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As a child of immigrants, I felt lost for my son because he could not assimilate into the Fijian-Indian Muslim culture

Broadcast United News Desk
As a child of immigrants, I felt lost for my son because he could not assimilate into the Fijian-Indian Muslim culture

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No matter how hard I tried, his connections were inconsequential, secondary to his “real life” which was essentially defined by mainstream Australian society. Now that I could see how this would affect his life, I felt a huge sense of loss for him.

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Many of the defining moments of my childhood, the moments that brought my family together, were very different from our adopted home. The community we built with other immigrants, the way we prepared special foods for Eid and observed the waxing and waning of the Ramadan moon, the jokes we told in Hindi, and the special nights when we prayed together as a family—these were not experiences I could share with my son as much as I enjoyed them because they were not as deeply rooted in our small family as they were in my own home.

There will be a chasm between his life and mine, just as there eventually was between me and my parents, caused by the difference in our respective cultural heritages, and my son will always be different from the majority of white people in Australia – as a mixed-race child, he will be caught between two cultures, never fully assimilated into either.

I worry that he may grow up confused, being so removed from the culture of his Indian ancestors, especially when he can’t understand the language his grandparents speak most. I can only hope that we can give him the tools to understand that cultural identity is fluid and unique to each person – that he is as Indian and Australian as his parents.

Zoya Patel is a freelance writer.

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