Immigrating back home
I’m a wordsmith, and I often encounter situations where I want to use a word that looks great in my mind, but once it appears on my screen, my original understanding of its meaning collides with the reality of what I’m writing.
Maybe I’m overdramatizing this a bit. Basically, I thought I knew what a word meant, but once I started using it, the meaning evolved, or rather, didn’t fit the context of the text.
Ever since leaving Russia, I’ve had a similar relationship with the word “to immigrate.” The day in grade school when we learned the difference between “immigrate” and “emigrate” is one of those random memories stuck in my head. My subconscious filed it away and it’s come in handy. I’ve found it hard to label myself as an “immigrant,” because I also associated the word with a voluntary move to another place. Of course, that hasn’t been completely our case over the past two years.
Officially, I was a “tourist” in Armenia and here in Sakartvelo until March, when I received temporary residency. However, I don’t consider myself an immigrant to this country. I don’t have any intention of permanently settling here, despite what the ficus plant in my living room says or the desk in our home office. I’ve accepted that this will be our home for an unspecified amount of time and isn’t so temporary that we can’t establish any roots, but I avoid the word “permanent.”
Where “immigrate” has appeared in my vocabulary is in my wife’s application to receive an immigrant visa and green card, though the US government prefers to use the word “alien.”
She embodies the meaning of the word “to immigrate” that I’ve always held in my head: someone who intends to move to another country to live. However, during the long process of applying and waiting (lots of waiting), I’ve spent time researching places to live and jobs, and have had to learn (or relearn) the realities of living in the US. It’s made me realize that I’ll be moving to a new place. Familiar, yes, but still new.
So, I decided to look at the definition of “to immigrate” in a few dictionaries. Here’s what I found:
to come to a place or country of which one is not a native in order to settle there
(of an animal or plant) to migrate to a new geographical area
to come to live in a different country:
to come to live permanently in a country that is not your own:
to enter and usually become established
especially : to come into a country of which one is not a native for permanent residence
to come to a country of which one is not a native, usually for permanent residence.
to pass or come into a new habitat or place, as an organism.
As you can see, the idea of moving to a country where you aren’t a citizen is a common theme in many of these definitions. That’s not the case for me; I’m a US citizen. I like the definitions from Collin’s and Dictionary.com that refer to organisms moving to a new habitat or geographical area. Now that I can identify with:
Immigrating is more than just moving to a country where you aren’t a citizen and establishing yourself there in a permanent way; something I did when I moved to Russia. It goes beyond documents. It’s a state of mind.
I moved away from the US in 2013 and with each year away, my point of reference for “life things” changed from what I knew “back home.” I spent my twenties in Russia, during which time I learned about looking for apartments, renting, and finding jobs. Now that experience has been augmented by living in Armenia and Georgia. I’ll need to adjust to a new reality.
I often recall an interesting remark by a former British colleague of mine. I once asked him something about life in the UK and he responded that his knowledge of life there is based on when he left 30 years ago. Thanks to the internet, I’m not completely cut off from the goings on of home, but the physical distance helps me understand what my colleague was referring to.
My feeling of living “in-between” Russia and the US, which I’ve written about before, confirms this sense of immigrating back to the US. It’s been two years since I left Russia, and that feeling hasn’t disappeared. It’s evolved, of course, with new memories of our life in Georgia taking precedence in my mind over those of life in St. Petersburg. In an ironic turn of events, many Russian speakers have moved to the US in recent years and I’ve used their blogs and videos as points of reference to “learn” about life in the US.
I’ll admit that this has elicited mixed emotions in me. It’s helpful because these new immigrants talk about the US in terms familiar to someone who’s lived in Russia or former Soviet countries. On the other hand, it’s weird, for lack of a better word. Here I am, an American, learning about the US from a Russian. But isn’t that how we learn best sometimes? Seeing things from a different, albeit familiar, perspective, has helped me to appreciate the US better and understand what I will inevitably find difficult to adapt to once we move.
So, I’m immigrating back home, though my journey is much less challenging than that of my wife, who must wait for documentation. I have my papers, but my challenge lies in returning home to a place that has changed a lot compared to my memories and expectations.
