My great grandfather moved to a different part of Asia and never went back. My grandfather moved elsewhere and never went back. My mother moved to another continent and then later, with my father, to a third, where I partially grew up. And I moved to yet another continent (with another emigrée), speaking a language that, like my mother, I had learned after growing up.
Yet today I spoke English with a stranger, a woman born to Indian immigrants and she spoke with the same hand gestures I do.
The article used Costco as a vehicle for exploring the experience, and yet so some degree trauma, of moving away from your birthplace. I read it through the lens of a common belief that Asian families in particular are very close and don’t handle migration well.
I mentioned my story because it’s a contradictory example, but also because I believe that the belief that somehow “Asians” can’t handle family separation is not correct — I believe all people have roughly the same percentage of “gotta stay here” and “gotta go somewhere else” — it’s just human nature.
The last part of my story also relates to the Costco article: despite a lot of time there I never lived in India, nor, thanks to the laws and attitudes of where I was born did I speak much of any Asian languages with my mother yet decades later I, and some American woman of Indian decent whom I’d never met before, used the same body language and gestures while speaking. Where did that come from?
Yet today I spoke English with a stranger, a woman born to Indian immigrants and she spoke with the same hand gestures I do.