Coming to America — Recreating Home in a New Country
Preserving Food Habits and Traditions, and Raising Children Far Away From Home
This is the second in a three-part series on immigration and diversity in Fairfax County in northern Virginia. The first in the series, Coming to America — The First Days is here.
Update: The third and final in the series, Coming to America — Becoming an American is here.
The effort to recreate a sense of home through food begins in earnest even before immigrants leave home. When they first move to America, they come armed not only with clothes, but also mom’s hastily written recipes and suitcases filled with spices and kitchen utensils thought not to be available here. Before the advent of the Internet, e-mail or Skype and before cell phones and low international calling rates, there was Air Mail in which recipes occupied much of the real estate.
Until a few years ago, once the spices brought from home ran out it was near-impossible to replenish them unless they were brought or sent again by family or friends. Many of the vegetables and other ingredients such as lentils and noodles used in ethnic cuisines were unavailable at the local Giant (which used to have a modest variety of items from various countries under a single ‘International Foods’ heading). Ethnic grocery stores were few and far between.
“Probably, next to family, this [missing the foods of home] was the biggest lament people had about leaving home,” says Dr. Susan Matt, Department of History Chair at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, who has studied immigrants to America from the 17th century to the present and has written Homesickness: An American History (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Immigrants have had to learn quickly to ferret out the closest alternatives among the available ingredients and make do. Big, fat jalapenos were adequate replacements for the small, thin Indian chilies, for example. In our household, until just a few years ago, tortillas stood in for the Indian rotis.
For Mona Al Batouti and her family, reproducing the flavors of home also meant doing some extra research to source stores that followed the halal method of treating meat. There have been times when she would drive all the way from Maryland to a store in Springfield to stock up on meat. The cabbages here were smaller and sweeter than in Egypt, the chicken was bigger and tasted different and she found fewer varieties of fish. Over the years, she learned to work around the differences and, with the help of her sister-in-law, found an organic farm in Virginia that also prepared meat the halal way. It is more expensive to purchase meat this way, she says, but they just do with smaller amounts of it.
With a burgeoning market for ethnic food items, these days, not only do big grocery stores devote ample shelf space to specific cuisines (Indian, Italian, Spanish, Thai, Chinese, Latino) and nearly every neighborhood in Fairfax County houses ethnic grocery stores, but the Internet fills any gaps admirably for those still obscure and hard-to-find items.
The explosion of ethnic restaurants is another function of immigrants missing the flavors of home. “The first Italian and Greek restaurants, Jewish delis, German bakeries, and taquerias were opened by immigrants and catered almost exclusively to other immigrants,” says Dr. Matt.
In spite of foods native to their countries of origin now being widely available, it is only natural that immigrants’ food habits diversify once they have lived here for a while. Firstly, even if they found the foods of home in America, it tastes different to the immigrants because for the most part, they are eating it, as Dr. Matt says, “in a new and different context, away from the people who gave it meaning, who made it seem familiar.” Moreover, the urge to try new things, the culture of eating out (according to some estimates, Americans eat out about 4 to 5 times a week), and the need to fit in, especially among the younger immigrants, cause not only changes in immigrants’ diets as compared to what they ate before they migrated, it also contributes to a deterioration in food habits.
Quoting from a study reported in the June 2011 issue of Psychological Science, the Association for Psychological Science, based in Washington, D.C., says “the wide availability of cheap, convenient, fatty American foods and large meal portions have been blamed for immigrants packing on pounds, approaching U.S. levels of obesity within 15 years of their move. …[M]embers of U.S. immigrant groups choose typical American dishes as a way to show that they belong and to prove their American-ness.”
The tussle between first and second generation immigrants over food choices plays out in lunch boxes and in school cafeterias across the county. The desire to fit in manifests itself in immigrant children as young as five who hesitate to take home-made lunches that are ‘weird’, preferring to buy at school instead and eat foods similar to what their friends are eating.
Monitoring children’s food habits and teaching them to be aware of the merits and demerits of what they are eating requires vigilance from all parents, not just immigrants. But in the case of immigrants, safeguarding their food habits is also about preserving a connection to their culture.
To this end, the ‘International Nights’ that are part of the calendar in some Fairfax County schools go a long way in bringing ethnic foods into the mainstream in the eyes of immigrant children, and have the happy consequence of exposing all children to a wider variety of cuisines.
Food, however, is not the only tug of war immigrant parents engage in with children. Bringing them up in a culture different from the one they grew up in adds a vexing dimension — what language should they teach their children?
Most first generation immigrant parents insist that the children learn to speak their native language even though a majority of the parents are conversant in English.
This not only goes a long way in preserving their heritage for the next generation, but there is enough evidence touting the benefits of growing up bilingual. According to a Belgian study quoted in the Scientific American, not only are bilingual children better decoders of the languages they already speak, but, according to a study conducted at Northwestern University, they are also adept at learning more languages if they choose to.
For immigrant families that are not conversant in English (a third of all Fairfax County homes speak a language other than English at home), there is not much of a choice. If such families move into the county with school-aged children, it is not uncommon to find parents and children learning English simultaneously. When the children become more fluent speakers of English than parents, it creates a subtle shift in the dynamics between them, the children necessarily becoming the link between the parents and telephone calls, schools or any other entity with which parents must interact. So it is not surprising to find parents making use of English language classes at the Fairfax County Public Libraries, at churches, and in adult ESOL classes in the Fairfax County Public Schools so as not to be left behind.
According to Mary Shaw, Media Specialist in Fairfax County Public Schools’ Department of Communications and Community Outreach, more than 30,000 K-12 students received ESOL services in the 2011-12 school year. The public school system also provides numerous programs to support immigrant parents, including parent liaisons, parent information nights, cable shows in the top five languages spoken by students’ families in the county, parent outreach programs and a translatable website.
Immigrant parents unfailingly mention how important it is for them to raise their children with a healthy respect for their culture. This might mean different things to different parents. For Mona Al Batouti, who originally moved here from Egypt, it means teaching her children never to say “Hey!” as a response when they don’t like what’s being asked of them; for Madhu Maheshwari, a mother of two grown children and grand-mother to one, it meant teaching her children the music, dance and stories that she herself grew up with.
“My childhood was enriched by my grandmother’s storytelling,” says Maheshwari. “The sounds and the literature, it comes with us. Whatever you have gained … you want to pass it on to the next generation.” Maheshwari’s passion is Hindi, a language widely spoken in the northern parts of India. She shares this passion by teaching the language at the India International School in Chantilly. When her own children were young and they traveled to India, her children felt a closeness to their India-based family that would not have been possible had they only spoken English.
When she first moved here in the mid-seventies, Maheshwari turned her attention to making a home and raising her children. When her children grew a little older, she went about building a network of like-minded Indian immigrants who gathered groups of children and taught them whatever dances, songs, poetry and plays they knew, and organized annual cultural programs, a tradition that still continues.
Many immigrants struggle with cultural nuances that perhaps did not exist in their country of origin. Sleepovers, for example. That concept is alien to immigrants that come from socially conservative societies such as some Latin American and Asian countries. Parents wrestle with the decision to let children sleep away for the night, especially when there has been little occasion to establish a relationship with the families of their children’s friends.
Immigrant parents know that there are enough of these cultural pot holes to negotiate and they anticipate having to do a lot of explaining as they children grow older. Al Batouti expects her children to ask why they are not allowed to do certain things (such as putting on nail polish) while their friends are. The nail polish question is easy — the chemicals are harmful on young hands, her husband says. But later, as the children grow up, the issues will become more intricate as they span religion, culture, choice of entertainment, and family values. She is educating herself as best she can so she is able to guide her children, Al Batouti says. Ihsan Zekkri, a mother of two originally from Morocco, echoes Al Batouti’s stance and says she will raise her children to understand that each family has its values and that they do things a certain way in accordance with those values.
Raising children in a community with traditions and customs different from the ones in which the parents grew up has the effect of prompting immigrants not only to work hard to preserve their connections to their heritage but also forge new connections to the communities in which they have made a home. Volunteering in schools, becoming involved in running the activities that their children participate in, and getting to know their neighborhoods and their children’s friends better are all par for the course. This, more than anything, goes a long way in fostering integration between native-borns and immigrants.
