Fascinating how immigrant child finds right path in the end

He could have all the toys he ever wanted, trips to enchanted kingdoms or, yes, Disneyland itself. His future carved out of his parents’ dreams, though still lost to him in the flurry of packing away and his first flight, nevertheless, excites him. 

But when the thrill of adventure wears off, tantrums and sulkiness start to bother parents, especially if winter were the season of arrival. Confinement in insulated apartments begins to manifest often among 3-to-5 year olds, crying at the slightest false move, as well, tight-layered clothing that turns into an “enemy,” which they wrestle against even at freezing bus stops like those I’ve witnessed here in Vancouver.

Among older children, going to school would strike fear akin to terror, so much so that a few vehemently resist going back to alien territory, speaking in a language they had thought they could understand, but facing ridicule for their “funny tongue” (accent). Worst, face-to-face with a mother, absent in infancy as she had to return to an overseas job, initiates a struggle like Ryan, who, at first, threw things at his mother each time she attempted to get close and quite a few, mostly young teens, flew back home to Lola or Tita,

Alex’s children, though, with ages 5 to 15 when they arrived in Canada, blended quite effortlessly. A quick shift of loyalties from NBA and UAAP icons to NHL with Vancouver’s Canucks heroes had the boys raving soon during hockey season. With innate abilities and talents, their rise to top honors in school with special recognition propped up confidence, as well, and friends came rather easy.

In New York at Long Island’s Carle Place, Betty’s children, then still in the grades, adjusted just as instantly—her having secured first, a job with the United Nations headquarters that allowed a nanny and her mom, and next buying a house, smoothened the way. Too, her own siblings and their families, having settled in the same city, eased up her children’s growing-up pains, climaxed by college degrees, jobs and intermarriages with classmates.

My cousin, Dita, had it rough in California, exacerbated with just-getting-to-know the immigrant dad, who took a long time to petition for her with her mom and a younger sister. In her troubled teenage years, she sought refuge in her paternal grandparents’ idyllic valley in Salinas — away from Ojai. But she later found her bearings, and reunited with her parents, enrolled at San Francisco State University, finished with honors and met her husband of Irish parents; their sons, an architect and a doctor, hardly hint at their mom’s and dad’s, beginnings.

With millions of such children sweeping this side of the hemisphere today, diversity of origins, though it turns out majority are Hispanic and Asian, yet commonalities, their impact not only on present-day America but especially its future, has apparently stimulated more researches, hair-splitting themes and topics toward their adaptation—Children of Immigration, by Harvard University immigration experts Carola and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, for one.

Two sides of immigration policies—integration in the US and multiculturalism in Canada—underlie such studies; integration generates fear of future generations losing their identity anchored on their own culture, while multiculturalism, as Miso K. Wong lecturing in Vancouver noted that though it served earlier immigrants “to be part of a whole,” today’s “lived experience” among the youth intensifies rather than mitigates differences (from Doug Saunders’s report at Vancouver Sun).

For me, a wide range of programs, indeed, help children carve their path in the context of their new country. Even more “fascinating,” as the Harvard book describes it, is how they find the right one in the end. Yet, not quite baffling to my mind, if studies delve deeper into histories and cultures that on the surface may cause divisions such as physical features, language and even religions, which I believe most immigrant children discover in the end, really don’t.