Landing

I landed in Gatwick to the voice of Barack Obama after a short flight from Zurich. Listening to his first book after his second, the personal growth is as apparent as the change in the country he calls home. Perhaps in no other country than United States can a person follow a narrative as diverse as his.

What he said in the preface of an updated edition ten years after the initial publication that what he said was politically undesirable. Well, he swore vulgar words! But otherwise, what he experienced can be summarized by a black boy trying to outgrow his identity, and to move belong the protection it offered him, and more importantly the limitations it inherited him. Trying to help everyone, and recognizing the needs and wants of people are fundamentally the same.

This is Gatwick airport, one of the many airports recently constructed in the outskirts of London to alleviate the congestion of Heathrow by relegating its discount airlines such as the one yours truly would always take use of. The financial benefits is clear.

It is easy for an immigrant to identify with Obama’s life. His struggle as a member of the visible minorities is ever so evident in all aspects of normal living. The length some of us go through to fit in, and the deep rooted self hate that we attempt to mask. It is particularly relateable to the black population as they are still misrepresented, under educated, and marginalized. In stark contrast, the Asian population while can still be identified with the similar disadvantages, however there is not the social stereotype that we are less capable intellectually to pursue the same ambitions as the whites. Quite in opposite, we are commonly identified as being “good-at-math”. Perhaps as a cause for this, it is often said that asian parents are strict, unyielding, cruel even, in the ways they educate. Though very few people wonder why that is. We can’t identify the origin of our issues, as easily as the blacks can theirs. Slavery is the root of many of the current societal phenomena that current day blacks experience, positive or negative. I say positive because the tight knit community that blacks construct around themselves to shield against the often discriminating society is a perfect example of the synergistic effect of communities in general. Of the negative aspects, I do not really need to elaborate.

I am no sociologist or a researcher in social behaviour by any means, my observations are mine alone and the comparisons are made with the experience of others. My views are incomplete, their usefulness depends on how commonly my experiences are felt by others.

The method of education with harsh punishment is in direct contradiction with education with rewards that is oft employed by white parents. The view that good grades is expected, and not rewarded, and that bad grades are to be eliminated, not tolerated may apply uniquely to asian parents en mass. Of course, as the tiger mother would write in her book, she does know a few white parents who are just as strict as she is.

One can explain this contrasting view by comparing the population density of China, Korea, and Japan against that of Canada or the US. This drastic difference resulted in the differing attitude one has towards education. In asianic countries, the lack of education means a life of servitude or of manual agriculture. There is simply no capacity to evaluate candidate on merits other than which university he/she graduated from, and the grades he/she obtained. There is not this sense of entitlement for all except the very elite. This method of evaluation strains universities in their candidate evaluation process, which led to the state-wide college entrance examination with students are ranked and admitted based solely on their achievement in that examination. This is what every student in China is educated towards. When 12 years of education becomes a drawn-out preparatory session, subjects that are not related to the success in this test often take a back seat. Other issues are regularly reported in NYTimes and other media.

With this process, the students who are not admitted, suffer no better fate than the dropouts of american high schools.

With there are only so many teachers to go around, the class size increases in the primary and secondary education.

Though that experience is not a part of my narrative, I never had to endure the unrelenting barrage of mock tests, of the cram schools, of private tutors, and of the possibility of disappointment and a life of a mcdonald waiter. No, like so many others, my parents applied to immigrate to north America under the category of technological immigrants. Unless my friends who remain in china, my high school in Toronto was stress free. Instead of feeling the daily pressure, I spent my days wondering shopping malls, doing what little homework I was assigned, free to pursue what interested me, which amounted to computer games and very little else.

There were a lot of other kids of recent immigrants in my class, and we bonded just like the blacks bonded,through our common identity and language, and the lack of association with the society at large or the dominate white student population. That was often sufficient for us, there were so many of us that the school, and the district board mandated English-as-a-second-language (ESL) versions of all courses for the 9th and the 10th grade, and English and grammar education for the rest of the years. Looking back, I can summarize the benefit and the issues with doing such a thing.

Our parents, being recent immigrants without a school community that we were provided with free of charge had a whole lot of issues that I did not know at the time, and only now beginning to realize. These issues are compounded by the fact that they by and large were middle upper class in the countries of their origin with the respect and recognition that comes with it. They often had office jobs with people under them, secretaries at their back and call, a steady salary that usually doesn’t require a whole lot of work, at least that was the case in China in the 80s.

They were admitted into the country with technical skills that may not match the need of the employers, and with virtually non-existent, and heavily accented English that few employers are willing to risk for. As a result, at least for the beginning, they rented basement apartments, worked at two or three jobs that illegal immigrants worked, and struggled to provide for their family.

The difference in how they are treated now and back in the home country causes a severe strain in their mental state, and in the husband and wife interactions. What you would expect when their already formed and settled lives are up-ended for an indefinite amount of time. Those days must have been long, and hopeless, with the promise of the American dream far and unreal.

On the practical side, the job and the uneasy family life leaves very little in time to educate the kids whom parents hinge all their hopes on. Many families cite the reason for their immigration is for the next generation, yet in the most crucial moments of the child’s life, they are not available to educate and to nurture, try hard as they may, in a society that they are not familiar with themselves.

The children of recent immigrants, despite a sudden blossoming of hope and opportunity, are probably the worst off of all. The combination of the lack of parental attention, the sudden relaxation in the school system, and a huge isolating population of our kind makes us very content with how things are going, with speaking english only when we have to, playing at the arcade in china town, isolating ourselves as much as possible from what we perceive as the unknown.

Despite the partial strict education of the asian curriculua, very little is taught through osmosis on how to live as a human being. of how to interact with others, of what is right and what is wrong. The focus was on the how, as in how to get a better grade, as opposed to why. After all, what is the point of wasting one’s time on the why, when that is the only option available.

That is my story. At least the start of it, before I realized the danger of not knowing the why when the road widened suddenly. I felt this overwhelming desire to alienate myself from the Chinese population. I stopped going to chinese gathering, in school or out, I talked almost exclusively to teachers, since my English was still bad and only the teachers felt obligated to talk to me. I would bring my physics teacher a cup of coffee every early morning so we could chat, every lunch I would spend it in the guidance counsellors office chit chatting about nothing, after school would do my homework in the physics classroom, and helping the teacher putting up the chairs for the janitors. These were the only extra-curricula activities I prived myself to at the time. I still had no interaction with students who have been here for longer.

Then I started to join clubs. I would refuse to join any cultural clubs, and instead join clubs that have no race affiliation. To fill my time, I joined the chess club, the stage crew, pingpong club, the yearbook class, the web deisgning club, and so on. Subtracting the ethical associations and the sports clubs, my photo was in pretty much in all the club photos on the yearbook. In a way, looking back at it, I became a boni-fide nerd without knowing what a nerd was.

It was in the chess club that I realized the advantages that 2nd generation immigrants enjoyed. The privilege they felt enjoyed and the resulting attention to academics they and their parents paid to. These kids were asians just like we were, though they talked to the whites with no difficulty, and I guess, with little sense of self belittlement. They excelled in school, often dominating the top 10 student list. They mapped out the extra curricula activities that would boaster their college application, that included the chess club. They were perfectly friendly and such at first and as I got to talking to them I began to understand what high school was really for.

Many of my Chinese friends got washed out and went into the work force are living good lives, but not matching the hope their parents had for them. They are too absorbed in their own sorrow to identify with the greater sorrow of everyone around them.

I got to know several really brilliant students senior to me. Instead of the common nicety that recent immigrants offer to me as a recognition that we are in the same predicament, they were quick to point out my short-comings in what I thought was brutal honesty. “you are saying that wrong”, “that move is god awful”. In the web club, they would test me with actual tests that they devised, and critique my code in length.

Come grade 11, I demanded to be transferred into the regular English class, and out of ESL. I thought that had to be done, I needed to be a normal student. I started sitting with the whites, the 2nd generation asians, the blacks, hispanics, and the rest of them. All had better English, better understanding of the high school micro social sphere, and had friends.

I was not good at math, I still suck at it for that matter. The first time I was in non-ESL math, and the teacher wrote square root of 4 on the board as the page the homework is on, I asked in my broken english “what does that mean?” and embarrassed myself to no end.

My grades started to pick up in grade 12, and I was frequently doing group work with the best students of the grade. I was invited to one guy’s house to complete a school project. He was an Irish descendent, Luke, the top student of every year since forever. His house was not big, it wasn’t decorated with a huge TV, or expensive furniture. It was clean, and organized. It felt like a home. He and his brother were raised by a single mom, who were trying to figure out a way to send both of them to college, doing her masters, had a grocery list ever time she went shopping, and avoided luxurious things. They had a 16 inch black and white TV that they mute over commercials, shelves full of books, actively used library cards, and a taste for good tea. We would start to compete to see who gets better grades. We would talk about what universities to apply to, what was needed in the application. In a way, I unknowingly to myself, understood the need for some of that distant Chinese system. No I still never studied nearly as hard as I imagined they did, but I tried. In the end, he beat me 90 percent of the time, and took the top spot yet again. Through that interaction however, I felt comfortable sitting at the table in the library or the lunch table with the whites, doing cross word sudoku, both of which I still suck at. I would come to know that both the brothers received full scholarship to the University of Toronto, and then I ended up going to the same program as Luke, and ended up renting their basement for a few years in college.

I did a lot of ice skating, and roller blading. Going so far as joining a speed skating club, and giving myself several permanent scars. People take it for granted that as a Canadian, of course I can skate. The fact was, in grade 10, second year of my life in Canada, the class organized a skating trip to one of the larger skating rinks along the lake. Not only did I not know how to skate, I did not even know what to wear or how to rent. I went for a practice run at a local rink, and collided with the wooden fence. That was my first experience with the change room, and a little community centre with a fireplace, really cheap hot chocolate, and old folks playing backgammon.

I may have gone too far in that direction, in that to this day, I am constantly distancing myself from any occasion where I need to speak Chinese or to interact in a fashion that is familiar to Chinese people. I do not mean the material difference between the two culture, heck I love chinese food, it is the association that I am chinese that I try my hardest to avoid. I am subconsciously afraid of being suckered back into what I perceived to be a dangerous thing. These opportunities arise a lot more now that I am in europe, where students are predominately international students, as opposed to immigrants, who rightly associate themselves with China. I always hide the fact that I speak Chinese, not actively saying I don’t speak chinese, but always defaulting to English until asked otherwise. When asked, why don’t you speak chinese to us, I always said, oh my chinese is embarrassingly bad. That may be true, but that is only true because I actively avoid it.

The sense of complacency of the upper middle class as well. To generalize my distaste above, I could say that I actively avoid the feeling of belonging as much comfort as it may offer. That’s not entirely by choice in a way, my bachelor did not go that well, I was always middle of the class in college from year 1 to year 4. I did a lot of extra curricula activities and organizing. With a widened diversity of people, I again felt the sense of inferiority. There were students from private schools, who had school trips to Africa and ate crocodile meat, there were students who aced maths competitions, students from south Africa but looking just as white as all the others.

I have routinely seen students of 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants perform letter grade better on average than of recent immigrants.

Though, at the risk of generalizing a race that I am not and will never be a part of, I get the sense that many black adults have grown accustom to disappointment and marginalization, in a way that some asian adults have not.Of course exceptions are numerous in both positive and negative directions. I have seen many asians working in restaurants for the remainder of their working lives, speaking always of little English, content with the way live is, confined to the few streets delineating Chinatown. Though the majority tries very hard, working multiple jobs while attending language school, always looking out for opportunities to move back up to where they were. Because of the extraordinary effort they put in while making sense of the world around them, many succeed, and many achieve greater success than their offspring.

The hardness of I faced moving to other countries pale in compare to my parents, though the difference in perspective new environments offer me are invaluable.

At the elevated height of ETH zurich with all the resources in the world, I look inward and see myself as a boy who is afraid of belonging and not belonging at the same time, never identifying with anything identifiable.

My argument is that despite the stereotype and the statistics,

This group of recent immigrants strangely experience a very different world than the second or third generation asians. These families are established, of differing reason for immigration in the first place, have houses in the suburbs .

Though the dream is shared, to amass wealth.

Maybe the great melting pot that is the States does some good in homogenizing the population as a whole, maybe it does not. That is not what Canada is, the principle is different.

who have to also raise a family

Like what Obama said “who we are and what we do is dictated by our history and linage, to completely disassociate from them, the freedom felt is sorrowful.”

I realize in the end that Canada is probably the place where immigrants are given the most attention to. Whether that is good or not is up for debate.

Chinese parents had a thing for wanting their kids to become doctors. It was always driven by the wealth it signifies.

They have a habit of putting their own children down, and saying how much better the children of whomever they are talking to are. Part of that is the culture built around deference and modesty, in the privacy of home, the amount of bashing is unbelievable. Of course we all want our kids to be the best, king of the jungle, but the reality is we are all just struggling along, and there is no shame in admitting that. This double faced behaviour I realized is how most Chinese people behave. It is heavily damaging, we seem to be incapable of saying what we actually think. I am by no means immune from such destructive behaviour, and I have difficult both offering opinions, and taking in critiques. It makes me feel like crap either way.

Who do I identify the most with?

The answer is simple. People who are exactly like me. The closer the better. The difficulty lies in where to find these people.

I have only begun in recent years to start conversing with Chinese people. Perhaps Europe offers more opportunity, head on collisions with Chinese people from China, and not the desporia being more frequent in north America.

Perhaps I have only recently felt ready, felt that I would not slip into where I was terrified of.

The process is gradual, and from the questions I asked I always felt like an outsider. And I was treated as such, seldom asked to group shopping trips to distant Asian malls, to dinner at restaurants. When I was asked, it was also out of convenience, to a school hosted festival, or a pingpong game on the 4th floor. This distance remained largely due to the fact that I am never the one asking, and this distance is comforting.

I do not belong anywhere, I do not fit the mould to which I was cast. Growing out of such a mould in a way that no one expected. It’s often impossible for me to identify with any group of people. I have come to understand that as long as I can identify aspects of me with likeminded individuals, maybe that is all I need.

People as scattered as I am often seek a sense of communalism in religion. That is what both my mom and dad do or did. The churches offer not only psychological reinforcement, but also material need. Psychologically, it is a form of looking upward instead of around. To be reminded that there are opportunities and success stories from people like my parents, to not be complaisant with their co-workers in the trenches thinking that is what life ought to be for now and the future. When life is surrounded by bleak and constant reminders of minimum wage, long and shifting hours, eating whatever is on discount at the Chinese stores, these Sunday mornings can make a huge difference to one’s mental state, keeping it in balance, not losing that vision of the American dream. Materialistic speaking, to the poorer members of its flock, the church doesn’t ask for much, but gives much in return. A form of redistribution that the democrats repeatedly attempt to implement on a legislative level without much success.

As generous as churches are, the one thing they ask for is faith. They may wait for the new arrivals to profess their faiths, but they do not wait forever. They never actively persuade conversion, yet they can make the unconverted feeling uneasy after a while. There comes a point where it is required for my parents to believe, wholeheartedly, and I don’t know if that is possible. My dad gradually dissociated himself from the church once he found a more stable job, and a routine that he is comfortable with. I wouldn’t call it taking advantage of the generosity of organized religion, I think he tried to believe.

If I were to join a parish, I would know that the intention is purely out of self-interest, that would be taking advantage. It would have to be on my schedule, to my liking, and my needs.

I sit in an office with a newly arrived Dutch PhD student. She missed the things she took for granted in Holland, in Delft where the shop fronts were familiar, friends tight knit, and the roads wide and sparsely occupied. She becomes visibly chirpy when friends come for a visit, and disappointed when they aren’t able to.

I have been away from my home for so long that I find familiarity in coincidences. I do not expect to be back in Toronto for length periods. The few winters I was back for holiday, I was afraid to call up my friends, knowing that they have their own lives now after graduating, and that I would be imposing. My memories of Toronto is altered, stores I used to love I don’t care for much. Things always seem sweeter in memory. I would wonder the shopping malls I spent so much time wondering in my younger days, and it would feel surreal and menacing.

As I am typing this, I sit on a train from Bath to London, UK. With the map application on my phone, navigating the cities I have never been became almost as easy as navigating Toronto. The occasional American style shops like Krispy Kreme doughnut shop gives me a jolt of home-bound sentiment, and that may be sufficient, and would last me a while.

I feel just as home here as anywhere in the world, my Canadian address means very little, being a place my parents once leaved before the separation. That is another piece of my identity gone, now if I were to return to Canada, I would not know where to stay. With my mom, or dad, or in a hotel that is as impersonal as a sterile ward in a nameless hospital.

I suppose I function quite well despite the above defects. This often cause people to assume I have got it all, and disregard my trouble when I express them as jokes or unimportant details. Maybe they are, when I am not given the luxury to think and write them down, I often brush them aside exactly the same way. I go about my day doing what I think should be done, not really thinking why I am the person doing them. It is only in times like this, when I am sitting on long stretch of train, looking out at the almost sepia toned English countryside that I feel I must tell my story. I realize my story is not worthy of comparison with the dynamic lives that others live through.