I was five when my parents told me that we were moving to Canada. That means that I have very little memory of the country I come from, as I was so young. But, I do have incredibly vivid memories of the transition process, of immigrating and assimilating here. If I’m being entirely honest, most of those memories are not very good.
My home country is one of many in the Middle East. Despite being (highly questionably) safer and more modern (also questionable) than others in the area, it bears many of the same marks. We practice bomb drills instead of fire drills. High school graduations were celebrated with the army, not with college. My sister spent the first three months of her life in and out of bomb shelters, or so I’ve been told. The TV and bedtime stories were always filled with tales of children being abducted in the middle of the night as part of some complicated political fight that I never understood. You know, the usual stuff.
Which is why going to Canada would seem like a very positive experience. Especially the part where no one that I know actually owns a gun. It has been positive, mostly. Yet, I would be lying if I said that it wasn’t incredibly and unnecessarily difficult. People in Canada, and in Vancouver, often pride themselves on being multicultural and accepting. I do it too, don’t worry. It’s really easy to hold ourselves up on a pedestal in comparison to other places—but just because other places aren’t that great at multiculturalism, it doesn’t mean that we are actually good.
I think what really tore me down was the difference in hostility towards the different ethnicities and races here. Those whose cultures had lain down roots in the area were accepted, and easily found their place. There weren’t that many people from my country here when we first moved, and that made it hard to belong, seeing as I didn’t actually have a place to belong to.
I was foreign to the kids that I grew up with. My body, my language and my attitude were all things that they had never seen before, and thus they tortured me endlessly for it. First it was my accent—so I stopped talking. Then it was the dark hair that covered my arms and back. That is something that is entirely normal back home, but disgustingly foreign here. So I stopped wearing short sleeves. Then it was the olive tint of my skin. So I stopped going outside in the sun. The curliness of my hair, so I straightened it. My dark features, so I got some bleach. So on and so forth, until I become entirely different.
The sad part? I was incredibly and overwhelmingly privileged, somehow. Despite being from the Middle East, I am very much Caucasian. That puts me leagues ahead of others in terms of privilege. It was always easy for me to change. A razor, some hair dye, and a straightening iron, and I fit perfectly into the mould. You can’t tell where I come from just by looking at me, which makes it simple. I can’t even begin to imagine what it is like to have parts of your culture or race that you can’t just tuck away the second people don’t like them. I was, and still am, so privileged to have been able to do that. Incredibly and unjustly privileged.
The issue for me is that I was never ashamed of where I come from: but I am always made to feel like I should be. I am proud of my heritage: my grandparents, my ancestors, my parents, all of whom fought their entire lives to allow me to be here. Yet I still feel that I am supposed to be shy about it.
Here in Canada, and in Vancouver especially, we like to hold our head up high because we have so many immigrants coming to the area. We like to believe that we are so accepting of those that come here. We are, surely, but never enough. We need to strive to be better to those whose homes we don’t know. It is so easy to accept someone whose culture is already instilled into your everyday lives. It is much hard to accept someone whose name you don’t even know how to pronounce. Those are the people who will one day have to answer the question of where they came from. They will have to choose between the place that made them and the place that moulded them, and which one they are proudest of.
I still don’t know which one I should call home.