Coming Home to a Place You Never Lived

The Journey of an Immigrant’s Daughter

It’s hard to pinpoint one thing that caused tears to push at the brims of my eyelids on the bus from London to Cardiff. It was many things. It was the wetness of the air, the sprinkle of yellow flowers in the grass, the shape of the road signs, the familiar rhythm and song of the voices on the bus, the aroma of the sandwiches being opened around me. It felt and looked and sounded and smelled like coming home. But rising up behind the tears was a tricky knot of guilt. Did I have a right to feel like I was coming home? What did I have a right to feel?

When do you become aware of the culture in your home?

Mine arrived in blue enveloped letters addressed to Florida, stamped with the Queen. It wrapped itself as advent calendars at Christmas and Cadbury bars on birthdays. It filtered through the television screen into my living room, embodying itself in Jeremy Brett and John Cleese, and laid itself on my kitchen table as Lexicon cards.

It demystified itself on my first trip to Wales at age 8, and it silently shaped dynamics in my household in ways I wouldn’t understand until my second trip at age 20. It sprouted a way of interacting with the world and with each other that was rooted in indirectness, in deference to others, in not wasting anything, in using humour to keep calm and carry on. It also cost me countless points in English classes for spelling words like ‘humour’ and ‘organisation’ “wrong”.

In college, when my pants became loose from too much rice and not enough protein, my dad offered me a belt — woven thread in the middle with leather just for the notched bit at the end.

“Dad, why do you have a child’s belt?” I accused, as I forced the belt into the last notch and gaped in dismay that it still cut gently into my hips.

My dad gave a short chuckle — “It’s not a child’s belt, it’s the belt I wore over when I came here!”

I glared up at him, hands still on the buckle to make sure it wouldn’t break free.

“This. Is a grown man’s belt?” The treachery had deepened. I unthreaded the belt and held it up, squinting to see if there were some sleight of hand I was missing that would elongate the belt another six inches. I closed the loop and eyed the opening. “This is how big you were in your twenties?”

My dad was sporting the pink cheeks, twinkling eyes, and pressed lips that appear when he’s finding amusement at my expense.

“I was very skinny. We didn’t eat a lot, you know, not like you Americans.”

I narrowed my eyes. I knew my dad sometimes got a kick out of my ignorance of his immigration story, out of playing on the gaps in my understanding of what Wales was really like. It lent that sparkle to his eyes to paint dramatic stories of hardship.

“I used to walk uphill in the snow to school, both ways.”

“When it was cold we would huddle around one thermos, everyone in the living room, and take turns putting our hands on it.” (That did happen, it turned out, but only once.)

The line was fine, however, between these embellished stories and the true stories.

“You fight over licking the brownie bowl, but we used to fight over who got to eat the stump of the cauliflower.”

“My dad used to turn off his watch every night and re-wind it every morning, to save the battery.”

I was trying to decide if this was a playing-the-gaps moment or if he was truly this skinny when he emigrated to America.

“Here,” he said, and after shuffling through an old shoe-box for a few moments, he procured a picture in seventies sepia-tone of himself in a canoe, beaming from underneath a huge ball of hair, shirtless and skinny as a rake.

“Geez, Dad.”

“Believe it or not, playing the violin didn’t bring in mountains of money.”

Staring at that picture, I imagined for the first time what it would have been like for my dad to cross the ocean at 22 and never return home.

I don’t think he planned to stay. The Florida Orchestra had brought him on a temporary special visa, but my mom had run away from New York to Florida and joined the Orchestra too, and she was a beautiful woman with that seventies pin-straight hair parted down the middle and an impossibly contagious laugh. Their glasses matched. They were simpatico. They moved up the ranked chairs until they shared a music stand. And then my brother came. And then my dad stayed.

I was only a few years away from 22. I wondered what it would feel like to leave America and never come back.

Dad was very skinny when he emigrated to America. I carefully filed this behind the other mental notes I had taken over the years and obsessively held onto. The more north you go, the thicker the accent becomes. Anthony Hopkins, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Dylan Thomas. Wellies. Bore da, diolch yn fawr. Fy nhad yn Cymraeg.

This mental Rolodex of index cards was carefully ordered, run through regularly, brought out at parties, and insisted on perhaps too emphatically, out of fear that these cards constituted my only claim to being Welsh.

In the days before I could see the numerous ways this culture had pushed and pulled on the clay I am made of, it did seem like the Rolodex was all I had.

This was compounded by not knowing my mother’s family. Because if I didn’t know my mother’s family, and I didn’t truly know my father’s family, who was I? Or the truer question, whose was I? In clinging to these bits and pieces, I was trying to cling to myself, to keep some sort of contoured answer to those questions.

In college I started drinking tea with milk and digestives, and using Welsh phrases for all my passwords. I draped an enormous Welsh flag in my dorm room, leading the residents I supervised to assume I had a huge thing for dragons, which prompted awkwardly received bags of dragon-themed gifts on my birthday.

I stumbled further into the strange no man’s land which children of immigrants often find themselves wandering. While I couldn’t quite identify with the typical experience of a white American family, I also wasn’t identified as Welsh by my dad’s family.

“Katie went skydiving, she’s our crazy American.”

“You don’t know how to make a proper cup of tea! Every lady should know how to make a proper cup of tea.” (By proper my Nan meant in a pot and cozy, carefully timed, sugar first, then tea, then milk, meticulously measured. A bag for each person and one for the pot.)

And I wasn’t Welsh, really. I was something in-between, roaming the space between the trenches, clutching my mental Rolodex.

I tried to concoct an easy solution by identifying, for two gloriously self-assured days, as Welsh-American. That quickly ended when a Taiwanese-American co-worker immediately laughed at seeing those words written next to “ethnicity” on a work form. “‘Welsh-American’, you’re hilarious.”

I understand, sort of, why he found it funny. It’s funny because if your parent immigrated from Western Europe or Canada, you don’t have to justify your American nationality with a hyphen. You’re just American. If, however, your relatives aren’t from Western Europe or Canada, then it doesn’t matter how many generations ago they immigrated, or how “perfectly” you speak English, or if you were adopted and raised by white Americans — you can never shake the hyphen.

I understand, too, that it is this privilege that allowed me to reach for and clutch onto my dad’s culture without consequence or stigma, this privilege that necessitated that I make the association clear because others weren’t making it for me.

They had made it for my dad. He had carefully swapped, over time, his melodious Welsh intonations for the monotone of America, because people “couldn’t understand him”. He worked hard to trade in his vocabulary after a disastrous meeting where he suggested to the CEO of the promotional printing business he worked for that they expand from thermoses and pens to printing their clients’ information on “rubbers”. He stopped wearing a Speedo. He stopped drinking tea. He stopped eating blood pudding and Welsh cakes and bangers and mash. Stopped speaking the basic Welsh he had learned in school. And while he was busy stopping, I was busy trying to figure out how to start.

I wanted an easy start, though, and it wasn’t really fair to my dad. I wanted the Welsh cakes but without the currants. Wanted the politeness but without the passiveness. Wanted the self-deprecating humour but without, well, the self-deprecation. I wanted to attribute the things I loved about him to his culture and the things that aggravated me to his personality. Can you believe my dad got mad at my new piercings? Can you believe my dad won’t let me say crap? Can you believe my dad just wants to watch BBC documentaries? Can you believe my dad ate Chinese take-out on Fourth of July? I was doing to him what everyone else had done. Demanding conformity while insisting on his difference. I would be 20 before I realized what I had been expecting of him.

On that bus ride from London to Cardiff, and the following drive to Merthyr Tydfil, all the things that made my dad particular to me were magnified and omnipresent. At 25, it was my third trip to my family, and I was feeling, seeing, hearing, and smelling my dad.

Tearing up was the least Welsh and most American thing I could be doing in that moment, so I quickly wiped my eyes and let them drink in the familiar rolling hills and lush greenery.

I passed the week hiking up to castle ruins and mountain crypts, clambering down through valleys and across streams. Up, down, up, down, like the voices and the tea bags that were filling the hours in between.

When it grew grey or drizzly, or at the end of a long day, my uncle would pull down the boxes that filled the shed and loft.

These boxes were a Rolodex goldmine. They held a couple centuries’ worth of family history — letters and boxes of hair and poems and pilots’ helmets and marriage proposals and postcards from Australia and photographs upon photographs upon photographs. Family secrets abounded, hidden in envelopes and torn-out scrapbook pages. And look! Here were the curves of my eyes and nose, there were my thick eyebrows and loose curls. Day by day, I greedily hunted through the boxes, piecing together the story of my family.

One night I pulled out a picture of a grim-looking bunch of women, hair all coiffed identically, shirts ruffled all the way to the chin and wrists. All the shirts were white except one woman’s, which was striped with colour. Beneath the woman was written Aunty Sophia (America). My aunt laughed and pointed to this woman. “Aunty Sophia was from America. Everyone thought she was a bit racy.”

“Racy?”

“Yes, because she wore colorful shirts, see.”

I laughed, then glanced down at my tank top and wondered if I was considered racy. If I walked around with a giant (America) above my head. I feel you, Sophia. Way to rock the striped shirt. Aunty Sophia was my familial spirit animal.

The day I unrolled the brown paper scroll was the day I finally received an answer. I pinned one end under a magnifying glass and the other under a box. The family tree sprawled across the entire length of dining room table. A blue index card fluttered out of the scroll. I picked it off the ground and unfolded it.

3:52 a.m. 6lb 15 oz. Kathryn Grace Prosser.

My throat caught. Had my grandfather been gripping to these pieces of information about me the way I had been gripping to ones about him? Hoping that when he placed the index cards end to end they’d bridge the ocean?

I held it up and glanced down at the tree. There, at the very bottom, it had been copied down. Catherine Grace Prosser b. 11/9/1991 Tampa-FLA. USA

I didn’t even care that my name had been misspelled twice. There it was, painstakingly mapped out for me. My place. Nestled underneath David Howell and Jill, across from Collin David. There were the lines connecting me to generations of family members, stretching back through time, tying me to past and place.

I thought about everything I had learned about these family members, and thought about what those lines meant. I thought about how easy it would be for those lines to disappear, for me not to have existed.

If that German guard hadn’t slipped my great-grandfather extra food in the prisoner of war camp.

If my great-great-grandparents hadn’t denied their daughter her first marriage proposal.

If my great-grandmother hadn’t stood in that exact place in line for the movie, so my great-grandfather could turn around and declare to the beautiful woman behind him that he would be buying her ticket.

If my grandfather hadn’t moved back to Merthyr Tydfil after his mother died, taking a job at the steel works where my grandmother was a secretary.

If it had been my grandfather, instead of my grandmother’s first boyfriend, whose plane had been gunned down in the war.

If my dad hadn’t settled on Florida, of all places, to pursue his dream.

If he hadn’t weathered the difficulties of starting a new life in a strange place.

But all of those events had happened. The lines did run down the tree, branching again and again, like scaffolding to cradle the place where my name was written. A map to where and how I belonged.

My husband flew in to meet my family for the first time at the end of the week. They held a big dinner at a local pub, and not one person was missing. As everyone continued to arrive, and the group was swelling with more chatter and more pints, he leaned over and whispered, “I love this. Reminds me of my family, so many people and generations all gathering together. You have a great family.”

I flushed with pride as I looked around the room.

“I do.”