None of Us is Where We Began

View from the University of Toronto - July 2011

Whether you subscribe to the 'Out of Africa' theory of Human Evolution, the 'Out of Eden' story of Genesis, some hybrid combination of the two, or something else entirely, the simple fact is that none of us is where we began. At some point in time our ancestors moved from one place to another. For some, that history is more recent, for others it stretches back millennia.

For sure, this is a simple observation – deceptively so. When given further consideration it expands and starts to trigger questions about the construction of identity and relationships between human beings, the world, and the places that we call home within it. The questions are ones that received serious attention at the conference I attended in Toronto last month and are ones that I carry with me as I navigate daily life in Southeast Asia.

I identify myself as a migrant, one who is decidedly not where I began. 

I think about my family and my 'homeland' in Southeastern Wisconsin. As deeply rooted as we may consider ourselves, we have not always been there. My mom's side of the family lays some tangential claim to passage on the Mayflower and one of the first pilgrimages from Europe to the Americas. The Harrits family came even more recently, in the first half of the Twentieth Century. While the identity I claim from them is primarily Danish, I know that if you push back further we were really potato planters from the northern part of what is now Germany. Beyond that, I don’t really know.

I think about where I have landed, the state of Sabah, and the successive waves of peoples who have come here and who have made this place their home. The Chinese who first came here as laborers from Hong Kong and Guangdong in the 1800s, the Malays who came as traders from elsewhere in the archipelago in the centuries before that, and the indigenous peoples who, although they’ve been here since at least 3000bc, first came here from either what is present day Taiwan or the ancient landmass known as Sundaland.

I think about conflicts over territories and borders. There were the arbitrary lines that Colonial Powers drew throughout Southeast Asia that sent related people groups off on divergent histories, separating what would become Malaysia from what would become Indonesia despite their cultural and ethnic similarities. Now, off the coast of Sabah and far out in the South China Sea, one can find new lines being drawn as the countries of the ASEAN region fight off claims by China over contested islands and spits of land. In the quest for resources and control of the channels for economic growth, the questions come again: what belongs to whom and who belongs where?

I think about the labels given to those who move and stay: resident, citizen, foreigner, alien, migrant, undocumented, unwanted. I think of the workers I’ve met who risked their lives to travel to the tomato field of Florida to feed America’s appetite for cheap eats while supporting families and loved one at home through the meager remittances they send back. I think of the Nepalis I’ve worked with in Kuala Lumpur and the children we serve in Sabah, both groups trapped in precarious places within and between countries. I imagine that all of their hearts are filled with the same hopes and dreams and fears that my ancestors had as they made their passages across the North Atlantic.

We are all immigrants. None of us is where we began. Others will be in our place when we pass on. If we can acknowledge our shared migratory nature, perhaps we can more easily acknowledge the commonalities those who are currently settled share with those who find themselves on the move.

For people of faith, such a perspective might allow us to learn more about the God who formed us all as critters with a propensity to travel, the God who animates us all with one same Spririt, the God who so loved us all that he himself took on flesh – a divine migrant born in a bed of straw.