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Another Country

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Clarissa

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Nobody can understand what is happening in another country without either living there for many years or making it an object of deliberate and consistent study.

This is why there should be a significant gap between arrival and citizenship. People simply don’t have a bloody clue. I didn’t have a bloody clue for many years.

I got US citizenship 13 years after arrival, and it was right about then that I actually started figuring things out. But I’m unusual in that I read voraciously and made enormous efforts to learn about US history and culture.

Remember how some years ago we played a game on the blog where people asked me about meaningful American phrases like flower power and Underground Railway to see if I knew them? It takes a very long time to migrate culturally, as opposed to geographically. And that’s why there is a deep breach between immigrant parents and native-born children. They almost always belong to completely different cultures.

16 responses to “Another Country”

  1. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “deep breach between immigrant parents and native-born children. They almost always belong to completely different cultures”

    Exactly. Traditionally, I think, no one seriously expected the immigrant parents to assimilate to any great degree, that was a job for the children born in the new country. and even then it can take a while (as in generations). One of the minor themes of the Sopranos was how many generations it took them to fully assimilate. Only the third generation born in the US were simply American rather than Italian-American.

    And “multiculturalism” in practice makes it difficult for the children to meaningfully assimilate and so the parents are more able to pass their culture shock trauma onto them.

    It’s another reason that countries should be careful about immigration policy and why open borders and mass unskilled immigration isn’t good for either the host society or the new arrivals.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Transporting people is much more fraught than transporting furniture. Yet we often forget about that. People ARE their language and culture. They think in snippets of phrases and images that accompanied them since childhood. When I say “the 90ies”, a completely different set of images comes up in my head than when an American says it. At least, I know what they are for an American. But I have no bloody idea what the nineties mean to a Vietnamese or a Nigerian.

      And this is only one single concept.

      Just this morning, I used the phrase “я много думал, не спал ночами”, and N immediately knew that I was jokingly citing the phrase attributed to Yeltsin, which was actually completely invented but implanted itself in the popular conscience. It’s a sort of a collective hallucination. But you can’t explain it to people who weren’t there and didn’t participate in this whole thing.

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      1. random reader Avatar
        random reader

        There is a set of shared experiences that people living in the same country simply have that cannot be replaced by anything else. It takes (a lot of) time to understand these when you move. In the same way, there is a unique family history that forms the children growing up – the jokes that parents share, the family experiences, habits (good or bad). There are many things that need to be merged and ironed out when two people marry. It is somewhat similar (but on a much larger scale) when a person immigrates. Except in a marriage, it is usually both people who do the merging and create their own new family – they are on a somewhat equal footing (it is a 1:1 merge). In the case of immigration, the adjusting has to be done by a person that immigrated, not by the millions of people who already reside in the country. The problem with the current mentality is that there is an expectation for the millions to adjust to the immigration of one which is insane and has no hope of working, especially considering that the immigrants come from many different places.

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      2. PaulS Avatar
        PaulS

        Even in a country there are big differences. I remember in the 90s how white people were listening to Kurt Cobain and black people were listening to Tupac.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          Honestly, I’d choose Tupac every single time, so that’s not a reliable test.

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          1. PaulS Avatar
            PaulS

            I guess you had to be there because Cobain was huge.

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            1. methylethyl Avatar
              methylethyl

              He was, and I was the right age, and… I still don’t understand the appeal.

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              1. PaulS Avatar
                PaulS

                Yeah, I remember the older kids talking about the death of a legend, so it was more like he symbolized the end of the old era.

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          2. oldcowboy3 Avatar
            oldcowboy3

            Why the Hell would anybody willingly choose either — both were drug induced, nihilistic, self-pitying, suicidal, destructive noise.

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            1. PaulS Avatar
              PaulS

              Well, they both represented their time, so hopefully progress would involve agreeing to move forward.

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  2. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    Couldn’t agree more. I lived in america for more than 20 years before I got my citizenship. It takes a LONG time to master a language and culture that is not yours. And that’s when you’re genuinely interested in the culture, and not just using host country as an economic resource to exploit.

    That’s why I am so disgusted with mamdani types. It takes extraordinary level of hubris to call for dismantling Columbus’s statue two years after arriving to the country. Couldn’t be a better illustration of Chesterton’s fence. Do not destroy something (traditions, rituals, laws, etc.) without understanding why it was there in the first place.

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    1. cliff arroyo Avatar
      cliff arroyo

      “Do not destroy something (traditions, rituals, laws, etc.) without understanding why it was there in the first place”

      Flashback to a conversation or six with other foreigners in Poland (long before I realized how long I’d be around here): General complaints about the (over) influence of the RC church seen as too old-fashioned and backward by some and as too…. catholic by a few (usually NAmerican protestants). Whenever I was pressed for an opinion I’d clarify my religious standpoint (agnostic) and say (more or less): “I dunno, it’s kind of a drag at s,but I don’t have anything to put in its place, do you?”

      That usually brought the topic to a close….

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      1. PaulS Avatar
        PaulS

        Much of the apartheid theory originated from the church in the Netherlands.

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Kuyper

        It’s reform came with reform in the church.

        https://scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1017-04992013000100010

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  3. ShadowsCollide Avatar
    ShadowsCollide

    This is interesting since I’m the daughter of Cuban immigrants who came over as children, my grandparents were all very Spanish and never really stopped being Cuban. They did get American citizenship and could speak English with Spanish accents, but they spoke Spanish at home, watched Telemundo and Univision and in general found the US and American culture to be weird and bewildering.

    Both my parents came over as children, my father in 1965 and my mother in 1970. The families both came to New Jersey and more or less had a crash course in learning to be Americans, going to school, listening to English- language music and watching American movies and TV and just hanging out with American kids. Both my parents speak English with New Jersey accents but they still speak Spanish and prefer Cuban home cooking to most American food.

    My siblings and I grew up speaking English and watching American movies and TV as a matter of course and listening to English language music, I’m the only one of us who can speak Spanish and that’s for professional reasons. At this point, my siblings and I are Americans of Spanish Cuban heritage who look and act like normie Americans, we don’t want to visit Cuba and we’re content to be Americans.

    It’s because our parents were surrounded by Americans and American culture and English that they learned to assimilate halfway and we’re fully assimilated, I’ve seen other people my age with a similar background who barely speak English and might as well be in Puerto Rico. And some of my students are worse, kids who were born in the US or came as toddlers but barely speak English or engage with American culture, since they live in an ethnic bubble

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    1. cliff arroyo Avatar
      cliff arroyo

      “because our parents were surrounded by Americans and American culture and English that they learned to assimilate halfway and we’re fully assimilated”

      A factor for sure, but hard to say if it’s the most important or not.

      Way back when I was told of research on German immigrants to Brazil. In that study living in an area with more Germans actually positively correlated with better/faster learning of Portuguese while those who found themselves surrounded by Brazilians assimilated more slowly.

      In that case I presume that being around others at various stages of the process can be helpful (Jutte’s been her longer and knows how to get things done and what to say and not say in various situations) and also puts the immigrants in a position eventually to help new arrivals (Otto had no idea how to find a reliable plumber, good thing I was able to help him).

      As a general rule (recognizing that a _lot_ depends on the county of origin and destination country) having some access to similar people is good but can turn into a situation of diminishing returns (and ghettoization) if it’s taken too far.

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      1. ShadowsCollide Avatar
        ShadowsCollide

        There were some Cubans and Puerto Ricans where they both grew up, but they were mostly surrounded by normie Americans so they never got to be ghettoized into an ethnic bubble. Kids were surrounded by American culture and since that was the cool stuff, that was an incentive to learn English and fit in.

        I’ve seen a lot of Hispanic immigrants or people several generations removed who live in ethnic bubbles and only associate with people from their ethnic group. The result is 2nd-3rd generation kids who barely speak English and think everything outside their ethnic bubble is Terra Incognita, just some black hole of racist white people. I’m lucky my parents were around normie Americans growing up, I’d hate to live in that kind of bubble

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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