A house made of sticks: the white romanticisation of the immigrant POC's struggle

Image credit: Official website of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I finally got my hands on a copy of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's third novel Americanah, which was well-received by critics and the wider audience. I see Americanah as a novel about love, identity and diaspora. I intend to write a more comprehensive post about it later on when I finish it, but right now I just want to talk about a part of the novel that resonated with me.

Alexa, and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but not mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty. (p. 278)

That just took my breath away.

I came to New Zealand at the age of twelve, and started attending school two weeks after my arrival. It was already the middle of the academic year, so naturally my new classmates were even more curious about me.

One time, I pointed out the Philippines on a map and showed them photographs of the cities. The impressiveness of Makati City's skyline would have surpassed that of Auckland's if it wasn't for the Sky Tower.

A classmate gasped, "I thought you lived in a house made of sticks."

When immigrants say, "We moved here so we could have a better life," what people see are fantastical visions of us escaping from danger or poverty. Things that they believe will never happen in New Zealand, because after all, New Zealand is "first world", and we - stocky people with brown skin, jet black hair and funny accents - are from the "third world".

They think that we come here to earn more money, to live more comfortably, to experience the wonders of internet and tertiary education. But we didn't.

My parents didn't shift our family halfway across the world because we were in danger, or because we were at risk of poverty. We moved because that's what the Filipino middle class did. We saved up our money to apply for visas to other countries, and then we sold most of our possessions to come here. And start all over again.

Why? Because we were taught to work hard, to provide for our families, to be loyal to our country. But our country only provides certainty and security for two categories of people: the wealthy and the impoverished. The wealthy run for political office, control the shipyards and the shopping malls, while the impoverished live in shantytowns and hawk their goods at street markets. They know what's going to happen to them, but we didn't.

Uncertainty suffocates the middle class. If I had stayed, I would have finished university then applied for a visa to work in some overseas country anyway. Because there would be no jobs, no future for me.

As Adichie wrote, we were "eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else". Our dreams and ambitions are what lived in houses made of sticks. Immigrating to New Zealand was our way of making sure that we'll have better houses to put them in.