using a multiverse as a narrative framework to tell an immigrant story really is THE best possible implementation of this concept. like the idea that every time you make a decision in your life a different branching universe splits off where you chose differently, while obviously broadly universal because of course everyone wonders what if (what if i had chosen differently, what would my life look like then), really does hit such a specific core question that is imo fundamental to the immigrant experience
all the time my parents talk about imagining what lives they might have lived if they had chosen differently, if they had never left home, if they had never come here, if they had not raised their daughter in a world and a culture so utterly foreign to their own where she might make her own choices that are painfully incomprehensible to them. it’s all tied up with a sense of grief and loss and regret and almost existential melancholy, not necessarily because they think they chose wrong specifically, not because they think they’d actually choose differently if they had a chance to do it over again, but merely because that choice is such a monumental one and the enormity of it and the ripples it would end up causing are only obvious in retrospect. you make the choice to uproot your life and move to a different world, a different universe, and once you cross that bridge you can never go back. you can never truly go home again. and when we do go back to visit, we see in their old friends and classmates and relatives funhouse versions of ourselves, people we might have been but never were and never will be.
every immigrant story is a ghost story and the ghosts that haunt you are all the people you left behind including yourself—versions of yourself, of your family, of your children, of the people that are you but that you are not, lives that you recognize but are not yours. immigrant stories are ghost stories are multiverse stories and in multiverse stories all of your ghosts inhabit your body simultaneously, everyone who came before you and after you and everyone you left behind, everything that is and everything that never was… it really is everything everywhere all at once i am going to scream
