What it feels like to be a migrant

I've never been a refugee but I've met many. Charles 'Newman' (a self-conferred surname) crept out the back door of his Budapest apartment in 1956 as the secret police were breaking in the front door, with barely enough time to grab his wallet and passport. He'd been in Australia about 4 years when I met him, was still traumatized by the collapse of his comfortable world when the Soviet army moved into Hungary to 'save' it (it was never clear from what). A Vietnamese couple who looked so fragile a puff of wind would blow them away were tougher than the steel cables supporting the Lion's Gate bridge, below which I met them and heard their harrowing story of piracy, rape, being stripped of all they possessed, and worst of all, the pettifoggery of bureaucracy that impeded their resettlement and led them onward from Los Angeles to Vancouver. I empathize strongly with them and many others I've been privileged and honoured to know, but I can't share their experiences.

But I know what it feels like to be a migrant. I've migrated intercontinentally, from one culture to another, three times, uprooting from a neighbourhood friendship network and culture to begin life anew in a strange new world with unfamiliar culture and customs, bringing my willing supportive Wendy and three rather unwilling little children with me. 

Our first migration in January-February 1964, from Sydney, Australia to Burlington, Vermont, USA was a comfortable 7-week affair, a luxurious sea voyage across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal to Kingston, Jamaica, then up the Eastern seaboard of USA. Our first impression of the USA was a vista of miles of squalid shanty-town slums where underclass blacks lived, as our ship crept up river to a berth within walking range of gracious antebellum homes and lovely downtown Charleston, South Carolina. It was a different planet from our first sight of those miles of shantytown slums.  Another first impression was gunshops with displays of ugly automatic pistols and rifles with magazines holding enough bullets to shred the first unlucky deer, wild pig, or newspaper delivery boy to cross the path of a proud owner of such lethal weapons. A newspaper delivery boy was slaughtered by mistake in exactly this way soon after our landfall in the USA. An Op-Ed comment in the Burlington Free Press after that commonplace tragedy twisted facts and distorted logic to imply that getting shot and killed was the boy's own fault. 

Before we left Sydney on that migration from Australia to the USA, I had begun to study socio-demographic and psychological factors associated with migration, so I had some insight into what was happening to me and my family.  I knew an essential determinant of successful migration is a slowly acquired sense of belonging to the migrant's host country. On our very first day in the USA impressions began to accumulate, a little more on the negative than the positive side of the ledger. Reasons not to identify with, not to seek a sense of belonging to American culture, grew more numerous in the months that followed.  

Throughout our 14 months in Burlington, Vermont in 1964-65, Wendy and I tried hard to acquire the sense of belonging that we knew was an essential prerequisite to successful assimilation. I was very fortunate: Kerr White, my host, mentor, guide on the path to assimilation, gave me many opportunities to travel. I went to New York, Washington, Boston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, Chapel Hill, Ann Arbor, Chicago and sundry other centres of scholarly life. At weekends and on a short late summer holiday we explored Vermont and the neighbouring states. Wendy and I found much to admire and like about life in the lovely little university city of Burlington, Vermont. But we also found aspects of the American way of life that felt alien - that inhibited us from acquiring a sense of belonging. 

We were disgusted by the profligacy and waste, appalled by casual acceptance of corruption as an integral component of politics, horrified and alarmed by the gun culture, apprehensive about the rising tide of strident militarism all around us. The war was heating up in Vietnam in 1964, and universally there was total misunderstanding of what that war was really about: Americans saw it not as the struggle for national liberation from colonial rule that it really was, but as a conflict between good capitalism and evil communism. 

I'd been reading the New Yorker avidly for about 15 years, but apart from that we searched in vain for local, regional and national evidence of the sort of cultural richness and historical traditions that permeate the lives of people in Britain or France or Italy. It was difficult to detect evidence that the values of Mark Twain, Louisa May Allcott, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, or a dozen other American writers I admired and loved, had penetrated the souls of any of the Americans we met, nice though they all were. The overriding impression was of a shallow, superficial culture hardly deserving to be called a culture - certainly not a culture to which we wanted to belong. 

Wendy and I felt that we were saved from a fate worse than death when Stuart Morrison invited me to join his team at the Usher Institute of Public Health in the University of Edinburgh. The salary was 40% below what I'd been offered to accompany Kerr White to the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene in Baltimore; even so it took no more than a nanosecond to decide between the two invitations. I achieved brief fame as an example of 'reverse brain drain' - even a short paragraph in the Lancet.

The process of migrating from New England to Scotland lasted overnight, a red-eye flight from Montreal to Prestwick, and an hour on the train to Waverley Station in Edinburgh. Wendy and I thought our adjustment to life in Scotland would be equally brief. She'd lived in Edinburgh before, for 2-3 years; I'd lived there for about 5 months. I was disconcerted to find that it took 2 years or more to acquire a sense of belonging. Probably this was because I'd lived in London for 4-5 years and had acquired aspects of Englishness that were subtly different from Scottishness.  It was easier and faster for Wendy, perhaps partly because of a little Scots blood in her veins. But it happened: our whole family acquired not so much a veneer as a sturdy sub-surface layer of Scottishness, strongly reinforced in our children by lovely lilting Edinburgh accents. (To my sorrow they lost these accents within weeks of settling in Ottawa, but Rebecca assures me she can retrieve hers if the need arises).  

After 5 years we all felt Scottish and would happily have spent the rest of our lives there. Several factors impelled us to move again. After 5 years I'd become professionally well known.  I began to get invitations to attractive professorial positions elsewhere in the UK, in Canada, USA. None from Australia, alas, and I was turned down for two positions I applied for in my homeland: both went to men who were well-connected rather than well qualified. I couldn't refuse an invitation from Harvard, however, despite misgivings about the politics of a cross appointment between the medical school and the school of public health, doubts about returning to a country and culture we'd found flawed, and painfully long commutes I'd be forced to make. After provisionally accepting the position at Harvard, I flew to Ottawa, arriving late on a balmy summer afternoon. I walked up to Parliament Hill, then around the Canal to somewhere in the Glebe where as dusk gathered, Mums and Dads sat on their front steps sipping wine while their kids played street hockey. I had an epiphany: this was the place to raise our kids, not some distant outer suburb of greater Boston with all the turbulence and racial tensions that afflicted the USA in the late 1960s!

The decision to leave Edinburgh, which we had come to love, and where we felt that we truly belonged, and move to yet another new country and culture was agonizing and drawn out over as many weeks as we could delay saying yea or nay. When we finally made up our minds it was after prolonged consideration of many pros and cons. Better chances for our children to get a good start in life was of over-riding importance.

We found to our surprise and delight that adjustment to Canadian life and culture was easy, fast and painless (but not to the climate! That's a whole other story). The policy and reality of multiculturalism smoothed the way: newcomers to Canada are accepted for who they are. Nobody tried to change us, to force us into a mould that would have us conform,  become like everyone else.  Canada's not like that! It draws its greatest strength from its pervasive diversity. Now after 46 years here I feel deep-rooted; and if my ancestors are all in another country, that just makes me more Canadian, not less, like close to a third of all of us who live in Canada.  The sense of belonging took hold soon after we arrived in Ottawa, and has grown stronger, richer, deeper with each passing year.