Nostalgic Thoughts: in between first and second-generation nostalgia
In her column “Nostalgic Thoughts,” Alaina Zhang ’27 reminisces on the past and reflects on why we miss it at all.
I first learned about the term “immigrant nostalgia” last year, and I finally felt that I had the words to describe the state I constantly found myself in. Most of the time this sensation appears at the most unexpected moments, sometimes when I’m alone, other times when I’m in the presence of company. There is a subtle yet profound feeling of loss when it appears, which lingers as my life continues on. As a result, I often find myself with the uncontrollable urge to obsessively attempt to construct a fictional childhood where I never immigrated to Canada with my parents at the age of eight.
When I try to list what is nostalgic for me, I realize that there are endless things — my family and the closeness (and almost intrusive presence) of my relatives, seeing the exact same faces every day when I step into a classroom sitting behind desks neatly lined up into rows, waking up at 6:30 a.m. to have breakfast with my grandparents and ride on my grandpa’s electric bike, listening to elders speak Wuxi dialect at the street stalls, having fried dough and soy milk for breakfast, being surrounded by people all the time, cracking the watermelon in half and digging into it with a spoon, putting on Fengyou essence and incense bags to prevent mosquito bites, my grandma braiding my hair with rainbow-colored mini hairties…
From the moment I left, these experiences became a luxury only promised by the window of summer vacation. I am a first-generation immigrant to Canada, which means that I feel nostalgia for a home country I have lived in and experienced. This is true for the most part. However, I think my experience can better be described as an in-between of “first-generation immigrant nostalgia” and “second-generation immigrant nostalgia,” the latter of which refers to nostalgia for a life children of immigrants have never experienced in their parents’ home country.
Eight-year old me never wished to leave my life in China. I spent a significant amount of childhood living with my four grandparents, showered with affection and snacks. Many Chinese families operated as one cohesive unit, with grandparents taking an active role in raising their grandchildren to alleviate the parents’ workload, and mine was no exception. It wasn’t until I moved to Canada that I truly began to live with my parents, who loved me but also demanded much more of me than my grandparents did.
Suddenly, I was pulled away from my friends in elementary school. No relatives immigrated with us, and my parents and I became a little unit wandering into a foreign world. I was never an extrovert, but I trace this instant as the irreversible moment when I became a true introvert. This was also the moment from which my nostalgia began, and unlike many others I knew who immigrated at a young age, my immigrant nostalgia never dissipated. It had a life of its own, inflating like a balloon and carrying a part of me with it.
As memories of my childhood in China became more distant, my second-generation immigrant nostalgia kicked in. I could no longer connect what I was experiencing in North America with the elementary school life I did experience in China. Based on the stories my parents told me, I began constructing fantasies about a middle school and high school life I should have had in Wuxi. Who would I have become if I had kept only my Chinese name and never adopted “Alaina?” For some reason, I believed, and still believe (to some extent), that that life would have been better. Nostalgia is like imagining the taste of candy locked in a beautiful glass bottle; I cannot truly taste it, but the sparkling temptations of the almost tangible sweetness makes the present I am living pale in color.
The problem was that I could not concretely point out what was dissatisfactory about my life in Canada. It was simply the fact that I was not living my life in Wuxi. When I had awkward social interactions with classmates or struggled to make friends at a Canadian public school, I wondered about the fictional “me” that never left. When I gazed at the gray rainy skies of the suburbs of Vancouver, I thought about the bustling streets of Wuxi and the long winding canal that ran through the heart of the city. I listened to old Mandarin and Cantonese pop because they conveyed emotions I related with, but found no one to share those emotions with around me.
Nostalgia sometimes makes my life pause, and I let myself drift into the body of fictional me.
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