Immigrant Parents and their 1st Generation Children
I don't know where to start with this. This topic has so many layers to it that I can't just free write, I don't want to. I want to write a well done piece on this, but for now I can only speak on my experience, and how weird and isolating it feels even compared to other people I meet who are first generation in their lineage.
When I come across people who also have immigrant parents, they usually speak their native tongue, fluent or not, or their parents have 'better than many' English skills.
My relationship is not like that at all. I don't speak my native tongue at all, and my parents are I would say...a little less than average at English, my dad better than my mom.
As I get older, I just realize more and more how unusual the dynamic is. We never really talk. It's exhausting to talk. It all ends in arguments, because one-- or both-- sides never understand each other.
Not only that, a lot of our parents tell us these sort of life-or-death sounding stories that almost feel exaggerated but definitely had truth to them--I went to war, I walked 10 miles across a river carrying my sibling on my back to get to school, and had to tend to the cows n' crops after school.
Our parents are country as fuck! And these country folk usually move into cities; places like NYC being a hot spot for African/Caribbean immigrants. These are country people with country ideals, traditions, biases and values, raising city children!
That's why things that our so normal to us, such as piercings, tattoos, slightly-alternative-but-not-really-alternative styling choices will drive them mad. When you stay in your little bubble and choose to not have an open mindset, this is all the work of the devil for all you know!
And an unfortunate pattern I noticed among many African/Caribbean immigrants--these poor people who moved from their poor lives in their poor country to come live poorly in America, is that they become very upset when their children adopt African American aesthetics, mannerisms, way of speaking, the whole shebang!
I started my loc journey almost a year ago, two-three months off from a year. And it's been hell from my parents.
The threats to be kicked out, arguments that end up in me getting thrown out but somehow getting back in, the threats to cut my locs off, the psychological torture of saying shit like "if you love me, take it off!", saying how it's un-Christian like! How we don't DO that in our country ( which is false ), how only CRACKHEADS do it. It doesn't matter if I go on Pinterest and show them a pretty girl with locs, it doesn't matter how many beautiful, put-together people in real life I point out with locs, it doesn't matter if we see other Ethiopian people with locs--
It's wrong on me! There will always be an excuse as to why it's wrong on me! It's all so sick. I wish I could move out and show them. But I don't have it in me to slave away for minimum wage just to live paycheck to paycheck, to pay almost 2k in monthly rent! Not including phone bill, car insurance, all of that!
The job market, the inflation of everything, it feels bleak to those of us living in home environments that affect us mentally, and it sucks when you start to see how it affects your siblings.
I went way off track, I didn't mean to write this much. There's like five different points here I could write a paper entirely on. Again, I'll visit this topic again when I'm a bit more put together and not just after a heated argument that has to do with all this!
gracieabrams
izzy806
snowghoul
origamiaround
ellievsbear
andulkaphoto
titsay
amandla
