On my parents’ baraat day, my mom is covered in gold jewelry, almost all of it pieces her mother had been collecting for years. My dad immigrated in 1992 with no money, first to Curaçao, then Jamaica, then Canada, where he was chased by border patrol dogs in the snow when crossing over to America, where he finally settled in the Bronx. He went back to Pakistan in 1999 to marry my mom, and she immigrated six months later. My dad’s immigration story is full of twists and danger, and when we were kids, he’d retell it like a bedtime story, always leaving us on a cliffhanger (did the dogs sniff him out, was the snow high enough to hide in!?) My mom never really talked about her immigration, partly because she felt it couldn’t measure up. Her story is one shared by many South Asian women who married and moved oceans away from home with people they barely knew. There’s strength in that kind of story, though. In Pakistani culture, a woman’s gold has always mattered. For centuries, women relied on it as financial security when they were dependent on their husbands. My mom was raised by a single mother after her father died, and with seven kids, my grandmother carried everything herself. She sold her wedding gold to feed her children and put them through school. My mom never had to sell hers. Now, as she shows me her jewelry, she packs them away neatly into three velvet bags, each labeled with one of her daughters’ names and a note tucked inside.

– AH

Relationship:  Child of im/migrant Child of im/migrant