Advanced Listening Practice

This is my last lecture. I'm told that retiring professors are expected to be reflective on these occasions, to survey the arc of a career and offer some distilled wisdom to the students who remain. I'm not going to do that, partly because I'm suspicious of distilled wisdom, which tends to simplify precisely the things that deserve to remain complicated, and partly because a career, like a life, resists summary. What I'm going to do instead is talk about three families. Their stories span about forty years of Canadian immigration history, from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s, and I've spent the better part of two decades researching them. They are not famous. They did not shape policy or make the newspapers. They came, they stayed, they built lives. And in the ordinary texture of those lives, I think, lies something more instructive than any policy document I've read.

The first family is the Horvaths. Istvan and Margit Horvath arrived in 1948 from Hungary, part of the wave of displaced persons who came to Canada after the war under labour agreements that were, to put it diplomatically, not designed with the migrants' interests foremost in mind. The agreements brought workers to fill specific gaps, in mining, in lumber, in agriculture, and the terms were rigid. You went where you were sent. You did what you were assigned. Refusal could mean deportation.

Istvan was a trained engineer. In Budapest, he had worked on bridge construction, a profession that required years of education and considerable expertise. In Canada, his credentials were not recognized. That phrase, "credentials not recognized," recurs in the immigration literature so frequently that it has lost its capacity to shock, though it shouldn't. What it means, in human terms, is that a person's professional identity, the thing they spent years becoming, is erased upon arrival. Istvan spent his first five years in this country working in a lumber mill in northern Ontario. Margit, who had been a secondary school teacher, cleaned houses.

I interviewed their daughter, Erzsebet, in 2009. She was seventy-one, living in a tidy bungalow in Hamilton that her parents had bought in 1956. She told me something I've never forgotten. She said her parents never described their early years in Canada as difficult. Not because they weren't, but because the language of difficulty implied a comparison with what they had left behind, and that comparison was not one they were willing to make. To say "this is hard" would have been to say, implicitly, "what we left was better," and they could not say that, because what they had left included a war, an occupation, and the loss of people they loved. So the hardship was absorbed without being named. Erzsebet called it "silent endurance," and she said it with a kind of admiration that was also, I thought, tinged with something closer to grief. She had grown up watching her parents carry a weight they never acknowledged, and she understood, as an adult, what that silence had cost them. Not in any dramatic, visible way. In the quieter way that sustained suppression costs anyone. Her father, she told me, never once mentioned his engineering career to anyone outside the family. It was as though that version of himself had been packed into a suitcase that never got opened.

The second family is the Ferreiras. Antonio and Clara Ferreira came from the Azores in 1957, part of a large Portuguese migration that would transform neighbourhoods in Toronto and Montreal over the following two decades. Antonio worked in construction. Clara worked in a garment factory during the day and, in the evenings, cleaned offices downtown. They bought a house in 1964, seven years after arriving, which was a point of immense pride. Their son, Miguel, who I interviewed in 2012, described the house as the physical proof that the decision to leave had been justified. It was small, he said. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, a backyard barely large enough for a vegetable garden. But it was theirs, and for his parents, ownership meant something that went beyond economics. It meant permanence. It meant that the country had, in some tangible and irrevocable way, accepted them.

What interested me about the Ferreiras was the gap between their public integration and their private world. Antonio learned enough English to function competently at work and in commercial transactions. He could negotiate a building contract and file his taxes. At home, only Portuguese was spoken. The food was Portuguese. The saints on the wall were Portuguese. The community they socialized with was drawn almost exclusively from other Azorean families in the neighbourhood. Miguel described growing up in what he called "two countries at once," the Canada outside the front door and the Azores inside it. He navigated between them daily, translating not just language but expectation and behaviour. His posture changed. His sense of humour changed. Even the volume of his voice changed, because the Portuguese household operated at a register that the Canadian classroom did not.

This is something the integration literature tends to flatten. We speak of immigrants "adapting" to their new country as though adaptation were a single, linear process with a clear endpoint. But what Miguel described, and what I've heard from dozens of other children of immigrants over the years, is something far more complex and far more permanent. It is the maintenance of two simultaneous identities, neither of which is false, and neither of which is complete on its own. The public self and the private self don't merge. They coexist, sometimes comfortably, sometimes with friction, and the negotiation between them is ongoing. It does not resolve itself. It simply becomes habitual, which is not the same thing as being settled.

The third family is the Nguyens. Thanh and Linh Nguyen arrived in 1979 as part of the Vietnamese refugee resettlement, what the media at the time called the "boat people," a term I use reluctantly because it reduces an extraordinarily diverse group of human beings to their mode of transport. They were sponsored by a church group in a small city in the Maritimes, which meant that their first experience of Canada was mediated entirely by the goodwill, and the limitations, of a specific community of strangers who had volunteered to help.

Thanh told me, during an interview in 2014, that the sponsorship arrangement was both a rescue and a constraint. The church members were generous and sincere. They found housing, arranged language classes, helped with government paperwork, drove the family to medical appointments. But they also had expectations, implicit ones that were never stated directly, about what gratitude should look like, about how the Nguyens should behave, what they should eat, how quickly they should learn English, how visibly and enthusiastically they should assimilate into the community that had taken them in. Thanh described a dinner, early on, at the home of one of the sponsors, where the host served a traditional Canadian meal and watched the Nguyens eat it with what Thanh called "the expression of someone waiting to be thanked." He said he understood the impulse. He said he was thankful, genuinely and deeply so. But he also felt, and this is his language, not mine, "like a guest who could never leave and could never stop being a guest."

That phrase has stayed with me for ten years because I think it captures something essential about the immigrant experience that policy language consistently fails to articulate. The word "integration" suggests a process with an endpoint. You arrive, you adapt, you integrate, and then, presumably, you belong. But belonging is not a bureaucratic category. It is a feeling, and feelings do not follow policy timelines. Thanh Nguyen became a Canadian citizen. He paid taxes, voted in every election, raised children who went to Canadian universities and built careers in Canadian cities. By every measurable criterion, he integrated successfully. And yet, thirty-five years after arriving, he still described himself to me as a guest. Not unhappily. Not bitterly. But with a precision that I think we owe it to him to take seriously rather than explain away as a failure of adaptation.

I've spent thirty years studying immigration, and if I've learned one thing that I believe with complete conviction, it is this: the experience of the immigrant is not reducible to the story the receiving country tells about immigration. Those stories, whether they are stories of welcome or stories of anxiety, are always about us, about our generosity, our tolerance, our labour market needs, our cultural concerns. The immigrant, in these narratives, is a character in someone else's plot. What I have tried to do, imperfectly and incompletely, is listen to the immigrants' own stories, in their own terms, and take seriously the possibility that those stories might not confirm what we expected to hear.

To my students, and I say this as someone who is about to lose the authority to assign you readings: resist the comfort of the explanatory framework that arrives before the evidence. The framework is useful. It organizes. It clarifies. But it also excludes, and what it excludes is almost always the thing that matters most, which is the specific, irreducible, ungeneralizable experience of the person sitting in front of you, telling you something you didn't expect.

Thank you. And goodbye.