“A stranger
ageing for me
I’m still 17.”
12th March 2022
When I turned ten, one of my parents’ friends held both their hands up to me open palmed. They smiled big and said, ‘double digits!’. Though it was meant with excitement, it ignited in me a panicked realisation of the passage of time. Age seemed in that moment not as a celebration, but as an inescapable state of existence; a series of doors that one can only pass-through forwards. What was I going to do with all these years? How was I going to fill so much time, so much life? And once it was filled, what then? Those two hands held up to me seemed to be the curse of time itself, telling me: double digits, now, until death.
Despite the existential terror that had awakened, I found in myself a longing for time, too. I imagined adulthood, at least, as the place where such questions wouldn’t plague me unanswered. The doors of 18, 21, 25, though far ahead, promised experiences and knowledge where the smallness of childhood couldn’t coincide. And I peered through their keyholes on my tiptoes with nervous curiosity, guessing at the impression of shadows and sounds reverberating from under the door. I wanted to know the beautiful and the dreadful. I wanted, beyond all, to be prepared.
It only appears to me now in hindsight that the anxiety for what was coming, was really for what had long since begun. That it was not what could be that frightened me, but what I knew already was.
It’s a rare privilege for childhood to only be childhood. To not be, in your softness, perpetually growing in and of you a new self.
As an immigrant child, for us even fewer such allowances are made. To be an immigrant in a white-dominated country is already a sin to be atoned for through perfect acclimation and patriotism. (See: speaking English without an accent; showing an interest in national sports, holidays, and practices; lacking involvement in political issues; rejecting one’s own cultural values; and, above all, existing quietly and without complaint).
For every child social rejection is painful at best, but for the immigrant child specifically, rejection is an immediate threat to survival. To be denied a place for faults perceived in one’s core, brings into question the self on an immense scale. The core I speak of is not of the self that is built, but the self that the immigrant cannot escape. We are visually, physically, politically, historically, culturally, and financially embedded in the immigrant experience. And acclimation, though possible, lies always on the thin knife of external acceptance. With this, existence takes on the quality of performance.
Though as a child this performance is easier to learn (in entering the cultural landscape at a younger age), for an adult immigrant, it is near impossible. The mercy that is granted the child for at least being helpless in their place is non-existent for the adult; the one who has chosen to take space in a new country, but inevitably failed in the way they have done so. There is no aspect of the immigrant that suffices as “enough”. And yes, as tolerant as western countries such as Australia perceive themselves to be, the experiences are nevertheless the same.
It is that small mercy that denies immigrant children a full childhood. The mercy that conditions them as the shield with which their parents, and consequently themselves, they must protect.
I’m aware that most of my parents’ racist experiences have occurred when neither myself nor my brother were with them. When someone heard the click of an accent or understood in their motions a foreignness so minute it could only be noticed by someone on the watch for an “other”. In response to an email where commas were misplaced, or words misspelt, or a customary faux pas at a social event. Coming out of the Persian grocery store where you can find ingredients for traditional dishes that don’t have a place in Woolies or Coles, like dried barberry and fenugreek leaves. Or perhaps when they were driving too slow, or too fast, that warranted a look into the driver’s window where, to another’s delight, was someone who could be on the receiving end of their racism. Was it this that saw my dad’s work van stolen one night, driven not far, and crashed into a river ditch? It’s a possibility to which he will never admit, choosing rather to forge a place where a place is given, than to ask for what is denied.
But to witness is to know, and to witness is much of what childhood is.
Shamefully, these experiences filled me not with rage but embarrassment. I saw them exactly as they were intended: as threats to our place, to a sense of belonging. It was present even when this was not the case, the most innocent occurrences where the otherness was highlighted. In one instance, my parents and I had driven a distance to see a second-hand SUV. A plane was going overhead, we were going to buy a car. I wanted such things, and it was nice. Until the seller called out to me, said I sounded like an adult on the phone when I called in place of my parents, asking for directions. And it meant nothing, maybe, but there I was and long had been something more than I ever should have. I saw myself in that small statement, catching my reflection in a shard of glass and seeing only then, how fragmented I really was.
I was, like most immigrant children, the keeper of not only my own experiences but my parents’, too. Their loneliness was my own, their difficulties, their fears, their regrets, all mine, rarely wilfully. I was the sieve through which their understanding of this place was derived, sweetened, whenever it could be. And it is sometimes wonderful to see myself as my parents’ parent, interpreting a new world for them. And it is sometimes my stunted tongue, looking at the two palms in front of my face, thinking of what the word for ‘digits’ is in Persian.
In this way, to grow as an immigrant child is not only to grow simply upward, but outward. It asks so much of you, it asks to be severed at the root.
I grapple with this still, on how it is possible to be one’s own person when so many years have been defined through the relation to another. As I travel further into adulthood, it looms on me that what I wanted to be prepared for was the wrong thing. I didn’t need to know how to stand as an adult when a child, but how to now. I find myself, here, in another new world. I move from bedroom to bedroom in my parents’ house. I stall time with degrees, and plans for tomorrow, but never today, and discoveries of inadequacies within myself that render me perpetually incapable. I hold out for the voice of my dad from upstairs, asking, can you read this message? Or my mum, can you make this call? In these small servitudes, I endeavour to give a place where there isn’t one. I put myself as the shield, I make whatever I can sweeter.
But time passes even when I pretend it doesn’t, and it takes me a while to admit it. White-knuckled gripping on the years passing, it’s water through my fingers after all.
I’m strongest when I can admit I still want someone to hold my hand, still want someone to smooth my hair. To give me a chance to learn childhood, so I can be an adult in the right way. I know that in their love, what my parents yearn for is both our freedoms. And in the midst, so much will be lost, but so much gained, too.
Thank you so much for sharing your writing, this brought me to tears💜 you put an experience I can never really define into words in such a profound way, I feel so seen🥲