Call me traitor

I am an immigrant, like many others here in Canada. Immigrants are involved with many issues and emotions in their first 3 to 5 years of new life -- I guess I am talking about average --. As an immigrant, first thing in your mind would be the barrier of language and consiquently the slowness of job finding process. If you are lucky you'll find a job within few months if not you'll hook yourself up to a college program or a course or if you are brave and not too old, you'll commit yourself to a degree or so. After a while the barrier of language becomes shorter and shorter by daily practice of dealing with native speaking people, after couple of years that barrier will look like a road bump, short enough to ignore, thick enough to slow you down when you are having an intelligent conversation. And if you are obsessed with learning and exploring, you'd try to make friends with people who were born and raised in the host land country. You'll face two different types of people, interesting and sophisticated exotic-land lovers kind of people and none-interested-in-forigners kind of people. The first group are those who are like yourself, obsessed with exploring and learning, the second group who get stuck in their own politeness, so at first they try to figure out what the hell you are trying to say, a couple of frowns or questioned faces here and there and then once you make the first pause, they are out of the conversation like a cartoon character with a circular tail of dust at their buttom while they are running away. They are the reason you become concerned with your accent. After a while accent becomes your new obsession.

And there are immigrants who are so protective about their homeland culture; they live under this constant shadow of “one day I'll go back home with my family, because I don't belong here”. They don't deal with native speaking people unless it's necessary; they find their own people, they make a community of their own, they even get special satellite dishes to watch mother-tongue speaking TV or radio channels. Practically they live same life and same culture in a different geographical position.

I guess I belong to the first group, yet in touch with second group of immigrants and I see the culture shocks the second group goes through. I see how difficult it is to live as an immigrant in a different value system and not contradict your own biased values. I've seen people who suffer a lot for not sacrificing their original values, I wonder what is the point of immigrating then? I came to this land to redefine some principal values which were defined for me, values that didn't make sense to me at all. I was having culture shock of my own when I lived where I was born and it’s hard for me to call it home. To me home means something else. I don't know what but not the place of birth. Perhaps home is where you want to settle in not where you left behind.