A UU Sermon about the Immigrant Experience

Every Thanksgiving, I remember my first one, back in 1984, when I ate my first turkey and watched my first Thanksgiving Parade--on TV, of course.  This year, Marilyn and I drove up to Chicago for the long weekend.  After watching the parade on TV as we sipped our coffee, we went down to State Street to watch the end of the parade just half a block from our hotel.

Last month, I was asked to participate in the service at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Urbana-Champaign, where Marilyn and I are members.  The service was going to be about the immigrant experience, and I was asked to speak about mine.  

This is the mini sermon I gave that day.   Below the text of the sermon is a link to the podcast of the entire service.

The Immigrant Experience – Sermon for October 18, 2015

When I was working on my PhD at Penn State in the nineties, I had a quote by Virginia Woolf pinned to the wall of my cubicle:  “As a woman, I have no country.   As a woman I want no country.  As a woman my country is the whole world.”  Last year, at the Made Fest that is part of the Pygmalion Festival in downtown Champaign, I found a world map—a print of a watercolor—that had these words painted above: “I have left my heart in so many places.”  That print now sits in my study.  These two quotes point to central aspects of my particular immigrant experience: feeling that I didn’t quite belong—for a very long time—and at the same time, making a home wherever I went.  I have a strong sense that parts of me will always be rooted elsewhere, that I began becoming who I am elsewhere—and because of that, I understand the outsider, the person who is new, the person who might not know the rules already.

For you to understand all this, it might help to know me as I introduce myself on my blog—which is titled, not surprisingly, Transplanted on the Prairie, (you are welcome to visit it; I post about once a month): “I am a reader, a writer, a teacher, and an artist. I was born in India, spent my adolescence in Kuwait [when my father took a job there], was educated in the eastern United States, and am at home in the Midwest. I came out as a lesbian soon after I graduated from college and now live with my life partner, Marilyn; we have been together since 1999, [we had a commitment ceremony in this church in 2006], and were able to marry legally in 2014.”  That’s me in a nutshell. 

One task facing a transplant like me is learning the rules, the conventions that others have grown up with and have known all their lives.  Though I was fluent in English—it has been my first language since soon after I began school at three and a half—and I was familiar with some American TV shows and had a few American friends in Kuwait, I had lived in India and then attended Indian schools (albeit English-medium Indian schools) in Kuwait.  I had traveled to Europe as a teenager but never to the United States.  So I had a lot to learn when I arrived at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1984. 

            

“Why are you all dressed up?” my new friends asked when I arrived at the cafeteria in a black skirt, one I wore to go shopping back home. 

“I’m not dressed up.” 

“But you are in a skirt!”  I thought back to our orientation-week picnic and realized I had probably been the only one there in a skirt; I felt a little embarrassed.  But I didn’t own shorts, and my new jeans were too hot for August. 

I was fortunate: our college, a women’s college, assigned each freshman a junior Big Sister.  My Big Sis, Donna, had family close by, and both her mom and her eldest sister were alumnae of the college.  Together, that fall, they taught me about Halloween traditions, about Thanksgiving turkeys and parades—I spent that break at Donna's parents’ house—and even about Black Friday.  They taught me to layer to stay warm in the winter, helped me to buy comfortable walking shoes, and invited me to decorate their Christmas tree with them.  Those cultural guides and the human connection they provided eased my entry into this new culture, where the food was strangely bland and where young women were not physically affectionate with each other (the homophobia in the eighties was pronounced though not always spoken).  Without Donna’s family, I might have been much more lonely and definitely disoriented. 

I assimilated into my nearly lily-white college, where there were only six international students my first year (it now has students of many races and the college president is an African American woman). I made a home there which I love deeply and to which I still return.  That place holds my heart—and the people there, my other mentors, now beloved friends, influenced my deep connection.  But I knew all along that those friends did not know, could not know the complexities of the cultures I had inhabited and which had shaped me.  They could not know the delight of soaking in the first monsoon rain after an Indian summer or the taste of a perfect filafil sandwich from a roadside stand in Kuwait.  They did not know the privilege of being a light-skinned, middle-class, Hindu girl in India nor the disdain with which Indians were often looked upon in Kuwait. 

And that’s part of the immigrant experience.  You agree to be a partially-understood minority in order to make a new home which brings other opportunities and riches.

I first came to this church on the Sunday after September 11, 2001.   Coming here that morning is one of the best decisions I ever made.  Here, as the congregants—some of you—went up to light candles one after the other and spoke at this podium, I felt comforted.  I had received my green card just a few months before—I finally had permanence—but suddenly, the world had gone mad and South Asian immigrants were among those being targeted after the attacks of that Tuesday morning.  Marilyn’s brothers had called from Springfield, checking to see if I was okay.  At first, naively, I didn’t understand why they would even ask.  What did I have to do with the attacks?  But soon it became clear they had reason to be concerned.  In Connecticut, someone yelled at my brother outside his neighborhood Dunkin Donuts, telling him to return to his own country; my brother was months from becoming a U. S. citizen.  Marilyn asked, reluctantly, that I not wear my salwaar kameezes for a while.  In Western clothes, I am not immediately recognized as South Asian; she thought I’d be safer.  Here at the UU though, the people who spoke seemed to find the backlash disturbing, and they seemed to understand that “other lands have sunlight, too, and clover, and skies are everywhere as blue as mine."  (I always cry when I sing those lines).  Though the whole world feels like my country, I needed a home, and I found this church home, where I could rest my heart and stay a while.  

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The podcast of the Oct. 18 service at the UU can be found here.

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I post this with gratitude for the life of Rev. Dr. John R. Tisdale,  Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Cedar Crest College, dear friend, witty conversationalist, beloved husband, father, and grandfather.  Dec. 10, 1932-Nov. 28, 2015.

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The parade as it neared the television cameras--a reminder that all is not as it appears on television.
(This was close to our hotel, so it's no wonder we could hear the music even up on the seventeenth floor, though we could see only a tiny sliver of it go by--if we craned our necks and rested our heads on the window pane so that we could see the street below.)

Walking on a street parallel to the parade route, we saw this float being deflated--an inadequate metaphor, but a metaphor nonetheless, for the realities of life in Chicago for so many black citizens, the realities not published in the tourist brochures: shootings by police, delayed investigations, justice deferred.

After the parade, we took a long walk in the rain.  I have crossed the Michigan Avenue bridge over the Chicago River many times.  The downtown of this Midwestern city feels like a home away from home.  

On Friday, Marilyn and I spent the afternoon at the Art Institute of Chicago.  On each visit, I like to visit the third floor of the Modern Wing, where I spend time with the Kandinskys.  You can see us in the reflection as we look out on Millenium Park.