no road for return
first- versus second-generation American, diaspora, mixedness, and the child-of-immigrant experience
When I was nine, I thought moussaka was ours.
My mom made a great one, and I couldn’t differentiate it from any of the other stews and casseroles she had learned to cook from my dad’s side. We had a kind-of-brown kind-of-white family, my sister and I had the curly brown hair, and my dad made the Windex joke so many times I started to think My Big Fat Greek Wedding had copied it from him.
Could we have been Greek? In markets abroad, on summer trips to visit my mom’s side, street vendors would proposition us in a rainbow of languages, asking, “What language, where are you from? Israel? France? America? America?” I always got a little thrill out of it, pleased that my muttness looked like Something, that strangers saw a little bit of color and culture in me, even though they were far off the mark.
Most who play the guessing game tend to lose. My mother is from Switzerland, my father Iran; my sister and I wear their features like white women wearing clothes from the “Ethnic” section of the thrift store. That is to say, it makes sense when you know where it came from, but something about it doesn’t quite look right. Our parents’ features translate through each other onto my sister and me as a true amalgamation of the two: black and blonde curls turning into our loose brown locks; dark and pale skin giving us an easily-tannable beige; deep brown and slate grey eyes turning out nut-brown, hazel in the sunlight. We look like neither of them, but extraordinarily like each other.
Our parents met in Oakland, at Holy Names College where my father was enrolled and my mother was studying abroad for a semester (she jokes that they met because she had to help him with his English, even though he had already been living there for three years, and it was her first time in the country). Then my mother’s student visa expired and she went back to Switzerland; the two wrote letters every week until she got a new visa to return and enroll as a full-time student in the United States. Six years later, they were married.
My parents moved to a small town in the East Bay called Dublin (which a friend of mine from Berkeley once affectionately categorized as “a strip mall surrounded by breathtaking nature”), a town whose elementary schools were half-Mayflower half-melting pot, mostly East and South Asian. Growing up in these schools, I felt very Weird Kid Gets A Legitimizing Identity Marker in using the term “first-generation”—it helped me categorize why my family did things differently than my classmates’, or more importantly, why I was so different from my classmates. (Little things that set us apart from multi-generational American families: we took our shoes off when we entered the house, wouldn’t open someone else’s refrigerator without permission, didn’t go to church, and ate things that no one could pronounce.)
When I later learned about “first-generation” in the context of “first generation to go to college”, I became less vocal about using the phrase, especially out of context—I didn’t want others to think I was claiming an identity I didn’t have. After all, it’s an adverb—first-generation American, first-generation college student—that means something completely different depending on what adjective succeeds it. In the context of immigrant families, that’s the crux of much of the confusion: when we say first-generation American, do we mean first to be born in America or first to live in America?
In March, I shared an Instagram story asking folks what phrases they used to define themselves; most of the votes came in for second-generation (i.e. second generation to live in the country) over first-generation (i.e. first generation to be born in the country). I can’t say why folks chose what they did; there weren’t any trends, respondents being of all sexualities and ethnicities (although all were between the ages of 21-31). In individual discussions, though, what respondents had to say differed depending on a variety of factors: if both of their parents had emigrated from the same country, if their parents had emigrated as children or as adults, if one parent emigrated before the other, if the immigrant parents had gained naturalized citizenship before their natural-born children.
Merriam-Webster defines first-generation (in the context of first-generation American) as simultaneously applying to “an American of immigrant parentage” (i.e. first to be born in the country) and “a naturalized American” (i.e. first to live in and become a citizen of a country). Citizenship is determined by a complicated system based on racist and xenophobic ideals, but it’s a part of my family’s story. My sister was the first to become a citizen (by birth), then my father (by naturalization), then me (birth), then my mother (little plastic American flag and hand over her heart). My mom waited until she had already been in the country thirty years, living off a green card for decades. She decided it was time after a scare at the airport where she was falsely warned that her green card had expired, and although the airline would let her on the first of two return flights, they might not let her onto the final flight into the US. I remember her studying for citizenship as I sat in the back of our family minivan, reading her study guide for a test that no one in my sophomore US History class could have passed.
There’s so much privilege in citizenship, especially dual citizenship in the context of a world where over 50 countries don’t allow or legally recognize double nationality (including my father’s Iran, which considers Americans born to Iranian parents as Iranian citizens, thus requiring them to have Iranian passports in order to enter the country). As a natural-born US citizen and “jus sanguinis” Swiss citizen (with no Iranian documentation), I know I have papers that open doors. But mostly I just feel like a mutt with my face in two different passports, not recognizing the photo that’s supposed to look like me.
In the poems I’ve been writing for my MFA program, I’ve started creating around first my father’s heritage and immigrant experience, then my mother’s. I’ve been using my parents’ cultural and ethnic positioning within the United States as a lens through which to experience my own, which has always been liminal and amorphous to me. My mixed-but-I-look-kind-of-white-kind-of-ethnically-ambiguous-but-mostly-white-depending-on-who-you-ask heritage has become complicated as I age and my appearance has changed. When I lost a lot of weight in my early twenties, my facial features became more prominent; my Iranian hooded eyelids became pronounced, hovering behind my Swiss almond eyes. Even my body hair is liminal: thick Middle Eastern tapestry on my arms and legs, but blonde as my mother’s European curls.
Every now and then another Iranian will clock that half of me. Sometimes it’s from hearing me talk about tadig, or fake my aunt’s accent, but usually it’s from seeing the last name on my ID (which they don’t always take to be mine—once, before I aged out of Obamacare at 26, a receptionist at the doctor’s office heard me say the primary insurance holder’s full name and asked, “Is that your husband?” (My sister—who looks whiter than me—has a similar story, except she got “Is that your married name?” and “Is your husband Iranian?”)). Sometimes they clock me retrospectively—oh yeah, I knew just from looking at you—but does it really count if they only say it once they already know? We never really meet many Swiss people, and the Swiss have a less distinctive phenotype, so no one ever picks up on that part of me. (It also feels like a generational thing, or a sign of the times: when my parents were first dating, my mom says strangers would always gush over her heritage and not pay much attention to my dad’s. Nowadays, everyone I meet is fascinated to hear that I’m half-Iranian. Not as many people care that I’m half-Swiss.)
Iranians and Swiss have more in common than you’d think: both aggressively tell you to take more food at dinner, both greet friends and family alike with cheek kisses, both have a major holiday celebrated by a bonfire (Swiss Independence Day on August 1st, and Iranian New Year, Norooz, on the first day of spring, when I started writing this essay). Little things, but I reach for them. I’ve always wanted definitive culture, to be monolithic, one thing—easy. Let me be definable. Let me fit a category. Let me make sense of both sides of my family without needing two different translators. Let me belong, anywhere.
I’m a child of immigrants, or a first- or second-generation American, depending on who you ask, but nothing has ever felt right to call myself. Even my parents disagree on the terms: on the phone, my mother says, I would never think of myself as first generation. You and your sister are the first generation in the family. My father says, I would. We are the first generation of immigrants. (He also says, I’m an American, baby! Brown man, red white and blue tank-top on the Fourth of July.) The three of us puzzle over why their perspectives differ so much, when my mom says to my dad, I think that’s because in some ways, there’s no road for return for you.
Where my mom could pack up her things at any time and move back to Switzerland for a good life, my dad doesn’t have that option (Life would be hell. I wouldn’t even want to try), and maybe that’s what’s at the heart of his identification as first-generation: that first-generation Americans are those who don’t have a country to ‘go back’ to—the immigrants who fled their countries; or their children, who have never been to their parents’ countries, or don’t speak the language, or can’t see a life for themselves there.
It’s not a one-size-fits-all definition: I don’t refer to myself as first-generation American, yet I most certainly can’t go ‘back’ to either Iran (which I will never be able to visit without an Iranian passport, and likely would struggle to live in as a loud, shorts-loving, afab queer person) or Switzerland (which has a culture and a language both deeply unfamiliar to me); the same can be said for many of my child-of-immigrant friends who identify as second-generation. Perhaps it’s a better litmus test for my parents’ generation; perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the child of an immigrant so separated from their country of birth that they ID as first-gen logically must be second-generation—it’s how ordinal numbers work. Perhaps, though, it’s most accurate to say that the decision to refer to oneself as first- or second-generation is as unique and circumstantial as one’s family’s immigration story; that the diaspora isn’t monolithic, and neither should be our vocabulary.