Michelle Eigenheer, a 28-year-old freelance journalist based in Louisville, Kentucky, shared similar experiences. Born in Korea, she and her mother immigrated to the U.S. in 1998, when she was six. She hasn’t seen her extended family since.
The only time she came close to visiting South Korea was when her grandmother got sick, but they ultimately never made the trip. “That’s the kind of thing it takes for us to be able to go: life or death,” she explained. “We thought she was going to die.”
People of color face travel difficulties, from discriminatory immigration laws to systemic income inequalities barring them from expensive flight tickets. For these immigrants, the lonely 2020 holiday season is not unique. It is like every other.
“This was supposed to be the time that I was going to get a break from that feeling of sorrow and loss, and instead I’m just having to muddle through it yet again.”
“It’s hard for me to understand people who cannot go a holiday without seeing their family because it just seems really out of touch with reality,” Eigenheer said. “It’s just an inability to take responsibility for their part in a functioning society.”
The conversation spurred online after student Nina Li Coomes posted on Twitter: “Not to be rude but something about watching White people lose their minds over not seeing family members for one measly holiday really makes me feel a way as one of many people in diaspora/suspended immigration who feels lucky to see loved ones once every year or two if that.”
Coomes, a 27-year-old writer and MFA candidate based in Chicago, is familiar with the financial struggles that keep her from seeing her family in Japan some years. She was unable to visit Japan last year, the country she called home until she was seven years old. And now, with strict international pandemic regulations and high risks, she faces yet another season away from her relatives.
“I’m an old pro at not seeing people,” Coomes said. “This was supposed to be the time that I was going to get a break from that feeling of sorrow and loss, and instead I’m just having to muddle through it yet again.”
But she, like so many others, has developed her own set of coping mechanisms to get through these all too common tough periods of loneliness and separation. Coomes finds that virtual Google Maps street view visits to the neighborhoods she misses in Japan help ease the nostalgia, along with consuming Japanese language literature, music, and media.