Are American families that different from immigrant?
I’m a first generation American on my father’s side, but might as well be 100% as I was raised my whole life with my father telling me that I’m not American. Funny thing is that on a journey into my own self-actualization, which started somewhere around 28 and ended with an epiphany at 32, while attending Mills College in Oakland, California, I discovered I am if not exactly then uniquely American.
My mother’s family arrived here in the 1500’s and made their way working the land till they arrived in Louisiana – most think these are the true “Americans,” but my father’s family came here as part of a diaspora that started with an exile from Spain in 1492, then an exile from Turkey in the 1920s, then an exile from Cuba in 1959, and WALA, here we are – Americans.
In New York, we got into a cab with a driver from Bangladesh who was inordinately chatty. The conversation veered towards parents, backgrounds, and the differences between Bangladesh customs and American. I told him my dad used to tell me, as a way of saying I couldn’t do something, that the other kids could do it because they were American, but I wasn’t.
Our cabbie said he had worked at a drugstore as a manager for nearly nine years and had taken time off to go back to Bangladesh for six months and lost his position. Typical. He then told us a story of how when he was working at the pharmacy, every day an elderly lady came in and bought two packs of Virginia Slims. She called him Jam (his name is Jamir).
One day she didn’t come in and he grew concerned. He asked the other managers if they had seen her and no one had in a while. So he went to her apartment, where he had been once when she was showing him a new car she had just bought, and he found her. She had been dead for more than a week.
She had a son, he said. He said that this is typical of Americans. He said his parents knew when they took care of their children that one day their children would take care of them.
I thought about us adopting a child. Some people say they want to have children because they want someone to care for them when they are old. I always disliked that reasoning. I have no aspirations that my child will care for me and have all intentions of trying to plan for being taken care of so that I am not a burden to my child. Is this because I’m American? I wondered as he was talking.
T told the cab driver that I call my mother every day, she said it with a sense of pride, although I’m typically feeling guilty that I am not doing enough for my mother. He said to T, “That’s because she is not an American. She still has the immigrant in her.”