(1173) Cost of Migration

Lately I seemed to be thinking and writing quite a few migration stories. I did mention a little about the following family in blog number 1156.

As I moved around my husband's university alumnus friends through the years, I have grown to like quite a few of them. We will call this particular one Tom. He is one of the most unassuming guys, gentle, kind, and there is no guile in him. It is very easy to like him.

As his life history goes, his wife forcibly moved him to Australia. In the new country, Tom has two daughters. The elder daughter is a most accomplished individual. In her high school, she easily won the Gold medal of the International English Exam for the entire commonwealth countries one particular year. During her free time, she picked up sufficient Korean from watching sitcoms that she could pass herself off as a Korean language graduate. Her first degree is in Japanese language. At some point of her twenties, she worked in Tokyo as a translator for two years.

I was very surprised when I heard that she went to study Library Science as a graduate degree. To my simplistic thinking, that line would be obsolete in a short time. But informed people told me that this field would merely narrow down. It would still be there, decentralised and in the digital world. A future librarian would have to be totally tech savvy, as he or she would navigate in the digital nether world. She would probably be dealing with other mediums of storage, not paper. 

It was very interesting that my husband's friend is very contented with his life in his adopted country while each one of his children seems unhappy that their mum uses the children's allotted money from the government for house keeping. Here both parents are frugal and try very hard to make full use of whatever resources they have. They take each part-time job they could as jobs come along. Yet there is a sense of the children against the parents.

The elder daughter moved out as soon as she turned eighteen, I think. The younger daughter saw the disadvantages that her sister chose and elected to stay on with the family even when she was of age. I know little of how parents communicate with children overseas, a week or two of vacation does not allow one to really see life as it is in a new country. When I was with Tom's family, we had pasta for lunch. The elder daughter came back, the mother offered to cook extra pasta, fry two eggs and warm up mushroom soup; the visitor shook her head and went to her room to take a few items and proceeded to leave. Apparently she was displeased to bump into me and my husband. When I related this experience with another Aussie graduate, she said that is one of the cost of migration. She and her husband counted the cost and they did not go even though they were offered the green card twice.