Why Immigrants Take So Long To Assimilate
Are They Better Off Going Back To ‘Where They Belong’?
Currently in Thailand, it is Songkran, or ‘Thai New Year’. Much like the Western New Year, it is a time of renewal. The clock is reset, and all can begin afresh.
Songkran is rooted in Buddhist mythology. The name itself is derived from Sanskrit, meaning ‘to move’, or ‘astrological passage’. Rather than fireworks, however, the Thai people celebrate with public water fights, which are intended as a ritual cleansing. It is a time for family, where the people clean their homes, get together, and visit Buddhist temples to make offerings. Misfortunes are symbolically washed away, prosperity is prayed for, and family is honoured. Anyone experiencing isolation or loneliness can bathe in a feeling of solidarity and togetherness.
I am currently in Chiang Mai, where the streets are covered in people armed either with hoses or water guns. Anywhere you walk, you are met with a squirt and a cheeky grin, or a drenching from a bucket paired with a flood of joy. Nobody seems bothered by their ‘assault by water’. All blessings are met with appreciation, and love seems more plentiful than even the water.
Songkran is a time of togetherness, fun and, of course, renewal. Life beams from the eyes of all. Each person crawls with excitement at the opportunity to bless their brethren. It truly is a beautiful spectacle to behold as a foreigner.
Culture Is Life
I recently spent multiple months with my family, eating our traditional food, speaking my childhood tongue, and attending church events as well as my grandmother’s 90th birthday. I left feeling refreshed, nourished and satisfied, ready for another season of travel and the burst of creativity which it inevitably brings.
Weeks later, I find myself in the heart of a foreign cultural explosion. The streets are full for Songkran, the people are together, and everyone is grinning. However, I feel an uncomfortable wave wash over me, and it’s not water.
It’s existential loneliness.
Along with this feeling comes a powerful realisation: Culture is life.
Culture is the water that nourishes the soul.
Losing Your Culture
My family originates from Lebanon, yet I was born and grew up in Australia. For the last decade, I had been living in Germany. Terms such as ‘Third Culture Kid (TCK)’ or ‘Nomad’ have been coined to describe people like me.
A ‘TCK’ is neither here nor there. Their family of origin is like a home which was ripped out of its block of land and moved across the globe. At home, people look, speak, believe and live a particular way, whereas the second a TCK steps out of their front door, everything changes.
If culture is an ocean of water, a Third Culture Kid lives in a pond. And if culture is a tall oak tree deeply rooted into the ground, a Third Culture Kid is a tiny branch which has been snipped off and planted thousands of miles away.
The Essence Of Culture
Culture, in my mind, consists of three pillars: Tribe, Land and God.
Tribe is a group of people with common appearance, rituals, beliefs and social norms, among many other facets. Land is the soil which your ancestors lived on and nourished themselves from. God is the spiritual and religious methods your tribe uses to access a power beyond itself. Combined, they form the lifeblood of a people.
A beautiful example of the power of culture against a backdrop of horror and unhinged destruction is the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Children, men and women are being incinerated, maimed, injured, killed and traumatised beyond conception. Entire families are being wiped off the map. The online footage is harrowing and stomach-churning to witness.
And yet, footage is coming out of Gaza of smiling children playing on the rubble, using a collapsed roof as a slide, and a broken power line as a flying fox. There are people with fierce determination in their eyes. Countless heroic acts. Terrified children being comforted by infinitely-patient adults. Mothers and fathers screaming in grief at the loss of their children being firmly-held by their brethren. The people continue to pray on the rubble, to broadcast to the world, and to hope for freedom. Where do they get such colossal, unshakable resolve?
Tribe, land and God.
These people have a love-filled collective identity, deep roots within their land, and an unshakeable relationship to God. With these three elements brought together, the Palestinians are somehow withstanding the most horrific onslaught brought upon a people in the 21st century.
Yet the long-term effects of the genocide on Gaza will not be known for a long time. The suffering of the Palestinians is immense, and they may still break.
This then raises the question of what happens to a person who loses the three pillars?
The Suffering Of Being Uprooted
A loss of culture occurs in the form of the three pillars:
Loss of Land
When a people live on a land for hundreds or even thousands of years, they become deeply attached to it. They have a spiritual affinity to it, and feel nurtured by it every single day. In a Western world built on settler-colonialism and migration, this is something that often becomes ruptured.
With each new generation, the loss of connection to land becomes unconscious. Perhaps the first generation feels and grieves such a loss, yet their offspring may simply feel it as an unidentifiable unease which they cannot grasp.
Loss of Tribe
For someone uprooted from their land, their family remains their tribe. But what of the greater tribe? Who will you celebrate festivities such as Songkran with?
While a pond can nourish you, it does not compare to the ocean of a greater tribe living on their native land. Such a power grows exponentially when you have thousands of families all sharing a tribal identity and land.
Loss of God
Finally, there comes the deep connection to God. While a person can access God wherever they are, their experience becomes far more potent when it is shared with a greater tribe living on their native land.
Many Third Culture Kids are dogmatised by their family to be ‘religious’, yet feel no affinity or connection to their faith. It is amazing how people, when uprooted, also lose their connection to God.
Some families manage to build an oasis in their new country by connecting with their ethnic community and cultivating religious practices while learning to accept the loss of their native land. They prioritise strong family bonds and upholding their traditional norms. Yet only the most resilient can pull this off.
For others, the long-term impact is devastating. Torn apart from their land, their people and their God, torn apart from their source, these families develop mental illnesses and drug addictions to numb the gnawing pain of their existential loneliness and alienation. God is replaced by a narcissistic, isolated self, and tribe is replaced by a desperate need to ‘fit in’ with the ‘real natives’.
While the first generation is deadly aware of the root of their pain, the new generation suffers without knowing why. They dive into their environment, looking to make their mark on it while struggling with a deep-seated inferiority complex and uncanny sense that they do not belong.
The Limits Of Nationhood
Living in Germany for a decade, I noticed a pervasive resentment towards people who ‘do not integrate’. First generations do not always learn the language, and often prefer to stick with ‘their own kind’. In light of everything discussed so far, perhaps one can find some empathy and understanding for such humans. People who do not integrate fully and remain in their local pond perhaps do not trust the ocean which surrounds them. It takes generations for roots to re-develop, and even then it is a painful and difficult process.
A diffusion of cultural identity is a confusing and challenging process. It creates enormous cognitive and spiritual dissonance in a person. This is the greatest weakness of a nation state. Drawing a border does not replace millennia of cultural development consisting of a deep evolution of connection to land, tribe and God.
To Be A Proud Oak Once Again
Humans are incredibly adaptable. Even my original ‘home’, where the Arabic language and Islamic culture are all-pervasive, was once the Aramaic-speaking land of Jesus and the Phoenicians. And even then, these Phoenicians developed a civilisation in North Africa, much like the British in North America, which grew into the Carthaginian culture.
With empire, conflict and crisis comes migration and uprootedness. Cultures of particular colours leak into other cultures, and eventually create a new ‘ocean’ with a new colour. It gets easier with each generation, and eventually becomes seamless. Yet much like a branch snipped off a great oak and planted elsewhere, it takes many years for the oak to re-establish itself. It takes pain, toil and hardship to grow those roots, to rise proudly and strongly into the sky once again.
The uprooted oak’s grief is immense. For the Third Culture Kids and their suffering parents, acknowledging this grief is the first step toward healing and strength. It is the foundation upon which a new identity can be formed, based on an affinity to land, tribe and God.
I am always exhilarated to leave home and dive into the deep end of the world. This is offset by my longing to return to my roots, to bathe in my culture. Its waters are truly deep. There is great power in my culture, even when it is a fledgling plant in a foreign environment.
For now, a full moon has emerged, and it is Songkran in Chiang Mai. And even though it is not my culture, I can still honour it for its depth, wisdom and beauty. So I’ll shut my laptop, go out onto the street, and receive my baptism, and give thanks and appreciation to the blessings bestowed upon me by the proud people of Thailand.
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