Legacy Blues

This article is an instalment of the MUSE online team's 2022 back to school theme week.

At times it is incredibly lonely to not be a legacy. 

I have found myself imagining experiences my parents and I could have shared in common. Tales and fables of my mom and dad thirty-something years ago, drunkenly stumbling their way through a student neighborhood, showing up to their classes six hours later hungover, surviving solely on Red Bull and a lust for life. These feel funny to think about, even in my imagination. 

My whole life, university was not a question, but it was always treated like a huge accomplishment. It was a goal my parents constantly reminded me about, and one that would represent the fruit of my parents' labor. To get a post-secondary education was to have a chance at a better life, and it felt like my extended family had been waiting my entire life for one of us Canadian-born children to make the sacrifices of migration worth it. The thought of us being able to say “we did it” was enough to keep me going through the dense applications and intimidating student loan applications. I endlessly watched university vlogs, scrolled tirelessly through websites, and absorbed every material I could that would prepare me for the unknown—educating my parents as I went along this journey. We excitedly discussed details of dorm rooms around the dinner table, and I felt completely prepared to take on this adventure as we packed up IKEA decorations into cardboard boxes. Except that while I was somewhat aware that every piece of information about student loans, class schedules, and reading weeks were new to my parents as well, I never managed to prepare myself for the uniqueness of my experience. 

I encounter so many more “legacy” students then I could have ever imagined—students who walk the same path as their parents while on their way to class. I did not think that the university experience (one I knew of as a goal and a privilege) was not defined in the same way for those around me. Those whose parents went to the same schools and read the same books. Move outs on Brock Street included being surrounded by chuckles and anecdotes coloured with  nostalgia as father and son shared stories about the good old days. Mother and daughter compared tales of bar-hops past and present with almost competitive undertones. And I stood in the middle of these amplified conversations, silent. 

I have no opportunity for friendly competition and familial banter. While some daughters now live meters from where their fathers lived at the precipice of adulthood, I am continents away from where my father turned 18. At 20, my Fridays may include wiping mascara streams off a friend's cheek, and I am hit with a pang in my chest when I remember that somewhere long ago when my mother was my age, she was feeding her first born. Maybe we are both mothering in our own ways. Nonetheless, this is a child of immigrants grasping at straws or strings or any semblance of a connection to those who birthed me. Having such a different young adulthood from my parents is isolating, and admitting this is guilt-inducing. 

I recognize that my story sounds like a cry for pity, and it makes me cringe, realizing my struggle to connect with my parents' lack of juvenile delinquency does not compare to their anxiety of kitchen table bills and citizenship forms. But it is isolating nonetheless; from friends who share a comfort knowing that their drunken mistakes or failed exams do not lead to life-altering consequences, because their parents made similar ones and turned out just fine. In a world where a post-secondary education is an expected step and not the reward at the end of a marathon, the stakes are so much higher for those of us whose parents could never have imagined being able to study in a country where all the vowels and words are still partially unfamiliar. Perhaps I can force a bridge between our experiences knowing we are both in less-than-suitable apartments, perhaps secretly wishing we were somewhere else, though never admitting it. 

I am learning now that the life of immigrant children is one filled with distance. While my classmates can trade memories passed down to them, I sit in silence, recognizing that the type of bond these young adults share with their parents that I will never have. I nod my head as if my dad also has photos of his student house in our garage knowing that most photos of his youth are sprinkled across South America and Canada, and his tales of youth can only be understood through a mixture of two languages. In some ways I feel like I am a fake — I am pretending to understand what it is like to have such a mutual understanding of this age with my parents. For there is something to be said for being the third generation to walk across a stage and receive a paper that signals you sought higher education and independence—a final string is tied between you and your parents knowing you have battled the same struggles and lived the same life. And this connection is made throughout generations. Legacy students can walk the same halls as their grandparents, being comforted by the invisible familiarity that comes with living a shared experience, while I can only struggle to explain where my school is in broken-Spanish to my grandma, each of us struggling and finally, pretending, to understand one another. 

Mother and daughter compared tales of bar-hops past and present with almost competitive undertones. And I stood in the middle of these amplified conversations, silent

They say distance makes the heart grow fonder. Perhaps this is true. Perhaps the distance between my parents and I strengthens our bond. Yet this does not change the irreversible fact that this distance will forever exist, and with it, a lack of understanding and an inability to feel connected by our shared experience. 

But maybe there is a unique joy in knowing I am the first. 

The first to walk these streets lined with solo cups and club flyers. The first to seek knowledge well beyond what those who birthed me would have thought possible. I cannot tell my mother I ate dinner in the same pub as her, but I can tell her about the new places and the new sights I have encountered. She may be doing her share of imagining, visualizing what they are like instead of remembering. But she is happy for me. 

My grandma once cried out that I was working “para La Causa”—for the cause. My cousins and I immediately burst out into laughter in response to the mysteriously prolific and dramatic phrase. The comment was clearly an eccentric burst of energy, one made under the false pretenses that I would be a lawyer or politician and help this mysterious but worthwhile “cause”. We all chuckled at my grandma’s action, a perceived miscommunication and misspoken manifestation. 

And yet I realize now that she knew exactly what she meant. The proclamation she made in Spanish that day was not misdirected or unspecific or the result of a comedic language barrier. This is La Causa—being able to be the first. It is knowing that the three generations that exist between my grandma and myself, the women in our family, have gone from poverty and being unable to read the signs at customs when she first arrived here in Canada to being able to study at a university where I can become someone who works for a larger cause and not just survival. In some ways, they are the “cause”–the thing that motivates me in replacement of advice. It is their blood that runs through my veins, and with it the pain and tiredness from trying to have a better life. The amalgamation of nights where my grandma and my parents cleaned washrooms at schools they hoped their kids and grandkids would be able to attend, and the prayers they whispered hoping that their children would find this new land of opportunity familiar and be able to call it home. My grandma cries that I will work for the greater cause that is our family name and I know she is echoing my family’s journey, one that is more admirable than a bachelors degree. Maybe knowing that she has this faith in me does not replace the distance between us, but it is something. There is a string between my parents and I, not one cemented by graduation photos and walls decorated with degrees, but it is held together by hope.

At times, it can be incredibly exciting to be a part of a legacy.

Header by Tiana Lam