Gael Melville
From Monday's Globe and Mail Published on Monday, Oct. 05, 2009 12:00AM EDT Last updated on Monday, Oct. 05, 2009 6:37PM EDT
The first question I had while flying over Pearson airport, eyes pink and throat raw from sobbing the entire journey, was "where are all the mountains?" Being Scottish and a newcomer to Canada, much of what I knew about the geography of the country had been gleaned from glossy tourist ads in travel magazines.
What became abundantly clear to me as we circled the airport before landing was that these scenes bore no resemblance to the featureless terrain below me. I'm not sure whether I actually vocalized my disappointment, but if I did, I'm sure it was a welcome relief for the passenger next to me, who had had to endure my hysterical homesickness throughout the seven-hour flight from Glasgow.
My husband Tim is from Toronto, and even though I had lived in the same area of Glasgow my whole life, I agreed to move with him to Canada after we married in 2003.
My second question, as he drove me from the airport to my new home, was "why is there snow on the ground?" Being the end of November, I had neither expected the early onset of winter nor its drastic effects on a city I had previously known only during lazy July vacations. Everything looked different covered in a blanket of snow, and I struggled to acclimatize to the freezing temperatures.
More questions as Tim showed me around our temporary home - a condo rented to us by a snowbird. "What's a snowbird?" And then "what's a blue bin?" and "how do we turn the heat up?" Bemused and mentally exhausted, I excused myself on the pretext of unpacking and lay on the unfamiliar bed, crying softly to myself.
Next came the bureaucratic questions. "What's a SIN card?" "What's OHIP?" "Why does the bank charge us for taking our own money out of our account?" Then the humiliation of a vertiginous drop in status. "Why can't I register to vote?" "Why is my credit card limit a measly $250 when I have the proceeds of the sale of my apartment in my bank account?" "Why can't I use my professional accounting designation in Canada?" As I suffered through the perceived slights and injustices, I consoled myself that this situation was only temporary, and would soon be resolved once I had a job and a credit file.
What proved significantly more difficult to fix was the yawning gap in my cultural knowledge. "Who are the Group of Seven?" "Who are Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen?" Canadians indulged my lack of knowledge of the arts with patient explanations and visits to cultural sites, but pop-culture references were omnipresent and perplexing. "What is the humidex?" "What is a two-four?"
I pored over newspapers and the Internet, and listened intently to the conversations of strangers on public transit, trying to tune in to the soul of Toronto. Reluctant to give up BBC radio and news, I clung desperately to my past, for a while maintaining a dual media citizenship of sorts - able to converse a little on current events (or current affairs, as they are called in Glasgow), but not fully present in either place.
Once I began working in accounting, a new world of unwritten rules and customs was unveiled. I studied assiduously, all the while trying to make myself as Canadian as possible. I couldn't shake off my accent overnight, but I adopted a slower and clearer way of speaking, adding inflection in the right places. Where once I would have taken the lift and gone to the loo, now I took the elevator and visited the washroom. I made slow progress, but at least most people were unable to pinpoint my country of origin - to some I was Irish and to others Australian. I counted that as progress.
No matter how much I tried to adapt and fit in, still the questions came bubbling up. "Why do they use a different size of printer paper than in Europe?" And, most importantly, "three weeks' holiday a year? Is that it?"
Each night I returned home to our condo exhausted. Scottish friends mocked me for sounding Canadian, while Canadians still treated me like a foreigner. I was in cultural limbo, drifting between traditions and dialects, neither completely one thing nor the other. At the same time, I was an invisible immigrant: a member of the visible majority to whom no resettlement services are offered. Although I obviously enjoyed many advantages to help me settle in, I was experiencing genuine culture shock. I looked the part, but under the surface I was a mass of insecurity and unhappiness, terrified of unwitting social, or worse, work-related faux pas.
Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the whys began to slow down. The agitated and occasionally irate voice inside me quieted a little and asked fewer questions. When family and friends came to visit, I realized how much I had learned as I explained to them the habit of referring to locations by intersections and the brilliance of the TTC. I found myself occasionally asking, "why don't they have something like this in Glasgow?" - the friendly and unpretentious library system, or a car-share club. And now that I'm a Canadian citizen and have the right to vote, the whys seem less intractable. All except for one: "If the Leafs are so bad, why are tickets to the games so expensive?"
Gael Melville lives in Toronto.
Illustration by Paddy Molloy.
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