Moving for a Relationship and Lessons From My Immigrant Parents

by Adnan Khan

In August 2011 I’d just finished a year of wobbly misery in beautiful South Korea — teaching English — and by the end of it I had several thousand dollars and nothing else. I’d gone to Korea to travel and instead found myself in a swirling pool of depression, unable to connect with most of the excited ex-pats I spoke to, and unwilling to do the work to bridge the gap between myself and Koreans. This slow melt of melancholy meant that I rarely went out of my way to spend money on things, which allowed me to save more money than I knew what to do with. By the end I needed a break, so I took those thousands and went away to bum around in Southeast Asia.

I found L. smoking and drinking on a picnic table outside a bar in Pai, Thailand, after I had spent two and a half months traveling. L. was on vacation and from Melbourne, Australia. It was a proper two-week vacation for a reasonable adult, not a five-month stroll like mine. I had just gotten off a 24-hour bus and car journey from Phnom Penh to relax in Pai before heading off to Burma.

I didn’t talk to L. then — I stunk — but didn’t worry that I wouldn’t see her again, because I knew I would. I found a room, showered and fell asleep. The next morning I saw her at breakfast, but thought it might be weird to hit on her that early, so I waited again. Pai has basically one strip, with bars pockmarked on either side, where the tourists hang out. I wondered whether she would leave that day. At night I saw her at a bar and sat at the table adjacent; three years later we live in a small unit in Toronto.

Three months after meeting L. I was in Melbourne. I wrapped up a month in Burma, a month in India, and said a quick “what up” to my parents in Toronto while arranging a visa and flight. I had a thousand dollars left, an uncle who promised me a rent-free room in the St. Kilda neighborhood, and still, nothing to do.

My father made the trip to Melbourne from India also when he was 25; my uncle had settled and invited him over. My father still remembers with precision the two South Asians he saw in his three years in Melbourne — we’re everywhere, now. He went, I think, to wander, but he also had a steady foundation. He’s an accountant and had found a good job there. What was I going there for? Money figures so prominently in the typical immigrant narrative, and while I tried to never think about it much, I started feeling its weight as I got older. Why do anything if it wasn’t for money? The traditional thinking is that it took so much money to get from the East to the West that the proper way to repay that investment was by making more of it.

Later, after my brother and I were born, my family moved to Canada. My parents have spent 21 years here, but their thirst for this countrynever stops. Little escapades to middling southern Ontario towns punctuate my memory: Once, after I had started squawking about wanting to be a writer, we were in one of these little towns and my father took me out on a small lake in a blue pedal boat. He told me about his co-worker who acted in Shakespearean plays on the weekends, but Monday to Friday, he worked, made money, had a real job. All I got from this was that he was trying to tell me what to do. I still don’t want to do this, but it’s exactly what I do — it’s what almost everyone does. If I had a kid now, I would tell him this same thing: Be like Mohsin Hamid or Zia Haider Rahman. Both are novelists who have worked substantially in finance, who make a gazillion bucks and write cosmopolitan novels on the weekend or on sabbatical or late at night when the world is quiet.

My uncle in Melbourne goes on a four-month vacation to Indonesia once a year, and when he did this in 2012 his wife started charging me rent. I had slightly mismanaged my finances up to this point, buoyed by a rent-free existence, a new country and new girlfriend: I was approaching broke. My father’s career advice didn’t stick, but his financial awareness did. We never missed meals growing up but starting life in a new country isn’t easy and in my mind money stood like a sharp edge I constantly reached out to touch. I hated spending and couldn’t understand why I was doing so much of it in Australia. I discovered that my father’s financial responsibility hadn’t translated into financial planning for me, but instead, a weird cheapness that I had abandoned in my first months in Melbourne, giddied by the experience of travel.

My job hunt yielded nothing. I was asked several times over the phone, while applying for basic jobs, if I was a backpacker. The Working Holiday Visa for Canadians in Australia has an odd stipulation that you can only hold a job for six months at a time. This means that no one really wants to hire you for a job that requires more than a minimal learning curve. When the issue of my visa came up, I was often dismissed.

My behavior towards money became a burden on the relationship, and not because L. found it shameful but because she didn’t. She didn’t allow it to influence her opinion of me and offered to help out when she could; prospects that filled me with trembling dread and a profound sense of shame and failure. She would offer to pay for a concert ticket or meal, and I would pissily refuse, suggesting that I didn’t need to eat or listen to music. L. handled my buzzsaw lunacy over money well, especially considering, really, that she barely knew me. We had hung out for a week in Thailand, and it took about two months for my cracks to start appearing in Melbourne. Her perception of weakness saved us — she refused to judge my berserker attitude toward money.

As I flung towards a zero-dollar bank balance, I borrowed cash from my parents for the first time in my life. When L. tried to comfort me by telling me that lots of people do this, I sunk into a cocooned despair. What was I borrowing money for? To open up a business? To buy a condo? To fund my education? Or because I had moved to Melbourne for a selfish reason, mismanaged a small sum of money and because I couldn’t land a job as a waiter? I was sort of a typical immigrant — brown, foreign — but a very lucky kind. I was fluent, Western-educated, had no kids, wasn’t in my forties, or in the thousands of more serious situations I could be in. I was living in a gentler version of my parents’ transposition to the West and I was failing.

L. tried to offer me kindness, but I didn’t want anything to do with it. Money was a deranged focal point in my life. Like Kanye says: “Having money’s not everything/Not having it is.” There was a huge separation in the way L. and I thought about money. L. is a fourth generation Australian with left-wing parents and has a relationship to money that seems to suit that; mainly not pinning the accumulation of it to her sense of self-worth. Despite the fact that I’ve made no effort to accumulate large amounts of it, hovering above being broke depleted me. Not living up to the idea of immigrant success was creating a shrieking pain — not only did I not have money, I had no real plan to ever have it.

My parents are not caricatures from network TV. My father did not stress or lecture me when he lent me money. In his emails he tried to gently explain that I was having a needless heart attack and that everything would be okay. He reminded me that his first job after we arrived in Canada was at a grocery store. He had a decade of experience as an accountant and he was shelving produce. My father took me out in the blue pedal boat to explain something that I had missed: Money wasn’t the issue, security was. He came from an India with no guarantees and no safety net — a country with no free healthcare or welfare. Money had wrangled its way into his heart because it was the only way he knew to provide security. Growing up in North America, I missed the lesson.

I accepted L.’s help and benefited from her connections, friends, peers, and colleagues. I knew the exaggerated kind of connection: an American friend of mine had been rejected from all the law schools she’d applied to, but at the end it didn’t seem to matter — her father, apparently a prominent lawyer, called a Dean at a university and greased a path for her. A friend of L.’s did something similar enough for me and put in a good word at a well paying office job, temporary work, and I got it. She did it again a year later. Another of L.’s co-workers knew someone at the Melbourne Vice office, put me in touch and I suddenly kickstarted a writing career. I was proudest of the job I got on my own, a ludicrous gig paying $22 an hour to stand around an art gallery and watch people play video games and occasionally explain Sonic the Hedgehog to a senior citizen.

At a party near the end of my stay in Melbourne an American girl tried to guess my job — I was freelancing at the time and working at a restaurant — and she said with a broad drunken smile, “I.T!” I produced that fake laugh I do when someone is too drunk to have the shades of racism explained to them, but part of me wished it was true. “Get a good job” is the hollow cry of the TV conservative immigrant family and I was starting to understand its appeal.

Everything for me is routed through the image of my parent’s recreation. Forty years old and moving themselves with two kids from Asia to the West to start over — the audacity of this boggles my mind even now: their degrees, not exactly flushed down the toilet, but soaked in it, and held up with contempt. My mother, a teacher, never taught again; my father waited two years until he got a job as an accountant. How can I live a life that makes this worth it? How much money would it take until I’ve paid them back?

Money was like a shroud of darkness in me that finally uncloaked itself in Melbourne. Trying to reconcile the burden I feel and the fresh start I desire created a schism of confusion that doesn’t seem like it’s going to come together. I’ve tied myself up to a myth of immigration that my parents never subscribed to and wonder how badly I misunderstood the nuances of that conversation out on the boat. The gleaming privilege of being a young fob meant that I was protected from the edge of my parent’s experience; I needed to recreate it in Australia to understand. Pulling the strands together — of my parents experience, of mine — was a responsibility towards money that I needed to undertake.

The second or third night I hung out with L. she bought us a large bottle of Chang beer. “My shout,” she said, a “shout” being slang for round. I told her that she didn’t need to do that.

“It’s okay.” She had a little smile on. “I’m only here for one more week. I don’t have to fret about money as much.” She poured us a glass, I tipped it back, and tried not to worry either.

Adnan Khan is a writer in Toronto. He has written for Vice, The Globe and Mail, Hazlitt and others.

Photo: James Antrobus

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