Space-Time Distanciation
The most devastating symptom of one-and-a-half and second-generation immigrants is a lost history. Their memories of the past are fragmented (if they exist at all), sewn together with slivers of information they collect their entire lives. Few seem to mention or recognize this phenomenon. Instead, there are countless stories about the pressures on children of immigrants—the emphasis on education, the bilingualism, the responsibility placed on children to aid in their parents’ acculturation. Focused on the present, on the future, never thinking about the past.
I spent this summer facilitating a workshop for Asian American teens who wanted to get more in touch with their community. We spent one session on the topic of immigration, the historical and the personal. It was after asking everyone to share the stories of their parents’ own immigration that I realized how little each knew. “My parents were married in China, and then they immigrated, and I was born here,” was once participant’s entire comment. “I think my mom lived in a village somewhere,” said another. Many admit, “I have no idea how my parents got here.” Silently, I wondered how many had ever asked, how many had thought about it before, how many cared.
The backbone of each of their stories was the same: at some point or another, their parents had immigrated from an Asiatic country, either with them as small children, too young to remember, or before they were born. The details of before were spotty, as were the understanding of circumstances directly after immigration. And so they invent details and embellish and fill in empty spots in their stories with information gleaned from textbooks or movies. Their personal histories become synonymous with the collective, simply because there are few other ways for them to learn about their pasts.
I am the same. My life is a biomythography that I am in the process of reading, along with everyone else. The past is an imagined iteration of some vaguely truthful story, and the future is as much a mystery to me as my reader. I experience the present and piece together bits of the past—imagining and reimagining as I confront new details and plot points.
I dream about knowledge of where I come from, and I am devoted to better understanding the circumstances of my birth. There is no other way for me to understand who I am in this world and how I fit into it. It seems quite easy, on the surface, for me to simply ask the questions that I want to know the answers to. But to ask is to make myself vulnerable, to endanger myself, to put at risk the carefully curated image that I have of my own history and to indicate, to my parents, that what I have right now is not enough. Curiosity killed the cat, and it becomes kill or be killed when you don’t even know the right questions to ask to find what you’re looking for.
It is difficult to understand your position in the world without an understanding of your family. Distance drives a wedge between you, and it’s difficult to break through barriers of language and space and time. Worlds and generations away. Space-time distanciation.
My family is the biggest mystery of my life. Spun of secrets with no real grounding in truth other than whispers and snippets of the story whenever my father’s feeling particularly sentimental. It feels quite strange to admit that I don’t even know my grandfather’s name, that I found out the grandmother I’ve known all my life is my dad’s stepmother I sometimes wonder if my fascination with history is a part of this same desire to connect the dots, attempts to explain the various diasporic elements that resulted in my creation. An invasion by the Japanese in 1937. World War II in Hong Kong. Loving v. VA (1967). The 1979 Iranian Revolution. The Iran-Iraq War.
History and imagination play together, over and over in my mind. Cause and effect. I fit the personal around the historical in my personal timeline, working my way backward. And I wonder…
Perhaps this is not a symptom of immigration so much as a symptom of diaspora; perhaps the starting point and destination matter and the push and pull factors matter much more than the act of migration itself. But that diaspora could disrupt cultures built on storytelling feels impossible to me. I think often of old Chinese folktales—mythology that I learned not from my father, but from books like Woman Warrior or lessons in Chinese school. I suppose these stories are old and they’ve changed and bedtime stories about ghosts and dragons have been substituted for dreams of wealth in America and a big, shiny college degree.
Maybe it’s possible to go back. To embrace the spiritual and the mystical and the whimsical and invite more belief into our lives. Maybe it’s as simple as creating a story for ourselves, understanding our lives not as the beginning of the story, but at the end of a very long one that is still in the process of being written.
About Donia Tung
Donia Tung is a Chinese-Iranian American and a born and raised New Yorker. She is currently a sophomore at Dartmouth College where she is studying History, Computer Science, and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies. When in New York, she works as a bookseller at McNally Jackson Books. After college, she hopes to change the world.