Personal Narrative: My Experience Of Migration To The United States

For my paper, I decided to interview my father, Bharpur Buttar, who immigrated to the United States from India in 1995 at the age of twenty-nine years old. I chose him for this interview because all throughout my life he spoke to me about how lucky I was to live in the United States. My father said the main reason he wanted to immigrate to the United States was because it presented a better opportunity for him and his future family. He found that it was much more advanced than India not just technologically but culturally. The culture of India was based upon whoever had the most money instead of a person’s ability. For my father, the United States seemed to be based on the idea that through hard work any person could achieve anything. Continuing …show more content…
In order to get to America, he left behind a teaching job in India and put all of his savings into the flight and paperwork. Coming to America was like a completely fresh start for him economically as he had to start from the bottom and work his way up. He had obtained a master’s degree in biological science and teaching credential in India, but he was required to complete a few courses in order for it to transfer over. In the meantime, he had to live in an apartment with his in-laws while working at a manufacturing company for the minimum wage. He soon realized that living in America did not guarantee a great living conditions; you had to earn your better living conditions through hard work. In India, there was much more leisure time because after returning from work, there was nothing else to worry about for a person. There was no emphasis placed on money management because most amenities were provided naturally unlike the United States where there was a lot of emphasis put on money management in order to balance between bills, school fees, insurance, and rent. Minimum wage jobs were only going to work for so long, so my father began to change jobs in search of better wages and better compatibility with education. As an immigrant it was tough for him to find jobs because he knew no one that could help him get his foot in the door and due to this his confidence fell. My father began to …show more content…
The part of the American culture that he enjoyed the most was the emphasis on celebrating holidays. In India, holidays were only celebrated on the day of but my father noticed that there were whole seasons for holidays here in America. He loved the spectacles of Christmas and the Fourth of July because some of the traditions like lighting fireworks and putting up lights were reminiscent of holidays in India. He also took great pleasure in learning about other religions and cultures so much that one day he went with his Christian friend to church just to observe the church services. He remarked that learning about other religions in India was near impossible because all of the people around him were either Sikh or Hindu. Seeing all of these different cultures live seamlessly together was something he couldn’t have imagined happening in India because there simply wasn’t a variety of cultures. Even though he fell in love with the culture of America, he had a hard time adjusting to making friends with people he was unfamiliar with. Initially he felt that he had no connection with the people he worked from other cultures because there was no common experience or language. He overcame this by learning about his fellow employee’s ways of life and working on improving his English in order to better communicate with them. Along with that he made a conscious effort to go to social events like