My Immigration Story
If I had to describe myself, I would say that I am an American with Yugoslavian values. I was born in the United States, English is my first language, and I have been educated principally to be a contributing member of American society. My parents, however, have some ways of thinking that are not entirely consonant with those of the “average” American—an entity that I do not quite understand, though, I imagine, deviates significantly from real Americans. This stems partly from their upbringing in their countries of origin, as well as the life they have lived in America since then. As an outsider (at least that’s what I consider myself to some extent) looking in on the workings of both pervasive American society and persisting (though fledgling) Yugoslavian culture, I seem to have been presented two different sets of paradigms, which at times seem to be incommensurable. Sometimes, I wonder why I keep up this Yugoslavian front, considering how little I actually know about my culture. I think about whether it is best for me to try assimilating into American culture; after all, this is the country that I was born and raised in. These thoughts never amount to much—I am happy to say. My identity is firmly grounded in my culture, and it does not make sense to remove a building’s foundation. Furthermore, having two different paradigms is not a weakness, it just means that my foundation is doubly strong.
When I say that I inherit these “Yugoslavian” ideals from my parents, I realize that I am using outdated terminology since there hasn’t been a Yugoslavia for over two decades. In my case, however, “Yugoslavian” is an umbrella term that covers both my mother and father’s shared heritage, despite living in different countries. My mother is from Montenegro and my father is from Kosovo. Both of my parents grew up in farming villages, and from an early age, realized the importance of hard work and sacrifice for the family’s wellbeing. After marrying, they moved to America because of the opportunities it provided to get ahead in life—in Yugoslavia, you could be successful in your work, but you more or less lived and died in your class. The road to success was not easy, especially since they were the “pioneers” of their villages, among the first to relocate to America. Without their village there as support, it was important for them to stick together. One of the things that I took away from my parents is the importance of the family unit, and how resistant it is to being broken apart. For instance, asking my mother to move into the dorms at City College was met with such controversy that I am glad was over. I often liken this aspect of my parent’s with the communist governments that my parents grew up under, and how people were more seen as individual parts of a whole than as whole individuals. Of course, I do not hold this against them since it was necessary for the whole family to be close in order for all of us to succeed. In a way, we compensated for each other’s failings, thus making us stronger. When I leave home, which I dub “the Motherland,” and enter American society, I adopt a completely different, and individualistic mindset: no longer am I the loving son and brother to my family when I go to school or work, but rather I am Taulant Kastrati proper, the individual, and this latter aspect has been shaped by my experiences growing up.
I was born and raised in Flushing, New York, a neighborhood now comprising mostly Asian-Americans, but more diverse during my childhood. Since I did not have many relatives or people of my nationality for me to spend time with, I learned a kind of openness to other cultures and acceptance of different people, who were very unlike me. I think this helped keep me from assuming a white-is-right approach to thinking about people, but when I was in old enough to go to school, I would begin to realize that the children who I would play with, my fellow classmates, were different from me. They were different, however, not only because they ate different foods or wore different clothes or spoken different languages, but because of their likes and dislikes, and in fact their whole personalities. I realized that I myself was a minority in this school, and I was a separate individual from them, not like how I was a recognizable member of my own family. This line of thought continued after moving to Brighton Beach at the age of 7, where I continued my education at a school with a large Russian-American population, though there were many African-Americans, Hispanics, and South-east Asians, too. In addition to seeing myself differently than others, I saw even civic matters differently from the narrow, white-male-centric way that I saw it. Whenever I saw some such event on the news where they were discussing how some economic plan or other that would help the lower class, I would think about children in my class, and who that may also affect—I began to see the news as personally affecting the lives of people, and real people at that, not some Hegelian ghost of collective consciousness. Perhaps my perceptions could also partly be attributed to the fact that my parents have practically given me free reign over my beliefs, never imposing upon my stringent religious or political upon me, and thus, I was able to think about things as I saw them and not how other people made me see them. It is interesting to me now I haven’t seen many white, settled-over-the-years Americans that you’d typically see on television until I came to City College. Even among my own kind, Yugoslavians, I haven’t had too much exposure. Although I’d go to weddings where it would be all Yugoslavians, and I’d occasionally see cousins, I don’t think I could actually associate myself with the population at large, and be the patriot that so many of these Yugoslavian-Americans seem to proud to be. That in and of itself, isn’t bad. Although I cannot claim strong cultural ties that many of compatriots seem to have, my family and me are testaments to how hard work and sacrifice launches the first generation of immigrants into the world of American culture, and strong familial ties keeps basic cultural instincts within the home.
