The Middle of Everywhere (10 page)

Linh's mother worked the night shift, overtime, and weekends, whenever she could. Linh said, "Mom will sacrifice anything for the family."

Her father was sixty-five and disabled from his years in the camps. He'd tried to work, but he'd fallen down his third day on the job. He stayed home now, bored and wishing his family could go back to their village in Vietnam. He wanted to see his ninety-four-year-old mother before she died.

Linh said, "Dad wakes me at 4:00
A.M
. and I study before school. He drives me to classes at the university and to my volunteer job teaching English to Vietnamese elders. He keeps all my awards and grade reports. He framed a picture of me receiving my scholarship award."

Sometimes Linh went to American movies but she closed her eyes during sexy scenes. She had been to parties but never danced or drank alcohol. The family was traditional and Buddhist and her parents didn't want her to date until she had completed college. She'd rebelled a little in junior high and had a boyfriend who was Vietnamese, but more Americanized than she was. They just talked on the phone, but she'd really liked him. Her dad and brother had yelled at her about this and finally she'd told her boyfriend not to call. After that, she'd cried, but she told me, "I am family-oriented and I made the right decision."

Her parents wanted her to be a doctor. Linh was scared of the MCAT and studied eight or nine hours a day to prepare for medical school. After she received her medical degree. she hoped to marry and have children. She wanted to be able to finance her parents' retirement in Vietnam.

Now she had a case of acculturation blues. She was not fluent in any language. Her Vietnamese was not perfect, but neither was her English. There were many times when she could not express herself precisely. I suspected that part of her current malaise was she didn't have the language to express all her complex feelings.

She also struggled with identity. She moved between two cultures, selecting only what she needed from American culture, yet having to play by its rules. She was a loyal Vietnamese family member in a world where most of the people she loved were thousands of miles away. She respected her parents, but they were of little help to her in the world in which she found herself. Somehow she had to balance the freedom of America with her responsibilities to family. Sometimes she felt like "hollow bamboo," Asian on the outside, but empty within.

Linh was grateful for her opportunities, perhaps almost too grateful. She was respectful of adults and eager to become who her family wanted her to be. The trick would be to meet their expectations without feeling so much pressure that she was immobilized with anxiety. Depression descended when she sensed she might fail the brother who stayed up all night studying math problems for her or her father who gave up his world to bring her to America.

I suggested that we meet again to talk through the pressures of school. I said, "We can discuss what you want to accept and reject from American and Vietnamese cultures. You will want to build a new life for yourself based on good choices."

We old pioneers dreamed our dreams into the country.

—B
ETH
S
TREETER
A
LDRICH

Refugees may arrive penniless but they don't arrive resource-less. They carry their individual attributes, their histories, their families, and their cultures. They bring their human capital, that is, their skills and professional experience. This is a complex situation, however, because it's often impossible to transfer credentials and knowledge.

Refugees possess what Bill Moyers described as "the outsider's impatience, the gritty resolve to storm the barricades and triumph from within." They bring what I'll call newcomer zest, an initial drive to succeed that consists of hope, ambition, and trust. Research suggests that this early zest fades by the second generation and is gone by the third.

Over the course of working with refugees, I have identified twelve individual traits that contribute to success in America. I will discuss these attributes in chapter 10. For now I merely want to note their importance in determining who is able to adjust to America. The more of these attributes a newcomer possesses, the more likely he or she is to succeed. Without a certain number of these attributes, a newcomer is unlikely to make it in America. The attributes of resilience are

1. Future orientation
   
2. Energy and good health
   
3. The ability to pay attention
   
4. Ambition and initiative
   
5. Verbal expressiveness
   
6. Positive mental health
   
7. The ability to calm down
   
8. Flexibility
   
9. Intentionality
   
10. Lovability
    
11. The ability to love new people
    
12. Good moral character
    

Cultural Values

To a certain extent, a culture influences the attributes of its members. It is impossible to separate what is cultural from what is personal. (It is especially difficult to do this if one knows only one or two members of a culture. As one knows many people from a culture it is easier to distinguish between individual and cultural characteristics.) The cultural and personal are as intermingled as coffee and cream. But in every culture, there are people who do and people who do not have these attributes of resilience.

Refugees who come alone are much disadvantaged. Families work together, share resources, and support each other emotionally. Both tradition and circumstance encourage the closeness of immigrant families. Over and over, family is literally what keeps people alive. Some members are housed, fed, and cared for by others. And the caretakers have a sense of purpose because of their responsibilities. In hostile environments there is no greater protection and comfort than the protection of close-knit families. Our word
wretched
comes from the Middle English word
wrecche,
which means "without kin nearby."

Supportive ethnic communities also make a tremendous difference in adjustment. Nothing is as important as friends, not food, shelter, work, or even language. When I asked a man from Sudan what the Kakuma refugees most needed in our town, he said they needed to live near other Sudanese people. He was absolutely right. Newcomers need people from their own culture to orient them to America. The first family to come has the hardest time. The second family has an easier situation.

Newcomers gravitate toward places where there are others from their homeland. In fact, before we understood the importance of support, our government had a different settlement policy designed to keep local communities from being overwhelmed. Refugees were encouraged to move one family at a time into isolated communities. However, the newcomers were lonely and didn't setde in. After many failed attempts, our government changed its policies and we now encourage refugees to setde near people from their old country.

In traditional cultures, survival was a social achievement not an individual accomplishment. Pleasure and comfort were associated with being with one's tribe and with being home. One of the best places to experience community in America is in an ethnic neighborhood. The streets are lively. Generations mingle freely. People help each other out.

The American pleasure in privacy and independence is strange to many refugees. To them, our autonomy simply feels lonely. Many refugees comment on how empty our public spaces are, and, in fact, the people in those spaces are often refugees. Afghani, Iranian, and Iraqi families are the ones grilling meat and onions in our city parks and sitting on public benches talking to their friends.

The closeness of refugees to their families and communities protects, but sometimes at a cost. The ethnic community can become a feather bed, a little too soft and difficult to climb out of. To really succeed in America, refugees must learn to deal with Americans. The best way is to somehow hold on to the good from the old culture while taking advantage of the new, which is much more difficult in practice than in theory. Linh's struggles are a good example of the difficulties of combining cultures.

The age-old refugee's dilemma is whether to stay in a small, safe cultural enclave or to leave this secure place and venture into the broader culture. If they stay in an ethnic stockade, they can't really succeed in America, and if they leave, they are risking their connection with the old culture.

People from traditional cultures with no sense of clock time and languages very different from English have a harder time adjusting than do, for example, the Bosnians, many of whom come here from Germany. Older people have a harder time. Also people who are dark-skinned have a harder time. Because of racism, the darker one's skin, the harder it is to assimilate.

An important aspect of refugee culture is its similarity to American culture in terms of work ethic. Newcomers are more likely to succeed if they come from a culture whose values promote high achievement; these values include sacrifice, curiosity, enterprise, and willingness to take risks and initiate activities.

Generalizations and dichotomies are dangerous. Thomas Friedman divides the world into fast cultures and slow cultures. There are great differences between "slow" or traditional cultures. The Somalis, the Vietnamese, and the Peruvians are strikingly different from one another in many ways. Still, there are distinctions that need to be drawn. All traditional cultures share the closeness of family and neighbors. Traditional cultures value interdependence and cooperation, whereas Americans place a high value on individual autonomy. As D. H. Lawrence wrote, "America is the homeland of the pocket not the blood."

Many cultures value children who respect authority and defer to others. Linh was raised in such a culture. African and Latino children are taught to comply with authority and submerge their own needs. Traditional families tend to be big extended families with multiple adults involved in child rearing. The parent-child bond is primary. The goal of marriage isn't happiness, but rather caring for children and aged parents. Status in the family is determined by age and gender. Men are favored.

Western families are more individual-oriented. Americans want to raise independent children who think for themselves. The emphasis is on self-fulfillment and development. Rules are flexible, and status is gained by individual efforts. Families are run more democratically. The primary bond is the couple. Emotions can be expressed more directly, and in general, women have more opportunity.

In traditional cultures roles are well defined. Families are more authoritarian and there is less direct expression of emotion. Suppression of feelings and self-control are often seen as positive. Traditional cultures are fiercely loyal to insiders and wary of outsiders. They both sustain and constrain their members.

The traditional cultures tend to be much more holistic than modern American culture. There is no mind-body split, no sacred-profane split, not even a work-play split. Life isn't chopped up into neat little compartments and intervals. In fact, to succeed in America, refugees must learn to compartmentalize.

For newcomers from slow cultures, time is a river that flows through their lives. They have no abstract sense of time. Refugees who have been on sun, seasonal, or Circadian-rhythm time find the change to computer time jarring. One of the first things I teach new arrivals is time management, a very difficult skill to master but one that is essential to success in America. I bring calendars, personal planners, and watches and teach refugees how to make and keep appointments. I tell them, "Americans are very serious about two things—time and money."

Anarchist John Zerzan wrote in the
Utne Reader,
"Time is an invention, a cultural artifact, a formation of culture. It has no existence outside of culture and it is a pretty exact measure of alienation." As I wind the watches and set the alarms, I question whether I am doing the newcomer a favor. Something is gained with schedules, but much is lost. The natural flow of life is broken into units and managed rather than experienced.

Newcomers joke about how we look at our watches to decide when to eat and sleep. From their point of view, it looks like we are slaves to tiny machines that constantly interrupt us and tell us what to do next They also notice that we are always busy. This seems weird to people who come from cultures where there is much sitting around, visiting, and watching the sunset or children at play. As one woman from Tajikistan said to me, "Americans think it is a sin to do nothing."

Newcomers sense that they are being hurried—to eat, to get in a car or out of an office. A man from Mali said to me, "I have learned that when an American looks at his watch, it means I am taking too much of his time. I had better leave quickly."

Many workers come from parts of the world where, when you are tired, you stop work and rest. You take a nap after lunch, which is provided by the employer. If you feel like taking a day off, you do it and then work harder the next day. It's a major adjustment to get used to forty-hour-a-week jobs at which one is expected to show up on time, work all day, and take ten-minute bathroom breaks when the employer says that is okay. Discussing work in America, a Spanish man told me, "Americans invented stress. And with globalization, stress will soon be all over the world."

Many refugees are not used to efficient scheduling. They allow time to unfurl, and they enjoy however much time they want with visits, celebrations, and other events. As an Iraqi woman said, "At home if we wanted to go to the doctor, we walked to the doctor's office. If I wanted to visit someone, I just went to visit. I didn't call and ask if they could come over two weeks from Friday at three o'clock."

Daylight saving time is a hard sell. Refugees are amazed that we manipulate time this way. They forget to set clocks forward or backward and often have many frustrating experiences before they get DST down. My friend Bintu missed church her first week in America. As I helped her reset her clocks, she burst into tears of frustration because we made time so hard.