Sometimes it’s hard to imagine what it would be like to live a hundred years ago or maybe even fifty years. We listen to our grandparents talk about how different the world was when they were young, and a lot of times we laugh at the seemingly ridiculous things that they did. Most people don’t write letters anymore and most of us probably don’t talk on the phone much now, but the point is, we have the option to. I could reach my relatives in Hong Kong with a click of a button, and have packages delivered to them in a matter of days. So for me, a person who live in the time of Skype, Facebook, and air shipping, it was pretty hard to believe that transnationalism existed back then.
As impossible as it sounds, immigrants did try to maintain connections with their home countries. It is hard to just leave everything behind and not look back, even now. It used to take weeks to travel to other countries and it wasn’t as simple as hopping on a plane and landing in a few hours. Knowing that it would be a long time before you got to see your home once again, it makes people want to hold on to what they could. Sending money or gifts back to their families was their connection to their home and the people who were left behind. My mother does the same thing, she speaks to my grandmother and aunts almost weekly, and many, many people do the it also. Moving to a country doesn’t necessarily mean adopting the ways and culture of the new place. As Foner mentions in this chapter, transnationalism is more accepted now, but I find it curious how anyone could see missing home as a bad thing. I understand assimilating into a culture, and I think it’s a wonderful thing to be able to feel at home at a new country that you’ll be living in, but I was taught to never forget where I’m from.
In honor of this chapter being about transnationalism, here’s a little Chinese lesson. There’s a saying in Chinese, 飲水思源. It literally means when you drink water, think of its source. Meaning, never forget where you’re from. It’s something that my family says to me a lot, because it’s important to look forward but also to not forget.
