The Line That Turned

by Sofia Stojic
Pancevo, Serbia

I have always struggled with the notion of straight lines. The chronology of history, for example, as a straight line. “Progress” as a straight line. Even my life, my maturation, my self-improvement, as a straight line.

To me, immigration always seemed to be presented as a straight line; the line of your life trajectory is heading one way in the “old” country, and suddenly it diverges into a second in the direction of the “new” country. The new line seemingly moves forward towards an undefined but guaranteed better future – the only certainty that could justify such a momentous decision. I want to reach out and embrace every being that has ever experienced this fragmented trajectory, but still I reject the idea of this second, forward-hurtling line, with an abruptly severed past left behind it.

My paternal grandfather was a respected architect – the old-school kind who, in spite of his boxy 2000s desktop, drafted all his projects by hand on a slanted table under the strong light of his work lamp. He taught me that a line has to have life. It can be straight, but it must be alive.

I wonder how my parents saw the life of their new straight line when they emigrated from Serbia to Australia in 1996, my brother in tow. Immediately, there was the struggle of my father’s unemployment, my mother’s lost tongue while she wrapped it around a novel and unfamiliar one, and, soon enough, a fourth line to draw when I was born a year later.

Even then, the straight line of immigration was not really a straight line. Within a year, my mother had returned to Serbia for a visit with her two babies. She almost didn’t rejoin her husband; this was her reward for surviving her bitter and endless rain of tears over the last 18 months. But we did rejoin him, and at some point it became clear that she had claimed the sureness of her new line, moving fixedly towards a future point. In time, my brother had too. After unrealised whispers of moving the family back a decade later, it seemed my father had finally accepted his migrant fate, just as bitterly as my mother had once wept for hers. All immigrants, but all so clearly and calmly on this new line, which was now thicker and stronger and overall better, than the life of the old line. Obviously.

What, then, does that make the line that (re)turned?

I have tried to rationalize my return to my home country (I claim this firmly, despite it being different from my birth country). I am still trying. Long before I had the chance to make this decision, adults around me would politely marvel at my strung-together Serbian sentences, filled with errors and English stand-in phrases, but still better than those of my peers. My parents only speak Serbian with us at home, I would say. They would nod in approval and sudden understanding, pleased at solving the mystery, then change the topic to something lighter.

At times, my sentences still feel strung-together, are certainly still filled with errors, and are still met the same way by adults here – but now these adults are my peers, mixed with those of my parents and even grandparents. Again, the nods of approval, but this time with blank faces, without understanding.

The only understanding I have found has been from those, like me, who have also turned their lines. It is difficult to communicate the depth of estrangement, perhaps felt even more deeply as a second-generation migrant, to someone who has never stood out in this way.

When I meet new locals, I joke that I am making a colony of returned-migrant expats. There are more of us than you think, I say, trying to persuade myself as much as them. “Oh, I know”, they offer, “my uncle lived for a few years in Germany (or Norway, or the United States)”. I could never, they say, and shake their heads with exaggerated sympathy. I rarely have the chance to explain that it’s not the same.

My turned line has been labelled many things by both those I left and those I have just met – brave, impulsive, stupid, selfish, crazy, near-sighted, delusional. The openly accusatory comments about my future children are the most interesting. My parents gave up the security of their family, friends and a familiar society to give their children a “better life”. What have I done to mine? At first l would be amused by these decisive labels (Serbians are famous for being direct), then tense in the silence that lingered. Now I wonder whether this is just my migrant fate, woven into my parents’ lines and now tugging at mine.

A Serbian-Australian friend once reasoned that, in fact, our parents’ greatest sacrifice and gift was not a more prosperous life than theirs, but the opportunity to choose our futures. I still cling to this logic as to a life-raft. Perhaps for the first time, I just have the privilege to choose the hushed dreams that all immigrants hold within themselves at some point, and now to live those unspoken questions.

Did I belong there? Do I belong here? Was my life better there? Is it truly better here? Have I suffered more there, or here? Was I happy there, but didn’t notice? Am I happy here, but am trying so hard to fit in that I don’t notice either?

When we misbehaved as kids, my mother would threaten benignly, “you’ll see when you have children of your own”. Once she noted with sad irony that if I returned, she would be living the same phrase spoken by her own mother’s, my grandmother’s, lips; her own child bringing her the same pain of leaving which she brought upon her mother. Perhaps it was inevitable that their line wouldn’t simply end at point B, Australia – even as their diverged line grew stronger, its origins stubbornly refused to fade. But then why is my decision to return such a jarring phenomenon, and why are there so few migrant stories like mine, after that initial shattering move?

Perhaps my return was more than just a desire to understand the first line, the first people that were left behind. Perhaps it was a subconscious need to confront the same uprootedness that my parents faced almost thirty years ago. When proudly clutching my heritage in the new country became too little, I chose to honour them by living through the same experiences they bore for me – but this time, in a way that would close the circle and bring us back home, from the most far-flung continent imaginable in their time.

What if the problem is not so much the fact that I turned “back”, regressing (supposedly) on what was a promising progression towards a better future. Instead, let’s make the problem that of how we quantify our lives. What does “better” even mean? In material terms, some aspects of life in Australia are at a higher standard than in Serbia. I would argue that some are at an equal standard, and some are lower there than here. Yet it amuses me that some refuse to believe that these aspects cannot be outweighed by the intangible but very real life I have gained with my return, and which was inaccessible to me there. Living in my home country has made the narrow, material understanding of “better” almost irrelevant, and further deepened the cracks in linear understandings of immigration.

If I ever did, I certainly don’t believe now that migration is a straight and irreversible split from the old line, destined to stamp out all memory of its origin. I prefer to think of it as a single and fluid life-line, which flows as we direct it. I also no longer believe what my younger self was once so sure of – that I am more one than the other, that I fit seamlessly here but not there, that this is a line which may never turn back on itself, again, perhaps just as instinctively as it did a year ago. I acknowledge my heavy privilege in being able to make this decision, as I try not to shoulder the quiet antagonism of some of my new peers. You were right, I want to say, life is not easy here, and I am not really one of you. But I left everything you dream of to come here, and now if you’ll accept me, maybe I could be … ?

I want to stand tall and say, I cannot help that my line dances itself into a circle, alive with my grandfather’s hand and all my ancestors before him – a singular line which is decided and thriving now, and which may grow restless again in search of a better future. But for now my line has returned to its source, and it is finally grounded in a deeper understanding of my roots and the contemporary society my parents left and which is now finally a part of me. And tomorrow, just like my mother and her mother before her, I will say to my future family, you’ll see, you’ll have lines of your own someday.

2024