“I don’t think I fit in anywhere, really. The Dhaka traffic gives me headaches. I miss having alu bhorta and bhaat. What I don’t miss is not being able to go out for a walk at night back home and the indefinite curfew on crop tops. Did you vote? Whom did you vote for? I wish I was there. I can come home next summer, but I don’t think I will. I’m not sure if I will get to see Coldplay perform live any other time. I don’t lock my door most nights–it’s Japan, you don’t really have to. I think if I could sleep in my own bedroom one more time, I’d sleep better than I have in the last five years here. Yeah, my friends here are great. Yeah, I miss you guys. I miss you so much.”
Of all the research and interviews I sifted through over the last few weeks, this unmindful monologue from my immigrant friend comes closest to explaining the scattered duality of belonging for everyone living away from home. Except that’s the point — the motherland left behind no longer feels like home. When it comes to fitting in, the room is rarely a room at all. It is a corridor. Most of us live in that corridor: suspended between geographies, fluent in both, anchored in neither.
Nowhere Feels Like Home — Not There, Not Here
We are often told that migration is simply a matter of finding our people. That somewhere in the new country there is a community waiting — a cultural association, a student group, a neighborhood enclave — where the loneliness will soften into recognition. But for many South Asians in the diaspora, the difficulty is not the absence of community. It is the rigidity of categories. You are not “cultural enough” for the ones who preserved everything intact. Not detached enough for those who shed it quickly. Too Western for relatives back home. Too foreign for the country on your passport. The taxonomy is familiar: American. Desi. ABCD. FOB. Model minority. Person of color. Each label promises coherence. None fully accommodates the in-between.
Psychologists describe this as bicultural identity integration — the extent to which a person experiences their two cultural identities as harmonious or in conflict. Research shows that when those identities feel blended, distress lowers, resilience rises. But when they feel oppositional — as if often the case— the psychological toll is cumulative. It manifests as quiet vigilance. As self-editing. As fatigue.
And yet the rupture does not end there. Because if the foreign land never quite becomes a room you can exhale in, the homeland does not remain untouched either. Time alters it. Distance mythologizes it. When you return, your accent is different. Your politics are different. Your patience is different. You are received not as someone who belongs, but as someone who left. The tragedy is subtle: the immigrant does not move from one home to another. They inherit two places that both feel partially withheld.
Because if the foreign land never quite becomes a room you can exhale in, the homeland does not remain untouched either. Time alters it. Distance mythologizes it.
The question that began this piece was relatively simple: Which room do I not belong in? But the longer one looks at the architecture of migration, the more unsettling the question becomes, the more it looks like Which room do I belong in? instead. It is not about exclusion from a single room. It is about searching for one that feels undeniably yours.
And so begins the balancing act.
The Endless Negotiation of Self
Belonging, in the end, is somewhat of a choice. And in the face of uncertainty, immigrants do what we all do. Trial and error. Identity becomes a project. The immigrant becomes a curator of selves — selecting which fragments to preserve, which to archive, which to discard. Keep the language, the food, the reflex to send money home. Hold on to filial duty, to collectivism, to the instinct that family is non-negotiable. Leave behind what constricted you: the misogyny, the colorism, the dismissal of mental health, the competition disguised as community.
From the West, adopt autonomy. The right to date openly. The right to pivot careers. The right to consent, without pressure. But resist the quiet corrosion of hyper-individualism, the disposability of relationships, the idea that independence must mean isolation.
In one room, you are the accomplished daughter, respectable and restrained. In another, you shed that skin entirely — dressing differently, speaking differently, desiring differently. Conservative here. Progressive there. Grateful in one conversation, resentful in the next. Fluent in contradiction. Some of these transformations are experiments. Others are rebellions.
But the negotiation is relentless. Eventually, the performance becomes heavier than the prejudice.
The Psychological Toll
This dilemma is not a romanticised tragedy of living as a South Asian — or anyone looking for going somewhere with more opportunities than where they were born. It is not aesthetic longing, not just poetic displacement. It produces real, measurable psychological strain.
The daily mechanics of survival amplify this strain. Code-switching — shifting accent, tone, humor, political expression — demands cognitive labor. Over time, that labor becomes fatigue. In professional settings, racial ambiguity triggers stereotype threat.. In intimate relationships, cultural norms clash quietly, producing doubt about compatibility, about compromise, about who must bend further. Layered onto this is cultural guilt. In collectivist families, filial duty is not optional; it is moral infrastructure. To choose autonomy can feel like ingratitude. To pursue unconventional relationships can feel like betrayal. To remain cautious, however, risks stagnation — the fear of shrinking oneself to preserve approval. Many live with the persistent anxiety of becoming unrecognizable to their parents while simultaneously fearing they have not become enough.
Add to this internalized hierarchies — colorism, class mobility shame, the pressure of the “model minority” myth — and the immigrant psyche becomes a site of constant negotiation. The consequence is chronic imposter syndrome: too Western here, too altered there. Every decision extracts something. In almost every direction, it feels as though someone is being disappointed.
So are immigrants doomed to this duality forever? To stand in corridors, hovering between rooms that never quite close behind them? In some sense, yes. The duality does not evaporate. The accent does not entirely settle. The questions do not stop. There will always be rooms where you are asked to explain yourself; to clarify your name, your loyalties, your choices. There will be rooms in which you feel slightly edited, slightly heightened, slightly aware.
But what if the duality is not doom?
If the first grief of migration is realizing that no room feels entirely inherited, the second realization should be a quieter and more radical one: you are no longer confined to one. The corridor is not only a place of suspension; it is also a place of access. You have stood in more doorways than most. You understand how rooms are arranged. Belonging, then, shifts from being granted to being chosen.
The corridor is not only a place of suspension; it is also a place of access. You have stood in more doorways than most.
Maybe the immigrant condition is not the loss of a single, unquestioned home. Maybe it is the acquisition of partial homes — smaller spaces, yes, but spaces nonetheless — in many rooms. A chair pulled slightly closer. A language spoken without apology. A boundary set. A tradition kept as heirloom. A tradition discarded as baggage.
You may never walk into a room and feel entirely unobserved. But you can decide how much of yourself sits down. And maybe that is the quiet evolution of the question. Not which room don’t I belong in? Not even which room do I belong in? But rather: Where do I choose to stay?
In that choice — imperfect, ongoing, deeply personal — there is something steadier than inheritance. There is authorship.
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