Pt. 3 My Immigrant Parents Don't Understand Me -- But Did I Try to Understand Them?

Now What Will You Do With Your Luck?

In December of 2023 I embarked on a 20 day trip to Ethiopia after not being back for 25 years. The revelations that followed suit have arrested me. This is Part 3 of a series dissecting my identity as an Ethiopian-American called “Now What Will You Do With Your Luck?”

Click here to read Part 1: I Could’ve Been a Hannah

Click here to read Part 2: The World of Addis Ababa

It’s hard for me to explain to you everything. Some moments explode with so much life you can only start by picking up a few pieces. These are the pieces I was able to scavenge. I hope it’s enough for you to understand how it has changed me.

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Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (2023)

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Politically, Ethiopia is in a very tense position. I’m still learning the nuances of everything myself, so I’m not going to go into detail, but due to this climate, we were fervently advised to be extra cautious. We were unable to travel far distances outside of Addis, and my relatives highly suggested I not go out by myself at all. Which as an adult woman who loves traveling, going out by herself, and meeting new people, felt tragic.

I couldn’t really spread my wings in the city — but in fairness, because I’m not fully fluent in Amharic, it would have been challenging for me to explore safely on my own. I can understand the language near perfectly, but I’m unable to concretely speak it back. Amharic is only one of the languages spoken in the city, but it’s what my parents and relatives all speak and is encountered often.

In a way, I was a child again.

Back to my youth of being taken to different relative’s houses, eating plates and plates of injera and drinking tiny cups of black coffee. With my liberties essentially being monitored as if I wasn’t 30. With us hardly doing activities at night and often sleeping before 10pm. And because phones were often stolen, I would rarely have my phone visible in a public place. This made everything feel more present. More childlike.

Again, this feeling of a type of yesteryear. The vividness of how I looked at the world when I was younger came back to me.

I watched my parents with my child eyes.

✴

Since the last time I’d been in the country was 25 years ago, there were a lot of family members I needed to reintroduce myself to. I was slightly dreading this. It’s hard meeting people when you don’t know how to fully communicate with them.

Yet, what was so shocking was how easy it all was. The feeling of looking into someone face and seeing my mother’s face, my aunt’s, or my cousin’s was so beautifully disorienting. I was looking into the eyes of people I was essentially meeting for the first time and I already felt like I knew everything about them. Their faces told me their stories.

What surprised me the most was how much these newly encountered relationships would bury their ways into my heart. I hardly spoke with so many relatives living there, outside of the few who came to America to either visit or live. Few brief convos were exchanged over choppy phone calls, but I didn’t really know them. Yet, the care, the love, the attentiveness, and the play we had over those few weeks assured in me a type of eternal love for them.

I was prepared for none of this.

I didn’t know how close you could feel to someone in such a quick amount of time. I didn’t know people could love you in a way that left you doubtless, only right after you’ve met them.

And it made me wonder why it had to be like this. Why we are here and they are there. We’re so different. We lead such different lives. But I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like if they could have been in America or if it was just easier for them to come. Or maybe, if I had just come to Ethiopia more often.

One of my mom’s sisters who came to stay with us struck me the most. The moment I laid eyes on her I loved her. I couldn’t explain to you why. Perhaps, because she looked like my mother with a slightly different build and darker skin. Looking at her I witnessed the start of my mother as well as the separation. How they grew lives in opposite directions. She stayed in Ethiopia as my mother left. I never understood my mother in this context before.

I began to look at both my mother and my father in a very different way.

✴

In the midst of this city their auras transformed.

Looking at them I was awestruck. Suddenly, they looked rich. They looked like the people I would gaze at in luxury neighborhoods and stores. Wondering how they unlocked this level of affluence. They moved differently within the backdrop of Addis. With a smugness, ease, and pride. Effortless wealth. As if given to them like breathing. Natural, as if it could never be taken away.

I watched my mother speak to waiters and cashiers with the the direct, firm elegance of someone swathed in cash. I watched my father take his inflated wallet out of his pocket to give money to the poor children selling trinkets on the street  — adjusting his crisp, gleaming glasses to sort out the bills.

In America, I never saw my parents in this opulent way. I blinked, jarringly, to make sure of what I was seeing.

My parents…..are……rich????

For my entire life, it felt like we struggled. Looking back, we’ve always had enough, but money has never been a source of comfort. I’ve had to retrain myself to believe it is not fastened with fear and lack.

Ethiopian birr, the national currency, is multi-colored. The exchange rate is 56.44 birr for one US dollar. Waves of blue, pink, green, and purple birr swirled through our bags in hoards. For the first time in my life I felt rich.

Rich, in the way of how you never have to think about money. You could just get something you wanted. No matter what it was. The only possible issue would be driving to go get it. Or playfully teasing yourself that you’ve spent enough today. But none of that concern was ever real.

It reminded me of going to college and suddenly being around the most affluent people I had ever met. Then suddenly these people becoming my friends, to which I was then able to microscopically surveil the way they interacted with the world. As if they were guaranteed it. A safety built inside of them with the nonchalant belief the world was theirs.

The world has never felt mine. I have always felt like I had to compromise myself for it. Yet here, in Ethiopia, the world became mine. I became the affluent friend. We were the rich people. We just had to shift our geographic coordinates.

Yet, how could any of this feel earned?

Everywhere around you, nearly swarming you, were people deeply in need. People asking for money. People selling odd things. Children covered in dust and tattered clothes carrying scales asking if you’d like to weigh yourself. To signify to you that they weren’t just asking for money. They were including themselves in the system that money is given through exchange. So you would know they were trying to teach themselves something.

There were also the children who didn’t have anything. Who climbed to peer into your car window while stopped in traffic or who surrounded your legs after leaving the grocery store. Who had nothing to give but their desperation. People would say not to give to those children. That there had to be some kind of exchange to teach their sponge-like brains. They had to sell something, anything, even gum, even a second on a scale.

There were so many people around you who needed very basic things.

So, what is this “richness”?

What does it even mean?

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Whenever my parents talked about their upbringings it conjured a blank space in my mind. An unclear drawing. I couldn’t imagine anything. I had no real visuals to accumulate what life was like for them.

As we traveled through their city their context began to fill in.

We drove by where my dad was born and the house he grew up in — now dominated by a large scale apartment building. We drove by where my mom went to school and her first apartment. I watched their faces glow recounting these landmarks turning to me in the backseat. A childlike joie de vivre compelling their expressions as they spoke of their tales. I watched them be young again.

I witnessed them experience a full body exhale. Attributes within themselves reaching an alignment in which I never thought possible. They were at ease, and despite how tricky, inconvenient, or genuinely more strenuous it was to get things done in Ethiopia — they carried with them this sense of wonder, perhaps a quiet sense of joy. A feeling inside of them that whatever was occurring, at least it was occurring at home. Where they began everything.

They chuckled together at the adventurousness of their youth.

Adventurous?????

I never saw my parents as adventurous. I had never considered them to be. I knew them as having ordinary suburban lives in Denver. I thought I was the adventurous one…

I came to understand over these few weeks I have only known half, or perhaps even less of my parents. I knew being an immigrant was hard, that it required a density of spirit, but I never thought of what came before that density. What dream filled that space before. That spurring, wild thing that existed inside of them that asked to leave everything. Not just the desire to leave for a better life, but the idea that for your whole life you have exuded the qualities of someone who will outgrow their surroundings. How your life was always amounting to this.

I gawked at them. They were so cool and they were mine. Seeing them with their siblings, I could see how they were different. What set them apart as the ones who chose to leave. And to be the ones who not only wanted to leave but to be the ones who were able to.

All the aspects of their personalities they were not able to bring with them that were glimmering through their bodies now. Because America is not just a different place. It’s a different set of values, movement, and wealth. There’s a rigidity to American structure. Of buckling up and working. They changed their lives to be able to do this.

It was through this sense I understood I was born of my parents for a reason. They lived lives of risk, uncertainty, and adventure. Yet, their journeys before my birth were not so vivid to me. They had already become adjusted Ethiopian-Americans when I found them. I did not know them for their wildness, their bravery. And even if I had heard stories, they did not gravitate into my mind-stream. They were stories, like fables. To me they were just immigrants who lived normal American lives.

See, I was the wild one. I was the one who lived an unconventional life. The one who dropped out of college and ran towards being an artist. Who rejected a life of staying in my surroundings to pursue my visions and dreams. I had always felt like I wanted too much. I never felt like they understood that.

Yet, in the back of the car, watching them take in Addis, I took in it was me who did not understand them.

Who they were as children leapt out to me. As well as teenagers and young adults. As the people who decided they wanted something more. Something more. I never saw my parents as people who needed something more. I thought I was the one who wanted more. I thought they were the ones who happy with suburbia and a sense of normalcy. I didn’t realize how even this was a culmination of an adventure. Even this was spectacular.

The point in which you came from decides the admirableness of your reach. My parents ventured across the whole world and they landed here and they had me and I grew balloons of desire within myself. I’ve wanted so much. For my whole life I’ve wanted so much. And I didn’t know where this wanting came from. I thought it was unrefined. It was scraped from the universe. It was too much for a girl to have.

But how, how can I not believe even this desire was earned? That this was a hunger designed for me? That to want this much, I was created by two people who also believed in something large and unexplored within themselves.

And me, I ate the combination. I became doubled down with dreams.

Because even in America I still want everything. But here, here is the place I might be able to design what calls to me. Why do I doubt myself when I am born of two people who made something come true?

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To be continued — Part 4 coming next week.