Finding ‘Home’ across borders: Upholding love, care and culture in my transnational family

Canada prides itself on being a ‘multicultural mosaic’, but I always struggled to find where my piece fit. I was born and raised in Ottawa to immigrant parents from Malaysia. My mother is Bidayuh, one of Borneo’s Indigenous peoples, and my father is Chinese-Malaysian. Though I was born in Canada, I always felt different from my Euro-Canadian classmates; our food was strange, our customs were odd and our concept of family was different. As many other second-generation children, I felt disconnected from my ethnic homeland but never quite felt at home in the country where I was born. My brother and I see our extended family, in Australia, Germany and Malaysia, maybe once every five to ten years. Transnational family life is very common for second-generation immigrants. In fact, having a majority of my family living abroad was my “normal”. In this article, I firstly explore how my transnational family life is ‘performed’ or ‘done’ in the context of family care, pulling from the work of professors Loretta Baldassar, Laura Merla and Yanqiu Rachel Zhou. Secondly, I explore how these transnational bonds of love and family have helped me find confidence in my own identity as a second-generation immigrant straddling multiple cultural worlds at once.

 

In their 2014 edited book Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care: Understanding Mobility and Absence in Family Life, Baldassar and Merla suggest that it is vital to look at the circulation of care in transnational families to better understand the different forms of care we can find within families who are separated by borders. As they mention in their chapter, the Western understanding of family is one that assumes that physical presence enables family bonds to remain strong, and that ‘separation automatically leads to family disintegration’. However in the case of a family like mine, where distance is the norm, how do we care across borders?

 

Put simply, one of the first ways is through virtual communication. My mother has a very active WhatsApp group for her and her three sisters, where they update one another on daily life, and also have important conversations about caring for my grandparents. My mother is living in Canada, one of my aunts is now in Germany, and the other two are in Malaysia, but in different cities. This is therefore a vital form of communication between the sisters that enables them to update each other on the changes to the physical health of their parents, and to make decisions regarding parental care, such as the transfer of remittances to pay for medical services.

 

My father’s side of the family also has a WhatsApp group for him and his four other siblings, in addition to some of their spouses and daughters. When my grandmother got sick last year, the group became a crucial form of communication between my aunt in Toronto, who was the primary care taker of my grandmother, and my other aunts in Malaysia and Australia, as well as with my father and uncle who were in different cities in Canada. They used the group extensively to update one another on my grandmother’s condition following clinic and hospital appointments.

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Secondly, temporary physical visits are another way we care for family. My aunts living in Malaysia and Australia both came separately to help my aunt in Toronto care for my grandmother. As Malaysian citizens, they were able to stay in Canada for a maximum of six months to care for their family member, and also had to go through a lengthy visa application process. My maternal grandmother also came to Canada for two months to help my mom with the birth of her first child (me). My mother was incredibly grateful she was able to have her mother’s support in person through this important life transition. 

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