Free Passages: Welcome Home to Canada by Michael Ignatieff

guests was a Canadian, a Jewish emigrant from Nazi Germany. He told my father that what was happening in Sri Lanka reminded him of those dreadful times, and he advised my father to leave. My father vacillated, said he would think about it later. I remember being furious with him for not taking us away, feeling frightened and sad at how our lives werefalling apart. Now that I am in my thirties, I understand why my father could not go. He loved the country, had invested himself in it and made a life for himself there.
    The fear, the terror of this ethnic conflict was like a beast circling ever closer. It finally did strike us, in 1983, when the rioting spilled over into Colombo. Mobs of Sinhalese went on a rampage, destroying Tamil houses, dragging families out of hiding and butchering them. They were in possession of electoral lists which they used to single out the Tamil homes. They also destroyed Tamil-owned shops and offices. Our personal experience of it is too painful to narrate here. We lost everything. My parents applied to Canada under a program of accelerated immigration that was being offered to Tamils wishing to leave. Our papers came through and we left for Canada in 1984.
    Nine years after my parents had decided to forego an affluent lifestyle in the West in order to live out their passions and their commitment to the country of their birth, they found themselves forced to leave, to come here and start over with nothing.
    I am on the telephone to my mother again. I want to know if she has any regrets about not going to America all those years ago. She is silent for a while.In the background I can hear the grandchildren, some loud game in progress. She is about to speak when one of them interrupts to ask her something. As she talks to him, I can imagine her hand resting against the side of his head. By the time she comes back to the telephone, I already know here answer. Yet she surprises me as she elaborates on it.
    “America is too dynamic. Everything there is hire-and-fire. Here things are more low-key, one is allowed to develop at one’s own pace. Canada is a more accommodating society.” Again she is silent. “But darling, it was hard.” How laden her voice is as she draws out the “hard.”
    My mind slips back to our first year here.
    It is that day in October when you know that the world around you has turned irreversibly towards winter. All last night the wind clattered against our windows, torn at the sides of the house, the rain a battering of angry fists. Now a weak sun sheds its light on shorn trees, their naked branches like arms stretched upwards in hunger, the newly fallen leaves blackened clots on the grass.
    My mother returns home, trembling with humiliation. At an office where she has temporary work,there was a party at lunchtime. She had brought something, expecting to share in the potluck meal. Yet just before the lunch hour her supervisor came to her. “You can go on break now. We’re having a party.”
    As my mother sits at the dining table telling us this story, a helpless rage takes hold of me, a rage I see reflected in the face of my father and siblings. Even before we arrived in this country, my mother had already accepted that she would never be able to practise medicine here. Unlike in America, where she would have had only to sit an exam, here she would have to do an internship as well, and there are a mere handful of internships for all the foreign doctors applying. The bar is set unfairly high. My mother has also realized that to say she is a doctor on her resumé intimidates people who might hire her. She has “doctored” it down, first to a Bachelor of Science and finally to housewife.
    I look at my mother this day as if seeing her after a long absence. She is of that first generation of modern Sri Lankan women, imbued with a sense of confidence that her gender will not hold her back, living out the fruits of the struggles of the women before her. As a Sri Lankan woman, she