Finding your way in a new country and becoming the person you once needed.
Farnaz Abdolmaleki (She/Her) // Contributor
I landed in Vancouver on a rain-soaked August afternoon, and because an August sky in Tehran would never dare to weep like that, I stood outside the airport convinced that the weather would be the strangest thing I would have to learn in this country.
I was wrong.
The strangest thing, the thing that took me years to understand, was that a person can do everything right, can claw her way through every closed door, and still find herself utterly alone on the other side of it.
I am writing this for the ones who are where I was, the ones who arrived last month or last week and are lying awake tonight, certain that they are the only person on earth carrying a war in their chest that no one around them can see.
I want you to know that I have stood exactly where you are standing, and that I understand.
What no one warns you about is how immigration hardens people. Somewhere between the country they lost and the country that does not quite want them, people from my community grow a shell, a stoic and self-protective coldness, until they can walk past their own kind without a flicker of recognition.
I learned this on my second day, walking down Lonsdale, the heart of the Persian community, with my hair covered in a bandana. I felt the disdain in strangers’ eyes long before I could name it, and I spent the whole walk wondering what I had done wrong. It was my mother, four years later, who finally explained that after a lifetime under a regime that polices women’s hair, some of them flinch at anything that resembles a hijab. My own people had looked at a frightened girl, newly arrived and trying her best, and saw only the thing they had fled.
It did not stop there.
When I searched for work, the Canadian employers saw a foreigner not worth the risk, while the Persian ones saw someone too new to know her rights and offered me wages they knew were beneath the law. When my first apartment was sold out from under me in the middle of the lease, no one told me I had any right to object, and so I folded my entire life back into a single suitcase within a week of having unpacked it.
I was the first person in my family to leave, which means there was no one ahead of me on the road, no voice to call and ask, and so I became my own map. I taught myself how transit worked, how visas are renewed, how you transfer between universities, how you fight a landlord and how you find, in a foreign grocery store, some pale imitation of the food you were raised on.
There was one person who reached out to me in those early days, a professor, Persian like me, who told me quietly that he knew I was a good student and he knew I was struggling. He placed his own phone into my hands so that I could reach my parents through the silence that fell over Iran. That autumn, when the government cut its people off from the world, because he understood that I could no longer afford to hear their voices any other way. Since then, I have measured every act of kindness with him, and that is how rare it was.
So let me say what I needed to hear back then:
Yes, it is hard.
And yes, you are carrying more than the people around you will ever understand, because whatever they think they know about being new, arriving from across the world with that war still in your chest is not the same as arriving from next door.
But it will not always look like this.
It may take you months, or it may take you years, and there is no shame in either, but one day you will stop being lost.
One day you will be the one who knows where the food is, the one a frightened newcomer calls, the one who reaches back. I gathered the students who came after me and we built something that resembled a community, a place where we taught one another how to stand. Many of them are my closest friends today. I tell you this not to boast but to promise you that loneliness is a season and not a sentence.
And when that day comes, when you finally set down the suitcase for good, this place, which asked so much of you and gave so little in return, might at last begin to feel a little like home.