The Loneliness of Immigration: When Nobody Quite Understands You

Automat (1927), Edward Hopper

There is a kind of loneliness in immigration that I don't hear people talk about very much. It is not exactly homesickness, or feeling rejected by the country you moved to. You can like your life, love your family, have a good job, speak the language fluently, and still experience it. It is the loneliness of having to explain yourself.

When you grow up somewhere, a big chunk of communication happens under the attentional level. Your friends know the television you watched as a kid, the smell of the school hallways, the chord progression of that hit from 1987, a political joke popular only among the ones born between 1978 and 1981, the ironic status signaling, the regional stereotypes. They know what a certain facial expression means. They understand why something is funny before you have explained why it is funny. You can say three words and communicate twenty years of context.

Then you move to another country, and suddenly telling a simple story requires footnotes. To explain why something your mother said was funny, you first have to explain something about Italian mothers. Then you realize that explaining Italian mothers is itself going to require some clarification because Americans assume New Jersey’s Italian mothers. Then you immediately need to check yourself for being classist or elitist. You start the story and somewhere along the way you think, never mind, too much energy for too little of a result.

It happens in the other direction too. The people back home know the world you came from, but increasingly they don't know the world you live in now. You tell them something about work, your marriage, raising a child in America, the healthcare system, your neighbors, some strange interaction you had at the grocery store. They understand the words, but you can feel yourself translating the context again. Neither side has the whole story anymore. You tell a friend in Italy, “Sammy's school has a Halloween parade on Friday.” They know Halloween, they have seen American movies, they know kids dress up. So there is apparently nothing to explain. But they may not immediately understand that this means parents taking time off work to stand outside an elementary school at 2 p.m., hundreds of children walking around the building in costumes, teachers dressed up too, classrooms having parties, parents volunteering, candy and little plastic objects coming home for days, discussions about which costumes are appropriate for school, and then everyone going home to prepare for the actual Halloween evening. If you explain all of that, you have killed the story. You weren't trying to give a seminar on American elementary-school culture. You were trying to tell your friend about one funny thing Sammy did during the parade. So you either provide the background and derail your own anecdote, or skip it and realize the anecdote doesn't quite land.

At first you do the work. You explain. But after years of doing this, sometimes you start thinking: why bother?

I think this is where something psychologically interesting can happen. We are social animals. We don't stop needing other people because communicating with them has become more laborious. Instead, other people can begin to live more and more in our heads. You think of something funny and immediately know what an old friend would say about it. You have the conversation with him in your head. You hear the joke and laugh. Something happens with your parents and you imagine telling them. You know what they would say, and you know what you would say back. Maybe you get angry at them in this imaginary conversation. Maybe you cry with them. Maybe, in your version of it, they finally understand.

There is nothing particularly strange about this. We all carry representations of other people around with us and anticipate their reactions. But I wonder if there is a point where the imaginary conversation can begin to replace the real one.

"I should tell him this. I know exactly what he would say" becomes "There's no point telling him. I already know what he would say." The actual person has disappeared from the conversation. I have become both people, and because the conversation never actually happened, the other person never got the chance to surprise. The same thing can happen with people in the new country. I anticipate that they won't quite understand, or that explaining something will require explaining five other things first, so I don't tell them. Of course, now they understand me even less because I have given them less information. Their responses feel superficial or slightly off because they are responding to the tip of the iceberg, and the tip of the iceberg is what I have shown them.

This can become a very lonely place. Nobody understands. Nobody knows. Nobody sees everything underneath. Immigration can divide a life into worlds that no single person fully shares. The people who understand where you came from don't completely understand where you are. The people who understand where you are weren't there for where you came from.

But there is also a trap in believing that I already know what is inside everybody else's mind. My old friend won't understand. My parents will respond exactly the way they always respond. My American friend won't get the reference. This person will think I'm weird. That person will misunderstand what I mean. Maybe they will. But I don't actually know.

And perhaps this is where immigration reveals something that is true of every human relationship, but easier to ignore when everybody shares the same cultural context. We have never completely understood each other. Even the friend I grew up with doesn't have access to my mind. My wife doesn't. My parents don't. I don't have access to theirs either. Shared culture makes this fact less obvious because there are fewer things to explain, and it can feel as though we are living inside the same reality. We aren't. There is always some distance between one person's experience and another's.

The strange thing is how often we manage to cross that distance anyway. Someone understands something you were sure they wouldn't understand. An old friend gives you a completely different response from the one you had already written for him. Someone from a completely different culture recognizes something in you that people from your own culture have missed. You explain a joke badly and somehow they still laugh.

Maybe the answer to this particular kind of immigrant loneliness is not becoming better at explaining ourselves. Maybe it is recovering some humility and curiosity about other people's minds.

Tell the story anyway. Call the friend even though you think you already know what he is going to say. Try to explain the stupid cultural reference. Ask the question whose answer you think you already know. Risk being misunderstood, and give the other person the opportunity to misunderstand you differently than you expected.

Complete understanding was probably never the basis of intimacy in the first place. The people we love have always known only part of us, and we have always known only part of them. What keeps a relationship alive is partly that there is still another mind on the other side, one we don't control and cannot completely predict.

We must surrender to the mystery of our interconnectedness.