There’s a certain sentence many of us have heard from our parents; the ones who left everything behind in search of something better. It’s the moment they look around and sigh: “This isn’t our home. But there isn’t a home for us back there anymore either.”
And in that moment, we feel the weight of something we can’t fix.
For so many of us who are first-generation kids, we’ve grown up watching this ache live inside our parents. They cook the food, tell the stories, hum the songs. They hold onto the rituals that remind them of where they came from. But woven through it all is the grief: the place they left isn’t the place that exists now.
Political change. Economic collapse. Entire neighborhoods shifting, families scattered, loved ones lost. The home they ache for is more memory than reality. And the place we live now? It never fully claimed them either.
We see it when they call relatives and hang up quietly, staring off like they’re somewhere else. We see it when they light up at the sound of their language, then go silent when they remember it’s not spoken freely here. We hear it in the stories of what used to be, always told with a little pause, a little catch in the throat.
And we, their children, carry that grief too. Even if we’ve never walked the streets they talk about. Even if we only know the homeland through stories and photographs. We grow up with this double-awareness: that the ground beneath us doesn’t quite feel like ours, and the ground they left has shifted into something unrecognizable.
It is a strange inheritance. To be told: This is not fully home. But neither is that. To learn that belonging is something slippery, fragile, and not guaranteed.
There is a grief that immigrants carry, and their children carry it too. It is the grief of a home that no longer exists, and the quiet knowledge that we will always be straddling two worlds; one that has changed beyond recognition, and one that was never truly built for us.
