on being an immigrant

or: i watched PAST LIVES and it destroyed me a little

A few years ago, I found myself in the enviable position of having to explain to a co-worker—my office-mate at the time, an adult, married, with two children whose education he was presumably caring for—that the northern and southern hemispheres' climates were flipped. I had to tell him, to his bewilderment, that in July, when it was summer in the northern hemisphere, it was winter below the equator. For a brief, dazzling moment, I was an accidental Earth and Space teacher.

Over the next few hours, he neglected work and googled maps ad nauseam, muttering to himself as if this information had somehow been intentionally withheld from him all this time. I think I may have altered the trajectory of his life. (I won’t go into how this is actually not irrelevant to the Court’s recent abysmal decision on affirmative action, but you should know that I really want to.)

Just one of the many unexpected externalities of immigration—becoming an unwilling educator to your peers.

This impromptu lesson materialized, I think, because I was telling him about how later that summer I'd be going to Uruguay, where it would be winter (information from which, even after looking up Uruguay on the map, he never quite recovered).

As a child, I often skipped entire summers, experiencing instead two winters per year. (Living in Miami, this held very little significance.) From around the time when I was nine until I was fifteen, the months of June, July, and August were typically reserved for visiting the homeland (so dramatique) I left when I was eight years old. It was a routine I was very happy to follow, as sitting with my grandparents playing cards, reading, and eating pastries all day was simply not a hardship for me. 

This week, I watched Celine Song's new film Past Lives, a movie that is not only exquisite, but also expertly, delicately, and sometimes hilariously, encapsulates what it's like to become an immigrant as a child. The relationship that develops with what used to be your home and the people you shared it with. (It is also 106 minutes, which is the scientifically correct length for most films.)

The movie was unexpectedly evocative of my own experiences as an immigrant, triggering some feelings inconsistent with my expectations for a Wednesday night.

(There are some comments below that could in some circles be considered spoilers from the film. Nothing major, and mostly in relation to the (my) feelings associated with immigrating, but wanted to give you a heads up just in case.)

Every scene between these two was manufactured in a lab to undo me. Credit: A24.

Past Lives' Nora, played to perfection by Greta Lee, immigrates twice to end up in New York—from Korea to Canada, and from Canada to the States. I am making this about me, but I also immigrated twice (from Uruguay to Italy, and from Italy to the Canada of Florida: Miami) to also end up in New York. A crazy thing, whenever I stop and think about it for half a second—from Montevideo to New York City! Who allowed me to trail this path!? An immigrant and an eldest daughter? It’s like I was fated to become a pleasure-to-have-in-class girlie.

The similarities between the movie and my life were a little too strong for my weekday sensibilities. 

It is a strange thing, to leave your birth country as a child—old enough to make memories, but too young to have developed into a full person. Impossible to know who you would have become, had you stayed. Indeed, the only way to get close to divining what that parallel life would've looked like seems to be through your peers. Those who've remained. There's a chance their lives are at least an approximation of what yours could have been, had a couple of very specific choices not been made.

To those who stay, you'll always be, as Nora’s childhood best friend/crush Hae Sung (played beautifully by Teo Yoo), tells her, "someone who leaves." Especially when you leave as a child, without the luxury of time to generate enough of a personality, of a history, to be remembered as much else to those who you left behind. The leaving takes over.

Those of us who do the leaving, though—we wonder what it would've been like, had we lived a fuller life before immigrating. Had we stayed even a little bit longer and carved out a better prediction of our future selves. Would I have studied the same subjects? Read the same books? Kept the same friend group? What drinks would I enjoy, had I not left? How much of a different person did I become by deviating from my original path? Because yes, leaving (it sounds so active, as if I didn't just get on a plane one day and start living elsewhere) was probably for the best, but it doesn't come without a cost, does it? 

There were so many instances in the movie that felt like looking into a mirror.

Nora’s at times obsessive drive to “do something of herself,” that immigrant campaign toward achievements that will make the sacrifice worth it. A smidge too close to home.

In turn, the tendency toward self-deprecation that people from back home (“back home”) exhibit when talking with a visiting émigré, felt loudly when Hae Sung called himself “ordinary” to Nora, as if living a predictable life is shameful in the face of someone who strayed from that predictability. Someone always asks, when I visit Uruguay, would you come back, quickly segued, without a peep from me, by well, why would you, right? And then they look at me as if daring me to disagree with them. It’s an exercise in awkward, careful monologuing, stumbling through words and feelings to tell people you have no intention of returning.

At one point in the film, Nora describes Hae Sung as "so Korean" to her husband, and it made me laugh. I have a sample size of approximately two people (my brother, who repeatedly does not read this newsletter and continues to go into deep shock every time he finds out how many of you do read it, and myself) with whom I speak with about this, but to me it's such a recognizable way to talk about someone from your home country after you leave. The only way of identifying the differences are to describe them as country-specific. Nothing else will do. Someone eats dinner later than we do? So Uruguayan. They wear dark-colored clothing? So Uruguayan. They repeatedly listen to 70s rock? Soooo Uruguayan. The mind refuses to contemplate that there might be other explanations.

Usually, ideally, opinions and generalizations evolve, take shape, become more sophisticated, as you grow older, but in this case: you decided what people were like as a child and there it remains, a stunted impression solidified at ten years old. It works the same for people’s impression of you, the child immigrant. A consequence of not sticking around long enough to build in the gradations of subtlety. Of a full person.

I go back to Uruguay relatively often, although the full summers stopped once I became someone with internships, jobs, a schedule that asked something from me beyond wake up and go to sleep. Every time I return, it takes me a while to ease in, almost as if I am stepping, temporarily, into the role of someone who stayed.

It’s different as an adult. I speak like everyone else and I look like everyone else, but it also feels like there's something intangible that clues people in, lets them know I'm slightly off. Because at a certain point, the feeling of foreignness expands, or flips—the sense of slight discomfort, of not belonging, now exists in the place that birthed you and not the one that somewhat begrudingly took you in.

A bit of a traitorous feeling, this revolving door of assimilation.

And yet, whenever I do go and see my friends, those I made when I didn't even know my times table, much less that New York City existed, I get a peek. Of my parallel life. The one in which I stayed. We talk about our routines, our careers, our lives, our expectations, and marvel at the differences even as we’re still stuck in our memories of each other, cemented as how we knew each other at eight, nine, ten years old. Building onto that shouldn’t be difficult, because of course people grow, but it is. It is difficult.

It’s strange, though, because the more time I spend with people who knew me when, the more I feel I can almost envision the person I was on track to become. I don’t wish I were her, but it is inevitably nostalgic.

Past Lives illustrated something I haven’t been able to put into words in years of on-and-off self-reflection. Maybe, you can go home again, so long as home is someone who knew the first, undeviated iteration of you. 

Thank you for being a subscriber, and thank for reading! Next up will be a recap of the last couple months of books/movies/shows/etc., so a much less existential issue. If you share the post on socials (and thank you if you do!), please try to include a link, and feel free to tag me so I can see it. As always, you can find me on twitter, instagram, and tiktok. xx