Chapter 7 “Where Are You From?” A Personal Perspective on the Struggles of Youth Living Between Two Cultures

Where Are You From?

“Where are you from?” This is a question immigrant children face ad nauseam. The first time I can remember being asked this question was during a routine grocery trip with my mother. We were refugees in Turkey, mere hours away from our native Kurdistan, from where we had fled. I have faint memories at four years old of a Turkish officer bending over to ask me the question, and I remember the tension radiating from my mother as her grip on my hand tightened.

This was in the late 1990s, amid ongoing conflict between those of Kurdish heritage and the government of Turkey. The Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 potentially provided for a Kurdish territory and the self-determination of Kurdish peoples for the first time in modern history. However, the Turkish War of Independence (1919–23) led to the treaty being superseded by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), in which there was no provision for a Kurdish state. The result was that the Kurds, along with the Assyrians, were divided among Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran, and conflict is ongoing to this day.

In hindsight, the encounter with the Turkish officer was an incredibly difficult situation for my mother, who did not speak the language and barely understood it, having only been in Turkey for six months. By this point, as children often do, I had learned the language almost fluently from cartoons and from other children in the old, run-down apartment complex where we shared a two-bedroom apartment with another Kurdish family. My mother would take me on grocery trips to translate for her. The task of translating for parents and older relatives is one that many newcomer and refugee youth can relate to. With parents desperate to understand the new language but without the capacity to do so, it falls to the children to navigate conversations that are perhaps much more mature than they’re ready for.

“Where are you from? What’s your name?” I was confused by the questions and intimidated by the officer staring down at me, waiting intently for my answers. I am not sure why, but during our time in Turkey, I had taken a particular liking to Turkish pop sensation Tarkan, Turkey’s equivalent to Michael Jackson or Justin Timberlake. So, with all the confidence and imagination of a four-year-old whose main source of entertainment had been watching a shirtless Turkish man strut across a TV, I answered, “I’m Tarkan!” The officer paused for a moment, then laughed loudly, patting me on the head and eventually leaving my mother and me to our shopping.

“Where are you from?” That question is a complicated one because it is difficult for the asked to know the intention of those asking. Are they merely trying to learn more about you, to empathize with you? Or is it, as I feared it may have been in the case of the Turkish officer, an interrogation, an inquisition, a question with a presupposed answer that will allow those asking it to categorize or even perhaps to antagonize you?

In 1997, after nine months in Turkey, my family was granted refuge through the UN to resettle in Canada. Months into our settlement in our new home, I had come to expect that question nearly anytime I met someone new: curious teachers, inquisitive classmates, and new friends and their parents alike. However, for a routine question that I had come to expect, I never nailed down the perfect response. At that point, not many people knew where or what Kurdistan was, so I learned that when I answered “Kurdistan,” it would encourage more questions, ranging from “Where is that?” to “Do you mean Dagestan/Afghanistan/Pakistan?” or any other “stan” they could think of. So rather than explaining it, I simply began to say “Iraq”—the country to which my part of Kurdistan was assigned. This was an answer that allowed me to mostly avoid any further inquiry in a conversation that had become incredibly tedious to me. Iraq was a country, unlike Kurdistan, and it was at least recognizable to most people in Canada.

Then, in 2003, the United States began its campaign against the Iraqi Ba’aths. It soon became clear that I could no longer answer that question with “Iraq” to avoid an extended conversation. Although my parents tried to shield me from the media coverage of the war, I inevitably saw clips of missile strikes and the frontline combat between Iraqi forces and the American military. Sentiment about Iraq had changed drastically, and the few times when I did claim to be from there, I was met with looks of concern and apprehension.

Certainly, I did not want to be associated with the Iraqi regime, the very regime that had taken so much from my family by way of decades of Iraqi genocide and the suppression of Kurdish people. My own father, a poet and scholar in Kurdistan, had been jailed by the Ba’ath party for his writing, which they believed promoted Western ideology. The Iraqi regime was the very reason we had fled our homeland in the first place.

“Well, I’m from Kurdistan,” I’d say. “You see, it’s in Iraq, but we’re actually enemies of Saddam too!” Was I trying to reassure my friends at ten years of age that geopolitical jockeying made me an ally of the good guys, not one of the “villainous terrorists” many of them had seen fighting against the liberation of Iraq? Or was this my attempt to justify my identity, a subconscious plea for acceptance of aspects of myself that I could never change?

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, there was a rise in anti–Middle Eastern sentiment, with the FBI reporting 481 hate crimes against Muslims in 2001, compared to only 28 in the year 2000 (Ser 2016). The invasion of Iraq by the Western coalition led by the United States only served to amplify this sentiment. One could tune in to the evening news and witness rallies calling for the bombing of the countries many Americans believed to be responsible for the attack on the United States.

Following the war, with the Ba’ath party now overthrown, my family could travel back to Kurdistan for the first time since arriving in Canada. So, in 2004, my mother, my two older sisters, and I took the two-day trip by plane, then bus, back to Kurdistan, and I was reunited with cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents I had not seen for over six years. Even at ten years of age, this visit brought with it an incredible feeling of relief, as I did not need to engage in long explanations of my past or my birthplace, and I did not need to worry that others might judge parts of my identity as offensive due to circumstances I could not control. I was around people who knew me.

About three weeks into the trip, my aunt gave me a few extra dinars to buy some snacks for myself and my little cousin. I walked to the corner shop about thirty seconds from my grandma’s house and picked out a few bags of likely expired chips and a knock-off Kinder chocolate egg. As I handed the clerk my money, he stared at me with the same sort of gaze I had become so familiar with in Canada. Looking back, I think part of me almost knew what he was going to ask next.

As he handed back my change, he asked me in Kurdish, “Where are you from?” This time, more than any other, I was confused—confused by the question, confused by what sort of answer to give. I felt his eyes gazing down at me, waiting for a response. “Here,” I answered in Kurdish, “I’m from here.”

His pursed lips changed into a mischievous grin, and I could tell he was not satisfied with my response. “Well, I suppose, but where are you actually from? You don’t sound or look like a kid from Kurdistan.”

I stood still for a moment, then picked up the bagged snacks from the counter and whispered, “Canada.”

“Aha! Canada! I once had a neighbour whose brother moved to Canada! Do you know him? His name’s Rawaz. I think he’s in Detroit!”

“No,” I answered, heading quickly for the exit.

On the way home, I began re-examining my trip. I remembered that my cousins had asked all sorts of questions over the past few weeks: questions about my clothes, my life in Canada, the video games I had brought with me. I remembered that occasionally they would laugh when I used the wrong word in Kurdish, and I remembered how they had made fun of me when I had cried to my mom about having sore legs from the squatting toilets in Kurdistan. Perhaps I was not old enough to articulate it or understand what I was feeling, but it felt like I was in limbo, in a purgatory of identity between two parts of myself that I accepted but that did not reciprocate that acceptance to me.

Back at my grandmother’s house, I sat silently on the couch, staring at a counterfeit Kinder egg that did not quite seem so appealing anymore.

My story may be unique in its details, but for children born in Canada to immigrant parents or immigrant children who have, like me, come to Canada at a young age, it is a familiar one. The motivation behind the question “Where are you from?” is often innocent, even well intended and caring: it came from teachers who took an interest in me or from friends who wanted to know more about me. But what can I possibly do to meet their expectations when I struggle for the answer myself? How can I provide a short but positive answer that gives a glimpse into the story of “me” when the very question asked is the subject of so much inner monologue and turmoil, when the question itself strips from me the ability to represent myself wholly in the way I want to be seen—as a person defined by my character, my interests, or even my motivations, not by my birthplace or my place of residence?

I do not intend to frame the motivations behind the question “Where are you from?” as malicious; I know very well they were often not. I simply mean to illuminate the struggles of a child, a youth, growing up between two cultures that share many similarities but many beautiful differences as well. For us, the children of immigrants and immigrant children, the weight of those differences walks with us in every step, and the feeling that we do not entirely fit into either side pursues us like a shadow we can never leave behind.

Peeled Labels

It seems that by nature, and almost entirely subconsciously, humans label and sort things into categories. Foroni and Rothbart (2013) posit that labelled categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, and religion all function as psychological “equivalence classes” and affect our perception and our judgments of the categories’ members. I am intrigued by an experiment they conducted that showed that once someone was given a subjective label, the subsequent removal of the label and even challenges to its validity had no effect on its overriding categorization effects. According to this study, “The perseverative effects observed here have direct implications for social perception. The link between the perseverative effects of category labels and the de-individualization of group members is an important one and deserves further investigation” (131). This finding supports the notion that once a person has been labelled or miscategorized, not only is it incredibly difficult to shed that label (regardless of its accuracy), but the label will directly infringe on the person’s ability to represent themselves independently of it. This study’s findings make it clear that as immigrant and refugee children, both first and second generation and beyond, we have little control over the narratives that surround our labels. Being asked where we are from is just one way in which we are asked to neatly fit ourselves into those labels; we also face potential categorization by our food, dress, religious markers, or culturally shaped behaviours.

While the question “Where are you from?” asks the individual to accept that there is a label that identifies them as “other” and therefore from somewhere else, incidents of misrecognition can indicate deliberate attempts at using these labels to fuel racial and cultural intimidation, which has seen a resurgence in the last decade. This trend is apparent in the province of Alberta, according to a 2019 report from the Organization for the Prevention of Violence, which states, “Since 2014 there has been a steady rise in police-reported hate crimes in the province. From 2014 to 2015 Alberta experienced a 40 per cent increase in this area. More recently, from 2016 to 2017 the rate of police-reported hate crimes increased by a further 38 per cent” (17). Likewise, at a national level, a viewer poll conducted by Global News in 2019 revealed that 37 percent of Canadians believed that immigration was a threat to them personally (Abedi 2019).

Labels can be used to promote hostility toward minorities, as the trends at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated. For example, the misrecognition that has arisen from ignorance surrounding the recent coronavirus outbreak has profoundly affected children in Asian communities. On May 8, 2020, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said that “the pandemic continues to unleash a tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scare-mongering” (1) and urged governments to “act now to strengthen the immunity of our societies against the virus of hate” (3).

Unfortunately, these labels are often perpetuated by those in positions of the most power. The former American president Donald Trump promoted the use of the term China virus, and a member of the Canadian embassy in China embroidered shirts that spelled out Wuhan Virus in stylized text, fuelling the animosity toward Asian communities in both the United States and Canada. The Vancouver Police Department documented a “significant” increase in reports of hate crimes against people of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese descent in Vancouver in 2020 (Xu 2020).

For me and many others, the weight of these labels, particularly those that explicitly vilify minorities, creates a resentment of our cultural identity because of the barriers it seemingly imposes on our ability to simply fit in as normal persons. In my case, questions about cultural identity seemed to always move me farther away from fitting into a simple or singular category. In more troubling situations, labels put children of immigrants and refugees on the defensive and perhaps even make them targets of racial abuse, often asking them to answer for the behaviours, ideologies, or beliefs of groups with which they have no association.

Due to this misrecognition and under the perceived threat of vilification, I did not see my culture as empowering. I saw it as a constant barrier between myself and the acceptance I longed for growing up in Canada. Rather than my cultural identity being a part of who I was, among various character and personality traits, I saw it as a restrictive barrier that limited who I could be in the eyes of my peers. The assigned label felt like a restriction, hindering my ability to surpass the definitions or expectations imposed based on my heritage, whether accurate or not.

My mother and father embody the story of many migrants who, due to threats to their lives, have left behind careers, homes, and families to work multiple jobs in a country where they struggle with the language, do not have a full understanding of the systems, and have yet to achieve the level of familiarity with everyday life that they had “back home.” The sacrifices these immigrants made and continue to make are the foundation on which we, their children, build our lives. While growing up as children of immigrants, though, we do not quite understand the world on those terms. At times, we feel beholden to this eternal debt. We see our parents’ sacrifices etched into every new wrinkle on their faces, every grey hair that seems to multiply by the week, month, year. Already struggling with the pressures of belonging, we witness first-hand as our parents struggle under the weight of providing us with opportunities to succeed. Yet their sacrifices don’t make our journey to success any easier. Even when we speak the language without an accent, are educated entirely in the Canadian education system, and have a very good understanding of the systems and institutions in Canada, we continue to be defined by the labels placed on our parents, which are based on markers of difference that seem to keep us apart from “native-born” Canadians, the majority of whom are white and monolingual (Statistics Canada 2016, 2017). This can manifest, as I know it did with me, into further complicating the relationship with our racial and cultural identity. We long for the natural sense of belonging that our “truly Canadian” friends feel. We crave the stability that comes from having parents and a cultural background firmly established in what we’re told, both implicitly and explicitly, are the genuine customs, traditions, and identity of our new home.

To make our situation more difficult, rarely do those other responsible adults in our lives whom we rely on for guidance within the dominant culture even attempt to understand our struggle. For instance, in grade seven, a math teacher told me I should “lighten up” after I explained an incident at recess when kids were throwing erasers at me, pretending they were bombs. In grade ten, a coach I had never met before thought he was complimenting me by saying I played like a “little terrorist” during a rugby tryout. These sorts of incidents are not unique. They are echoed in the stories of nearly all multicultural youth in Canada.

The False Promise of Being a Brown Citizen

Since the government began collecting population data in 1871, Canada has never seen a higher proportion of foreign-born residents (Statistics Canada 2017). With immigration come significant increases in Canada’s diversity. By 2036, 80 percent of Canada’s population growth will come from migration (Statistics Canada 2017). And in the Prairie provinces, where my family and I live, the share of recent immigrants has more than doubled over the past fifteen years. For these newcomers, not unlike my family’s experience, one of the greatest concerns is obtaining Canadian citizenship—the ultimate in-group legal status recognition.

In the first few years in Canada, my family and many other Kurdish families we knew were deeply concerned about citizenship. I remember the day we received our citizenship in the town hall and how excited my entire family was to finally be officially Canadian. As an immigrant youth, I distinctly remember being incredibly proud of finally becoming Canadian upon receiving my citizenship. I have a photo from that day with a mini Canadian flag in hand and a large grin on my face, holding my official documents. But in hindsight, I wonder about my fascination with immigration status as a child who knew little about settlement laws or even deportation. Looking back, it seems to me that my fascination with citizenship, like that of so many immigrant children, revolved around that same longing for belonging. So, for immigrants like us, citizenship affirms that we truly belong to our new home and collective.

Examining more analytically numerous broad and legal definitions, citizenship seems to consistently reference a relationship that is accompanied by rights, privileges, and duties. Those who are undertaking citizenship presumably opt into those duties in exchange for the rights and privileges afforded to them. If so, how can we explain the discrimination faced by immigrants who have become citizens and dutifully fulfill their obligations? They should be shielded from discrimination as full-fledged members of the collective, but in practice, not much changes with the acquisition of official citizenship.

Rogers Brubaker (2010) suggests that citizenship laws are heavily influenced by whatever conception of national identity has historically formed the state. Peter O’Brien (2016), in his analysis of the various immigration policy changes of numerous liberal democracies within the last twenty years, states, “Virtually every national government has revisited and revamped its immigration and naturalization laws—some toward greater exclusivity [. . .] others toward greater inclusivity” (66). Some nations, such as Germany, that have embraced a more inclusive policy have established through voting processes that this “belonging” should be extended—in theory—but what of countries, such as France, that have opted for more exclusivity? O’Brien writes that “Muslim immigrants in particular tend to experience higher levels of exclusivist discrimination when applying for citizenship” (72). Taking Brubaker’s evaluation and applying it to O’Brien’s data, we begin to understand how a higher refusal rate for Muslim immigrants may suggest a refusal to accept their belonging within the French national identity, even on a surface or legal level.

This knowledge may help us understand why, in countries such as Canada and Germany, many newcomers continue to feel like aliens even after citizenship is awarded. From a legislative standpoint, Canada disagrees with France regarding designating citizenship; however, it would be naïve to assume that immigrants who are of different backgrounds and cultures are seamlessly accepted as “belonging.” While white immigrants from western Europe have accents that may differ from Canadian-born speakers’ or may have different cultural habits or mannerisms, they often fit what seems to be the standardized image of a “teammate.” Similarly, many political leaders in Germany, Britain, and France have been critical of multiculturalism, publicly denouncing it as a disaster (Citrin, Johnston, and Wright 2012), but have been silent in any criticism of immigrants from the United States or Canada, for example. The assertion seems to be that patriotism or even contribution toward a collective good is only accessible by those who share similar cultural and ethnic identities and habits, perpetuating exclusion regardless of legal citizenship. Indeed, citizenship alone is not a remedy for the alienation we as immigrants feel. In fact, on its own, it may reinforce the perception of a split identity among immigrant youth when recognition as a legal citizen does not come with recognition as a peer or a member of the “team.”

Resilience: A Way Out of Identity Purgatory

Feelings of ostracization experienced by immigrant youth in schools and elsewhere deeply impact youth in racialized and minoritized communities and serve as invisible barriers to well-being. Strong evidence points to racism as a social determinant of mental and overall health, with a recent meta-analysis concluding that “racism is significantly related to poorer health, with the relationship being stronger for poor mental health” (Paradies et al. 2015, 15). Systemic/structural racism is often invisible to actors within the dominant culture’s institutions, meaning that schools and even supportive programming are underequipped to deal with the fallout (18). These factors add to the challenges racial and ethnic minority youth already face as they seek to develop a healthy sense of their cultural identity, develop their strengths, and build a strong social network. When youth must shoulder family stresses, navigate relationships with parents, and deal with racism and bullying at school in addition to the typical adolescent challenges of struggling with schoolwork and finding employment, these intersecting pressures can quickly derail mental health and resiliency.

Among culturally diverse youth, resiliency has been predicted by (1) the capacity of the individual to navigate through health-sustaining resources, including finding opportunities in which they have positive experiences, and (2) the capacity of the individual’s family, community, and culture to provide these health resources and positive experiences in a way that is culturally meaningful for the individual (Ungar 2008). With proper support, immigrant youth and their communities can be equipped to foster resiliency and deal with adversity.

In retrospect, this is exactly what my sister tried to help me do. In 2007, she dragged me kicking and screaming to the youth group she created with support from an organization called Multicultural Health Brokers Cooperative (MCHB Cooperative; https://mchb.org/). The program, which was funded by Alberta Health Services’ Addiction and Mental Health Branch, brought together not only Kurdish youth but other ethno-cultural youth from all over Edmonton. These children, like me, were living in identity purgatory. I had little interest when my sister and the other youth leaders approached subjects about our Kurdish identity. By this point, in my early teens, I was not particularly interested in being once again boxed into identifiers associated with my culture. Nor was I particularly interested in the traditional dance, arts, and clothing we were required to interact with or try on during these sessions. I remember insisting that the food, prepared by a local Kurdish women’s group, was inedible and demanding a burger or fries on the way home. I had experienced too much trauma with my Kurdish identity. I didn’t want to experience that identity anymore. I just wanted to be a “normal” Canadian kid.

What I did have an interest in, what I grew to love, were the connections I made with kids who were just like me. I also loved the soccer time they used to bargain with us in exchange for an hour of Kurdish-related activities, which featured folk stories and occasionally learning the Kurdish alphabet. Over time, though, it became more difficult to tune out the barrage of facts, history lessons, and mythologies about the place where I was born. Day by day, I found myself listening more intently when we talked about Kurdistan. I found myself more interested in our struggle for independence and feeling how unfair it was that we still did not have our own country. When I was growing up, my mom and dad had tried to tell me stories about Kurdistan, but I rarely listened. Now, with the support of other Kurdish youth and mentors who made my own culture interesting to me, I felt more empowered as I learned more about my Kurdish identity.

To my surprise, this newly acquired interest in Kurdistan did not make me feel any less Canadian, nor did it mean I could no longer identify with my friends who were not Kurdish. It simply alleviated bit by bit a path of self-destruction I was pursuing in the desire to be white or to elevate my social, political, and cultural status in proximity to whiteness. By the time I was in university, the youth group, through years of meaningful involvement, had tricked me into loving my Kurdish self. The experience had such a profound effect on me that when my sister decided it was time for her to move on with her career, I offered to become the youth leader of the Kurdish group.

This new role connected me to what I found out was a chain of youth groups, all supported by the MCHB Cooperative, representing sixteen different ethno-cultural communities. I found similar success stories in other communities that had little in common with my own except for one factor—the active youth and community leaders who had experienced (and to some extent still did) the immigrant youths’ cultural context in a way that other support groups could not fully understand. These leaders were able to make time to develop individual connections with youth whom they knew had histories of difficult experiences surrounding their identity. The community groups recognized that building relationships with youth is a process of building trust, so as the programs have grown, youth who were once participants struggling with their circumstances, such as myself, are now helping their communities’ leaders run the programs or have taken over the programs as leaders themselves. I believe the key to these programs’ success is the culturally rooted, responsive, and supportive care they provide. According to Alberta Health Services’ (2015) anchoring document Foundations of Caregiver Support, “It is critical that children be immersed in their culture so that they can internalize a healthy self-concept and positive cultural identity” (3). If a host country such as Canada is to adequately support struggling immigrant youth, this philosophy must be integrated universally into intervention programs.

Just under twenty years ago, Dr. Tara Yosso (2005) from the Graduate School of Education at the University of California discussed the “cultural wealth” of racialized and immigrant children. To summarize, Yosso examined the cultural wealth that minority students leverage to bolster their resiliency in the competitive schooling environment. Simply put, she interviewed graduate students who were children of immigrants who did not come from privileged backgrounds, and she found that although many of these students did not have the same financial security as their peers, they brought talents, strengths, and experiences with them to their college environment that were fostered by their family relationships. Their parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles—all these relationships armed them with forms of capital that Yosso describes as including but not limited to linguistic capital (the ability to speak more than one language) and aspirational capital (the ability to maintain hope and dreams for the future in the face of real and perceived barriers). These forms of capital were essential in their ability to traverse the university landscape, and they also added diversity of thought to the students’ environment, which was crucial in their own learning and that of their peers.

While responsive interactions are key to alleviating the struggle immigrant youth undergo, I believe that support for them needs to be culturally rooted, culturally safe, and interculturally competent to be effective. Too often, service providers and others from the dominant culture, albeit with the best of intentions, intervene with cultural minority children and their families in ways that increase, rather than prevent or bridge, the painful cultural gaps that often exist in immigrant children’s ability to develop healthy bicultural, bilingual identities. This failure is often a result of ignoring the cultural contexts in which the youth live and approaching their support within a rigid Eurocentric framework that inevitably positions them as “other.”

Despite the hope that culturally rooted programs bring to their communities, such programs are profoundly lacking in funding, support, and resources. Programs like the youth groups rely on year-to-year funding and often are put in competition against one another. This funding shortfall sends the message that this programming is non-essential, despite the profound effect it has had on many youths. And because immigration patterns have changed dramatically over the last century, there is a great need to prioritize these programs. The increase in immigrant populations, combined with limited resources and the inability to provide proper support, has the potential to result in many kids being left behind, struggling with a fragmented sense of identity.

Concluding Thoughts: From Identity Purgatory to Cultural Wealth

Although many immigrant children had no say in the circumstances that led to their arrival in Canada, they are faced with the repercussions that accompany their resettlement. Their sense of identity is often split between their ancestral identity and the dominant cultural identity they do not operate in. Often, this fragmented identity creates a tension that the youths are forced to deal with regularly—for example, when questions such as “Where are you from?” lead to stereotypes and negative labels. A common response in such instances is to distance themselves from their own cultural identity in pursuit of belonging to the dominant culture, which may manifest itself in the desire for citizenship as a pathway to belonging. Immigrant youths’ embrace of the dominant culture may further alienate them when they discover that citizenship alone is not a remedy for the “othering” they experience. To foster an inclusive environment and to limit the struggles of these youth, there should be a concentrated effort to tap into their cultural wealth through community-based programming. This programming should also be supported by policy and resources—namely, funding—to allow it to empower youth within their own cultural identities.

Working with the MCHB Cooperative, now as the coordinator for community-led youth programming, I know that my experiences are not unique to me. They are echoed by the over 650 youth we work with annually. I also know that allowing youth space to explore their cultural identity and connecting them with support tailored by their own community can play a vital role in relieving the anxiety of struggling with their own identity. I now know that my story, like the stories of so many immigrants like me, is a story not just of struggle but of perseverance. Examining our communities from a lens of appreciation reveals the cultural capital embedded within them, not just in the contributions immigrants can make to all facets of Canadian society, economically and culturally, but in their resilience and courage. With evidence gathered over sixteen years of youth-focused programming, we also now know that youths who are connected to support systems that understand their struggles and are embedded in their communities can build their resilience and thrive.

As immigrants, our cultural heritage identity is inescapable. Often, it is etched in the colour of our skin, the smell of our food, and the traditions we carry from those who came before us. There is value in that culture, and youth must be reminded that their unique identity is another piece of the beautiful mosaic of our society. And some of us who now support other immigrant youth can make it clear to them that their feelings are mentionable and manageable. By doing so, we will have done a great service not only for them but for ourselves.

References

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