As the child of immigrants, I feel a loss for experiences my son will never have

When you grow up as the child of immigrants, you’re usually encouraged to seek out a partner with the same cultural background. It’s an impulse many first-generation migrants have, to preserve their culture and safeguard their children by keeping them connected to the same values and traditions that they themselves grew up with.

As the child of Fijian-Indian Muslim immigrants, this was definitely the case for me. While raising their four children in Australia in the early 1990s, my parents were determined to retain our culture and religion. We were made to speak Hindi at home, observed strict Islamic rules, and socialised with other Fijian-Indian families as much as possible.

Zoya Patel and her son.

But no matter how hard they tried, my parents were unable to counterbalance the strong desire I had to fit in with my Aussie peers, and early experiences of bullying and racism meant that I wanted to diminish my cultural difference. I hated being Indian, and I didn’t identify as Muslim by the time I was a teenager. Instead, I desperately wanted to be part of the mainstream Australian culture I was surrounded by.

That impulse ended up defining a lot of my major decisions, including my long-term relationship with a white Australian man.

This was something I was warned against by my community from an early age. It wasn’t necessarily that white Australian culture was seen as dangerous or distasteful (although that was the view held by some in our community), it was more the idea that sharing a life and raising children with someone from a different culture would come with too many seemingly impossible hurdles.

What language would we speak at home? What religion would we observe? And most importantly, how would our children know if they were Indian or Australian? Muslim or not? Why willingly choose such a complicated scenario when you could bypass it all by marrying within the culture?

For me, the issues raised were moot because I identified far more with secular Australian culture than my ethnic heritage, and my partner and I have shared values and beliefs despite our cultural differences. I didn’t consider that we would have issues navigating our different cultural backgrounds as parents because I know we’re on the same page when it comes to how we want to raise our son.

What I didn’t anticipate before having a child earlier this year, though, was the impossibility of giving my son full access to my culture and the opportunity to embrace his Indian heritage. Despite my closeness with my family, and the time my son spends with his grandparents, aunts and uncles, without Hindi being spoken at home by both parents, and cultural traditions being woven into his day-to-day, he will never have the immersion in Indian culture that I had.

No matter how hard I try, his connection will be tangential, secondary to his “real life”, which is inherently defined by mainstream Australian society. Now that I can see how this will play out in his life, I feel a great sense of loss on his behalf.

So many integral parts of my childhood, and the moments that bonded my family together, were experiences of difference from our adopted home. The communities we built with other migrants, the way we would prepare special food for Eid and observe the waxing and waning of the moon for Ramadan, the in-jokes we have in Hindi, the special evenings praying together as a family – these aren’t experiences I will ever be able to share with my son in the way I enjoyed them, because they aren’t embedded in our little family like they were in mine.

There will be a chasm between his life and my life, the same way one eventually opened between me and my parents, created from the gaps in our respective cultural inheritance. At the same time, my son will always be different from the majority of white Australia too – as a mixed-race kid, he will be caught between both cultures, never completely absorbed in either.

I worry about the confusion he might feel as he gets older at the distance from the culture of his Indian ancestors, especially when he can’t understand the language his grandparents are most comfortable speaking. I can only hope that we give him the tools to understand that cultural identity is fluid and unique for every individual – and that he is every bit as Indian and as Australian as his parents are.

Zoya Patel is a freelance writer.

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