immigration, psychology of immigration
