The West is a culture shock for family-oriented Asians -The Asian Age

Adapting to a new culture is not easy for some immigrants who go to work or live in a foreign country. Most of the time, they have to learn the local language because some locals don't speak a second language.

If you live in An Arab country in the Middle East you need to learn Arabic to communicate with the Arabs and you also need to know Arabian etiquette, customs, and culture lest you should not offend an Arab. It is not too difficult for a South Asian to adapt them in An Arab country, and yet some of them get culture shock in the Middle Eastern countries.

But after moving to the West from Asia, Some immigrants always experience culture shock despite living in the West for decades. They get a huge culture shock because their ideas, family values, and culture differ considerably with their adopted countries' culture. But the people who are religious conservatives are not enamored of the West and its values.

Schools help the children of immigrants to acculturate. So, the majority of children of immigrants are grown up adapting and acculturating to the Western values. But often, the children are on a collision course with their parents about the conflicts between the two cultures.

A Bangladeshi-Canadian super rich family, our close friends, usually gets together with us every now and then. The man and his wife are practicing Muslims.

Their eldest son is completely infatuated with a girl whose family is of Indian Gujarati descent. Both of the parents want their son to bring an end to this infatuation because they have a rock-solid disliking that their son will get married to a Hindu girl without converting to Islam, but the son, though he is not an atheist but doesn't care about the girl's religion. The boy is getting older and soon will be approaching towards 40.

Marriage is still widely practiced in the East but traditional marriage is on the downward path in the West as well as in some far-Eastern countries including Japan, China, and South Korea. Though traditional marriage is on a downward trajectory, but interfaith marriage is on the rise in the west. According to my family friends' belief, they and their son will be committing a great sin if their son's non-Muslim wife doesn't get converted to Islam.

Bangladeshi people have always had a weakness for fairer skin when it comes to getting their sons' marriages. Another Bangladeshi-Canadian family, which is our family friend, too, lives in our neighborhood. The couple's only son fell in love with a girl whose family is of African descent. The boy's parents couldn't accept a girl of dark-complexion for their son's wife, so the son moved out of the home to start living together with his girlfriend.

Love is color blind to them. As a Canadian educated man, their son doesn't believe in the superiority of white coloured skin but personality traits. It is worth mentioning that the numbers of interracial marriages are on the rise in the USA and Canada.

A few years ago, on the subway train in Toronto, a Bangladeshi man witnessed an intimate moment between a girl and a boy. The man suspected that they had a love affair. He knew the girl's family and disclosed the incident to her parents. The parents told their daughter to break up with that boy and also ordered her to make a friendship with a Canadian-Pakistani girl who was in her age group.

A few years later when the girl finished her university study, her parents had told her to get ready for her marriage. But she replied that she was in love with the Canadian-Pakistani girl with whom her parents told her to make a friendship. And, she also replied that if she had to marry someone, then she would only marry her Canadian-Pakistani girlfriend.

Nowadays, an extraordinary number of South Asian millennials have also been remaining unmarried like Western millennials. The majority of them can't even think about their marriages due to their hard up, student loans and high cost of living. They would rather live together and take no babies than get married and having babies.

So, fewer numbers of millennials are getting married in the West in the recent time. But then again, the majority of the marriages come up into an end with huge failure or divorce. So, both men and women are avoiding marriage. Someone needs to pay thousands of dollars if a marriage ends up in divorce. Men have to share half of their properties and assets with their wives if they get divorced.

The immigrant parents who are smart and liberals give permission to their children for interfaith, interracial, and color-blind marriages so that they don't remain unmarried. But the immigrant parents who remain adamant about imposing their will on their kids, and then there is a chance that their grown-up kids will remain unmarried for their entire life.


The writer, a Bangladeshi freethinker, is based in Toronto, Canada.