Are People Who Move Abroad Happier Than Those Who Don't?
The mirage of having more money dwarfs any other hardship in the eyes of the ones who never left.
The mirage of migrating
It was the early days of the internet when I had to go to the campus web lab to get online access. And there, a bunch of students were queueing to use it as well. Once settled in front of the computer, I pulled out a map of the USA and picked a few States where I’d research universities to apply to. Glossing over the country’s geography, the Appalachian mountain range, the Atlantic Ocean nearby, it seemed I was entering a fantasy land. I’d never dared to even dream of going to the US until then.
My then-boyfriend’s plan was to study somewhere in the northeastern US. He was also shooting for the stars, just like me, hoping to step on American soil one day. We started splitting the States as kids split candy from a bag: evenly and fairly. One for him, one for me. I “took” West Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina. I also grabbed Tennessee from the bag of candies. That one was the closest to Georgia, where Gone with the Wind took place, which I’d read twice by then. These were the criteria we employed at the time. He took the States further up northeast. We had this grand plan of both going to study in neighboring States, to make our reunions possible.
Equipped with my list of States, I had to pick five universities where I would apply for a master’s degree. The application fee was $200 for each, and I got an allowance of $1,000 from my parents to spend on them. It felt more like playing a video game, entering an improbable reality and using the available coins to reach the portal door at the end. I was in my senior year in college in Romania, and this fantasy-land game was more appealing than the real life awaiting me after graduation. I’d get lost for hours watching the photos of university campuses, worlds apart compared to how the campuses in Romania looked like. I imagined walking on those perfectly paved alleys, under secular maple trees, passing by red brick buildings adorned with important people’s names.
I let myself dream because somewhere in the back of my mind I knew perfectly well that reality would hit me soon enough and I’d need to start looking for a job in my native country.
Reasons for emigrating
We don’t all leave our home country for the same reasons. Some escape wars or religious persecution, as refugees, and are grateful to be anywhere but back there. Others move to a different country for cultural exchange. And ‘exchange’ sounds like a trade between equals. Between escaping a war and the cultural exchange, there is an entire spectrum of reasons people migrate, and have been, for thousands of years.
Just like some accents are more desirable than others, some countries are more desirable than others to live in.
There are external factors that determine where people would rather emigrate, such as spending power and quality of services.
And then there are the internal factors, harder to evaluate. How much a person resonates with the host culture. Social customs. Ways of building community, loneliness levels while being far from the family of origin…
Most people — both the ones who leave, and the ones who contemplate emigrating but never do it — give more importance to the external factors.
I got into three of the five universities where I applied.
When acceptance letters started coming in, I was confused at first. Did this actually work or was it a scam? All you had to do was prepare a folder with documents, essays, test results and transcripts, attach a proof of payment for $200, and then you got the entry pass to go touch the stars?!
My then-boyfriend didn’t get in and the tables turned. The reason I had applied to go to school in the US was to be close to him, across the Atlantic ocean. But in the new light of events, the opportunity was too big for me to pass on. Leaving for the US felt like a golden ticket to escape to a better life, very far on the spectrum from an egalitarian “cultural exchange”.
The external factors weighed heavily on the decision to go, mostly for my family. Everyone around me treated me like the lucky one who drew the winning lottery ticket to get out.
The economic superiority of the US compared to Romania was incontestable. After all, I had been given an entry pass to the world’s first economy. Putting the external factors aside and looking at the internal factors would have seemed insane at the time, proof that I wasn’t in my right mind, or at least a terribly ungrateful 23-year-old.
But the internal factors shape our experience abroad maybe more than the country’s higher GDP. Adapting to a vastly different culture, loneliness, breaking off all my social ties and having to weave a brand new social network from the ground up, learning to interact with people from not one new culture, but various others... these are the real challenges of migration.
But I was 23 and excited to travel far away, so I left for the US in August 2005 holding a one-way plane ticket.
The skewed perception of the ones left behind
People who are left behind, in their country of origin, see the immigrant’s life as a utopia.
Especially if one emigrates from a poorer country to a wealthier one. The opportunities overshadow any potential hardships, which people who never emigrated just cannot grasp.
Having no social threads older than a few weeks or months. The different cultural norms and office politics. Learning the acceptable customs and especially what is unacceptable. All that is oversimplified. Loneliness is downplayed. All hardships are trivialized by the non-immigrants, in favor of economic opportunity. The mirage of having more money dwarfs any other hardship in the eyes of the ones who never left.
But affording top-expert eye surgery or a high-end wool coat doesn’t compensate for feeling an outsider or battling loneliness.
Taking a 30-minute train ride to see the Eiffel tower in Paris, or strolling through Central Park in Manhattan, on any given Sunday, is a luxury in the eyes of the non-immigrant, which bans you from complaining about any inner struggle.
Expectations from the non-leavers
Together with a skewed perception and focus on the external advantages, some non-leavers also display a bunch of expectations from the leaver.
For one, the immigrant is responsible for going back to visit and for bringing gifts.
As an immigrant, you don’t really have a choice in the matter. If you don’t comply with it, it’s as if you have forgotten where you started off from. And that would be an insult big enough to get you feeling excluded from the family.
The paradox of the migrant: feeling homeless and homesick at the same time.
In a subtle way, you become responsible for their well-being even when the people in the home country don’t need any economic help objectively. The baby chicks wait in the nest with their beaks open, all looking in the same direction, expecting mama bird to bring back the worms to keep them alive. It’s all out of principle. You’ve seen the Eiffel tower, you’ve walked the streets of Manhattan on any given Sunday, so you owe them something. Of course, the anticipation is not expressed, but you feel it like a hot iron on your skin.
The next biggest expectation is that you lose the right to complain. Reminiscing about our tribal times when a leaver was either endangered or pitied, you’re seen partly as a traitor and partly as the lucky bastard who got out. If you complain or have a hard time, you are ungrateful, you are not trying enough. God forbid you say you’re unhappy. Inevitably, a schism forms between the two groups. It becomes a challenge for the leaver to resonate with the ones who stayed behind. And that schism also impacts the migrant’s experience when abroad.
No country is milk-and-honey only, but many of them look like that from afar, from the slums of the world.
So many great quotes in here Monica, here are two that really hit home:
"Having no social threads older than a few weeks or months. The different cultural norms and office politics. Learning the acceptable customs and especially what is unacceptable. All that is oversimplified. Loneliness is downplayed. All hardships are trivialized by the non-immigrants, in favor of economic opportunity. The mirage of having more money dwarfs any other hardship in the eyes of the ones who never left."
"The next biggest expectation is that you lose the right to complain. Reminiscing about our tribal times when a leaver was either endangered or pitied, you’re seen partly as a traitor and partly as the lucky bastard who got out."
Great post!
This is a fascinating story about your experience emigrating to the US! It's interesting how you compare the initial "dream" of moving to a new country with the reality of the challenges you faced. I can see how exciting it must have been to get accepted to all those universities, but also how tough it must have been to leave everything behind. It's a great point about how people who haven't emigrated often don't understand the internal struggles of adapting to a new culture.