"Interpreter of Maladies" is a brilliant collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, but you do not have to take my word for it - it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. My favorite story in the book, "The Third and Final Continent," is tucked away as the final chapter and tells the story of an immigrant from India as he tries to make it in the new world. Ms. Lahiri does a fantastic job in conveying his struggles but for me the story shines because it describes to some degree the tribulations that my parents went through when we first came to the United States. I am also technically an immigrant, I was seven years old when we left India, but I barely remember my life before America and while there might have been some growing pains, they were quickly forgotten. My parents are the ones who had to do the real fighting in a new land where the language was unfamiliar and the customs seemed so strange.
Thus it should come as no surprise that the immigrant experience holds my attention more than most topics. I have always wondered what it must have been like to come to a new country and leave everything you have ever known thousands of miles behind. What if you don't speak the language? How can you get by when you can't even communicate with the people of your new land?
Ask and you shall recieve.
I landed in Vietnam with big expectations of myself, chief amongst them being that I would be able to assimilate quickly and easily. Travel is not new to me and usually conversation can be had without any big problems. I figured that a smile and a well delivered Xin Chao (hello) would go a long way. What I forgot to take into account was the fact that this time around I would be primarily working instead of sightseeing and would be far away from the tourist part of town. It is really easy to talk to people when you are on vacation, most of the time they are as well. Its a different story when you try to lead a normal life away in a whole new city.
My first day of work went well enough, everybody was really friendly and welcomed me with warm words and embraces. All of the physicians and nurses spoke english and thus I had no problems communicating with them. At lunch time however, things started to change and I realized that I wasn't in Kansas anymore. Away from the restrictions of the ICU, everybody started to speak more candidly and very quickly in Vietnamese. I was by no means ignored, in fact everybody did their best to include me in their conversations. But the problem was that talking casually in English was not something that my gracious hosts were accustomed to and each time I tried to interject the conversation became painfully slow. I began to feel lonely.
As the days carried on the feeling of isolation began to get deeper and deeper. There were never any major events where I felt that the people of my host country were actively rejecting me, instead it was the insidiousness of daily life that caused the problems. On the walk to work I pass by numerous street side food stalls yet ordering from them is insanely complicated. The standard Bahn Mi contains pork and trying to get one without it is really difficult in this part of town. Persistance pays off and I can usually get a fantastic egg only version of it but eating it reminds me of how much easier it is to do all of this back home. In fact everything is easier back home, why leave?
Being homesick is a terrible malady and it had hit me full in the face. I did not expect this at all, I mean I love to travel! This was supposed to be an adventure in a far off land! Everyday I wake up thousands of miles from home without any idea what the day might hold....so why do I want to be in Philly so much? I imagine this is what every immigrant goes through, except on a much grander scale. Here I am being antsy about a temporary stint abroad whereas other people, like my parents, have left everything behind to come to a new land and see what it brings.
This homesick feeling became unbearable and thus one day I decided to quell it and went on a hunt for the best Indian food in Ho Chi Minh City. A lot of my colleagues at work recommended a place downtown and off I went. "Tandoor" is a fairly high end restaurant and I felt at home from the moment my waiter, Mohammed Safi, said Salaam to me. He realized that I spoke Urdu and immediately began talking very rapidly to me in our home language. I was shocked that somebody so young, he couldn't have been older than 25, was so far from home and so I asked Safi about how he found himself in Vietnam, it was a pretty fascinating story.
Safi is one of ten children from a very poor family in Bangalore, India. He did fairly well in school and had plans to go to university but his family's financial situation demanded a more immediate way to make money. He spoke fluent english, which was a testament to his intelligence, and he heard that this would be a very usefull skill for him if he went abroad. He signed up with a job agency in his hometown and boarded a ship without any knowledge of where he was going to end up. The job he was hired for, being a tourguide in Singapore, did not work out and so he set off on his own. Thus at the tender age of 22, he found himself in Vietnam and ten days later had a job at Tandoor; he had been working there for two weeks when we met.
To say that I was blown away by this was an understatement. Here I am griping about being homesick while Safi literally left his home not knowing where he was going to end up and no plans on going home in the foreseeable future. When asked how he had the courage to do this he told me "Zindagi meku ithar lahi, mujko malum nahi kyun. Gharku tho wapis nahi jasaktha, sablonge mere kaam se khana khare. Ithar rehjaunga, dhekinge kya hoinga. Inshallah sab kuch thik ho Jainga, ye din bohoth lambe hai magar sal kafi choteh hai." Translation: "Life brought me here, I dont know why. I can't go back home, everyone there needs the money I am sending back. Godwilling everything will be ok, these days are long but the years are short."
The immigrant experience is a truly fascinating thing. Driven by great need they willingly leave everything behind and enter the great unknown. As Americans we romanticize the journey of the immigrant yet forget that it is inherently a very lonely story with many bumps before the dividents come in. This was the path that my parents took and I finally have a little bit of understanding into how difficult it was. I am now more impressed with my parents, and immigrants in general, than I ever was.
I am not an immigrant to this wonderful country, my experience will never be as harsh or scary as Safi's. Therefore I should not spend a single minute pining over home, especially since I will be back there soon enough. This is an adventure, I'm going to start treating it like one.
