I took an online quiz a couple of months ago that was supposed to tell you what your political leanings were. There were several pages of statements, and you were supposed to give them a rating somewhere from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree. One of the statements, in particular, stands out in my memory. It was, “first generation immigrants can never fully assimilate to their new homeland.” I could tell just from the tone of the quiz that the “liberal answer” (and I’m a fairly liberal sort of person) was supposed to be on the disagreeing side, but I had to give what I’m sure was my only “right-wing” answer and say Strongly Agree.<\/p>\n
The longer I live in Sweden, the clearer it becomes to me that I will never really “fit in” here. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a complaint or an indication of discontent. It’s merely an observation of fact. There are so many little details that I don’t have a good grasp of, and it seems like the more I know, the more I realize how much I don’t<\/i> know. Usually this doesn’t bother me so much, but sometimes I feel like an outsider within my own family, because I’m the only non-Swede in this house (even Lydia, who is 100% American by birth, becomes more and more Swedish with each passing day).<\/p>\n
Judging from my own experiences, I don’t see how it could be possible for a first-generation immigrant (not counting young children, of course) to assimilate fully in a new culture. It’s just all too much to absorb. I don’t think I ever thought about how much information we have stored in our subconscious minds and how impossible it would be for me to develop the “mind of a Swede” until Lydia started going to school here last year. There are so many little songs and rhymes and stories that kids pick up from a very early age, and so many cultural details that can be learned only by growing up within the culture.<\/p>\n
The hardest part about this, for me, is that I have come to the realization that my kids will grow up without a true sense of what it is to be American, regardless of the fact that they are American citizens. I just can’t give them true “American-ness” if they don’t grow up in America, and that makes me sad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I took an online quiz a couple of months ago that was supposed to tell you what your political leanings were. There were several pages of statements, and you were supposed to give them a rating somewhere from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree. One of the statements, in particular, stands out in my memory. It… Read More Assimilation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}