This article was written alongside a second article to be released together: The Emigrant Aftermath.

In 1966, my grandfather left Maoist China in search of better economic prospects, eventually landing in coastal Macau. My father immigrated to Australia for university in 1991, and to the United States in 1995. My mom arrived shortly after in 2004. 

Like most others in the United States, I’m the aftermath of immigration. My parents and grandparents each decidedly chose to upend their lives and relocate due to their audacity to hope. When coming to the United States, they were brought into the country by immigrant lawyers, who once were immigrants themselves. They settled in Colorado in a neighborhood of other immigrants.

Immigration

Let’s preface any discussions about immigration by making a clear distinction that immigration and immigrants are not synonymous. Most discussions over immigration veer towards the side of human rights, politics, and economics. It can get dirty rather quickly, especially since it’s remained a hot-button issue in many more-developed countries. But while immigration policy may be debated, it’s important that we don’t allow xenophobic rhetoric to be the baseline for defining immigrants—the people. 

This article is aptly titled “The Immigrant Aftermath” and not “The Immigration Aftermath”; while there are many, many facets to immigration itself (many of which I’m sure I’ll eventually cover in their own articles), my priority is to instead share my family’s experiences as immigrants—post immigration. Unlike refugees or emigrants, immigrants chose to move, and as such tend to be far more willing to acculturate to their surroundings, whether it’s done consciously to better fit in (job prospects, social enmeshing, etc) or done subconsciously through cultural exposure. The question for the average immigrant is how far to take the acculturation process. Should they maintain their foreign traditions? Leave them behind altogether (assimilation)? Or blend both old and new in the hopes that the result is acceptable? These questions implicitly run through the minds of every immigrant, especially once they hit the stage of parenthood and must decide what their children ought to know and ought to not. 

The Immigrant

It’s been an intriguing process watching my parents, grandparents, and other relatives make these decisions themselves. Each individual has gradually built their own interpretation of the immigrant process, maintaining certain thresholds of our Macau-based culture while blending in new developments from America.

Even within my parents, the differences in acculturation are striking. After moving to Colorado in 1995, my dad worked to bring over his parents (my grandparents), his siblings (my aunts and uncles), and his aunts and uncles. By the time I was born, most of his side of the family lived within 20 miles of each other. As such, my cousins and I all grew up sharing a Cantonese drawl in our speech, one which gradually disappeared as we continued our schooling. In fact, it seems that language has gradually become the strongest differentiator between the acculturation process within my family members. My aunts and uncles, all fluent in English, have all managed to simultaneously maintain both their Cantonese language and their Cantonese accent. My grandparents, meanwhile, never learned complete English. 

My mom and dad have the most unique situations: while my father still holds on to his native accent, his depth of experience in United States business has gradually deteriorated some of his Cantonese language capacities. In one return visit to China, he noted how his Cantonese felt rusty and the city of Macau actually felt rather foreign. Still, his accent remains apparent as he speaks and, admittedly, even I struggle to understand his tone on select words (a sign of my own assimilation). On the opposite end of the spectrum, my mom, whose family and friends remain overseas, has retained most of her Chinese writing and speaking but is also the only Gen X family member to have eliminated her accent. On the same return trip to Macau, she felt at home.

Old-school familial traditions have also greatly evolved over time. Growing up, my grandparents used to live under the same roof as my brother and I, meaning that our family followed more uniquely Chinese customs. I fondly remember instances of rubbing a hard-boiled egg over a wound to “suck up bad spirits” and taking anonymous brews that my grandma would cook up. Our dinners became a staple example of tradition: no elbows on the table or eating until everyone was ready. Each night was a different assortment of family-style Chinese cuisine.

 When they eventually moved out, certain aspects remained while others disappeared. On the one hand, our medicinal practices have gradually westernized, and our food palates have diversified. Yet, Fu Dog statues still rest at our front door, protecting our home from evil spirits. We still celebrate the Lunar New Year. And we still believe in the power of old medicinal brews.

The Immigrant Aftermath

There lies a complicated balance when mixing cultural norms, and it can be far too easy to teeter one way or another. That’s the Immigrant Aftermath: in moving to a location it risks either the destruction of the old culture or a failure to adapt to the new one. Arriving shortly after my dad, my grandparents flocked to jobs best fit for their capabilities: my grandmother worked in factory plants while my grandfather started up a Hong Kong-style restaurant. Both jobs offered little in terms of exposure to English or new cultures, and so my grandparents never quite fully adapted to American society, only grasping the barebones of English. Now US citizens, they shop at Chinese supermarkets, eat at Chinese restaurants, and spend most of their time digitally connected to a land 7000 miles away. For them, living in the United States is almost a constant sacrifice to be closer to family.

The opposite form of sacrifice took place in the second generation immigrants of my family; our overexposure to English has led to my cousins and I being able to understand Cantonese but with an inability to speak it back, almost like an heterogeneous version of Spanglish. Our conversations with older family members are inherently one-sided, and many parts of me fear the lasting impact that this may have. In the short term, my relationship with my grandparents is limited by the bounds of my speaking skills. In the long term, I’m terrified of the loss of greater familial roots, many of which I won’t be able to pass down or discuss, replaced instead by Americanized caricatures of General Tso’s Chicken and lantern festivals. As wild as it sounds, I don’t even know my grandmother’s name (she never adapted an English name and I’ve only ever called her “grandma”.) 

In some senses, I’ve already become a victim of the Immigrant Aftermath, stripped of old culture and left with only little remnants of China that I urgently cling onto. My grandparents have also struggled, forever surrounded by a culture so foreign that they wade their days by eating, sleeping, and streaming old shows.

The benefit is that neither I nor my grandparents are alone; millions of immigrants struggle with the adaptation to new cultural norms and many immigrant-born individuals contemplate the loss of old traditions. This phenomenon—the Immigrant Aftermath—isn’t new. People have been moving to and fro for centuries. The harsh destruction of old values is never an isolated event because it occurs simultaneously with the building of new traditions. While I may not be able to talk clearly with my grandparents, I’ve found other ways to show love, appreciation, and relational depth, such as cooking and eating, weekly phone calls (however simple the conversations may be), and just being present. They come to all of my school events and orchestra concerts, which don’t require English to appreciate. Similarly, while my family’s practices cannot be quite called “Chinese” anymore, it doesn’t depreciate from the weird, unique traditions that we’ve built, such as watching Crazy Rich Asians every New Years Eve while feasting on Whole Foods cakes. My grandfather, while he can’t hold a conversation in English, still finds the time to say “hi” to strangers, and he understands the Colorado road system better than I do.

Like immigration itself, there is a risk to being an immigrant but also infinite benefit. It’s never an easy process but it’s not optimistic to say that for each loss there is also a gain.