A long time ago I was told, perhaps as we all were, to never begin an essay with a quotation. The suggestion is well-warranted – just as I wouldn’t want Bill Cosby opening for me at a comedy club, I certainly don’t want Twain or Hemingway or Poe opening for me on paper. With that said, I apprehensively reject the notion, at least when the quote is the catalyst for a great deal of self-reflection and introspection. In a 1996 New York Times article, Bharati Mukherjee (a professor at UC Berkeley and an Indian immigrant) remarked:
“I need to put roots down, to vote and make the difference that I can. The price that the immigrant willingly pays, and that the exile avoids, is the trauma of self-transformation” (Mukherjee, Two Ways to Belong in America).
Having recently become a United States citizen, her entire essay struck a chord but the above quotation accurately resonated with my experience. To be frank, I didn’t know why I was so moved – I felt as if I had been abruptly woken up but couldn’t find the alarm clock. After all, America is permeated by the positivist idea of the “metamorphosis”. Chicken Soup for the Soul is the American staple of a healthy self-help diet; we like to think that change is good, that losing weight is good, and that seeing a therapist is good, but I digress. My self-transformation began in late 1997 when the Titarenco family (I use the third person because I’m not even sure I still know who these people were) stepped off of a Boeing 747 into the uncomfortably warm evening air of Phoenix, Arizona. We had just arrived from Romania, an Eastern Bloc country that was devastated by communism. Most of my parents’ lives were spent in the oppressive clutch of a communist dictatorship – America wasn’t only a childhood dream or a political ideal, it was a real-life Utopia. We found ourselves in Eden and we were elated; every man woman and child seemed to be a perfect human prototype: an Adam or an Eve. So then why does Mukherjee describe the immigrant self-transformation as “traumatizing”? Better yet, why do I almost subconsciously agree? I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly changed between that puerile inception, the grueling decade that was to follow, and the oft too-cynical position I find myself in today. Read the rest of this entry »
