Gallery of Human Migration Literary Award
2025 Honourable Mention
Awarded to the story
Her story
The Prairie Collective
Total Reading Time: 13 minutes
Her Story is a conversation between SPEAKER 1, a first-generation immigrant to Canada,and their partner, SPEAKER 2, who was born and raised in the aftermath of their parents’migration. The dialogue was sparked by SPEAKER 1’s curiosity about SPEAKER 2’sexperiences growing up between cultures, languages, and expectations. What follows isan unfolding exchange, where voices alternate, reflect, and respond to each other.
This dialogue unfolded over several conversations during the summer of 2025. It hasbeen divided into three parts and edited for clarity, flow, and pacing.
I
Inheritance
SPEAKER 1: first-generation immigrant /SPEAKER 2: second-generation Canadian
SPEAKER 1:
How do you feel right now?
SPEAKER 2:
Calm. I’m not in a rush, unless it’s something biological, like I need to eat. I also feel slightly detached. Like, I know I should be more moved by being here, but when that doesn’t happen, I feel like I’m missing something.
SPEAKER 1:
What do you mean? Do you mind elaborating?
SPEAKER 2:
I thought I’d be more overwhelmed by the scenery here in Stanley Park, Vancouver: the cherry blossoms, the blue sky. It’s beautiful. It’s not too hot. But part of me is disappointed the trees didn’t fully bloom. Then I tell myself: why nitpick? It’s like your body’s here but something inside hasn’t caught up.
SPEAKER 1:
Hmm, ‘here’ is an interesting concept. If you were to think of the earliest memories of being ‘here’, what would they be?
SPEAKER 2:
It’s being in Canada. My mom came here because of poverty. She married at 30, which was considered very late at the time. These days that sounds normal. Then, it was like the end of the world. She saw someone who could give them a better life. That was my father.
SPEAKER 1:
When you say poverty, are you comfortable to elaborate?
SPEAKER 2:
When Ma was little, living with her grandparents, the family was doing okay. But once they passed away, everything changed. It was poverty. Like rationing food. My mother used to work outside to support six other siblings.
SPEAKER 1:
Did she easily reveal these stories when you asked?
SPEAKER 2:
I didn’t really have to ask. There were these envelopes with red and blue stripes around the edges, airmail. My mom would share those letters with me. She’d talk to me constantly, even as a baby. I was her first child. I didn’t even realize it was something to ask. It was just known.
SPEAKER 1:
You mentioned being the first child. You don’t really notice you’re in Canada when you’re little, right? What do you remember about growing up in Canada?
SPEAKER 2:
The only thing that really stuck was food. That was the one connection to culture that couldn’t be broken. I rejected a lot of the other stuff growing up in Canada, language, Sunday school, temple. But the food stayed. And school. That’s where I realized I was different. That there was such a thing as an accent, being called “Paky.” School was the first time that hit.
SPEAKER 1:
Do you remember the first moment you felt injustice? Was being called “Paky” a one-time thing, or did it happen more?
SPEAKER 2:
It was constant exclusion. Being left out was normal. Monday morning, the teacher would ask what everyone did over the weekend, and kids would say, “We went to her party.” That’s when you found out, you weren’t invited. Once, a couple older girls came up to me during recess. I thought maybe they wanted to talk. Later, I realized they were teasing me. I misunderstood their politeness for kindness. Then came the burst of laughter. That misplaced laugh, it suddenly makes you feel ashamed.
SPEAKER 1:
Hmm, and what about in your house? What was it like growing up as the first child to two working parents?
SPEAKER 2:
Both my parents had to leave together. When I didn’t go to school, they’d say: lock the doors, shut the windows, don’t open the door for anyone, not even if you hear our voices. We have the keys, we’ll let ourselves in. At night especially, if they said they’d be gone two hours and it stretched longer, the panic would start. But later, after my sister and brother were born, I noticed my mom talked to me more than to them. I knew all the gossip. Every fight. Every drama. I’d hear her on the phone talking to relatives, and when she hung up, I’d ask for the rest of the story. That was the kind of engagement I came to expect, those shared moments. Otherwise, both my parents were generally exhausted. Just going through the motions.
SPEAKER 1:
Do you think you were absorbing your parents’ burnout?
SPEAKER 2:
One of the earliest memories I have is being always woken up around 4 or 5 in the morning. It felt like the middle of the night. My mom worked two jobs. My dad had to drive her, so he’d pack us all into the car to drop her off or pick her up. I didn’t feel the absence at that moment. But later, you realize, yeah, they weren’t there for most of it. My mental health started to become a mess. I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t want to do anything to add to their stress. My dad used to say: “You cannot get hurt. We don’t have time to take you to the hospital.” That one line shaped so many decisions. Or non-decisions.
SPEAKER 1:
I remember you told me that story about the bike, when you got hurt?
SPEAKER 2:
Yeah. I snuck out once, went biking by myself. Fell. Scraped my knee so badly, it took the birthmark right off.
SPEAKER 1:
What happened after?
SPEAKER 2:
I had to hide it. Changed my jeans, hid the blood. Didn’t want them to know. The injury lasted weeks. That scar became a reminder for everything I wasn’t supposed to do.
SPEAKER 1:
You also told me once about your dad leaving milk by your bedside? Can you tell me more about these little gestures of care?
SPEAKER 2:
Yeah, then there were also these little moments. Every night, my dad left three bottles, milk, juice, and water, by our beds. Just in case we woke up hungry. He would also buy KFC on Toonie Tuesdays. That was his bachelor treat back before we came into his life. But now, he’d
share it with us. I remember him yelling at us for not eating it right, “Eat the cartilage, the ends!”
SPEAKER 1:
Were there other moments that made you feel like, Yeah, I’m part of this immigrant experience?
SPEAKER 2:
Hmm, I remember hearing about the end of my dad’s work shift. He would always wait until the parking lot emptied. He was the last one to the car so he could pull out without hitting anything. A fender bender? Too expensive. Too time-consuming. And if anything were to happen, I would be the one to handle the calls.
SPEAKER 1:
What do you mean?
SPEAKER 2:
As a child, I used to handle all the phone bills, dispute charges, even call strangers selling cars in the classifieds. One time, I was translating for my dad about a Volkswagen. He thought it was an actual wagon and didn’t want it. I was trying to explain to him in Punjabi that it was an actual car. The guy on the phone yelled at me for not speaking English. All I could think was, how stupid can you be? I felt so much anger, not at the man, but at the absurdity of it. It’s like yelling at a blind man’s walking stick. That was the moment I realized just how invisible some people want you to be.
SPEAKER 1:
What was your response?
SPEAKER 2:
I told my dad in Punjabi, quietly, what the man said. Hung up. I resented that I had to do it. That my dad couldn’t. That when it really mattered, our communication needed to be perfect, and it wasn’t. I didn’t even speak my language well. I avoided it because I didn’t want to stumble.
SPEAKER 1:
What’s interesting to me about this conversation is this theme of being risk-averse. Yet your family took one of the biggest risks imaginable, migration. Why do you think people become so cautious after such a leap?
SPEAKER 2:
Because once you cross the river, you never want to get wet again. You protect your kids from even the smallest chances of failure. But your kid doesn’t have the same perspective, you’ve seen the flood, they’ve just seen the shoreline. For your parents, it feels like every mistake could cost everything, and that fear is taught down. And now, that fear lives in me.
SPEAKER 1:
I wonder if maybe sadness comes from a kind of grief we can’t name. Like maybe you’re grieving something from the past you didn’t know about. Or something from the future you’re anticipating. What do you think about that? Grieving without really being able to pin the source?
SPEAKER 2:
I don’t know about grieving the future. But the past? That’s real. My mom grieved her father for years. She never got to say goodbye. He was very sick, she had to travel between cities for his treatment, which they couldn’t afford. She got married partly because of that, poverty and urgency. And in the end, he died anyway. She lost him, and we lost her attention. That grief rolled forward, and is passed on like an inheritance.
SPEAKER 1:
Hmm, we’ve also talked about this idea of collective survival, how your family relied on each other to survive. You mentioned needing someone beside you to try something new. Can you tell me more about that?
SPEAKER 2:
I need the hand-holding I didn’t get as a kid. Usually, parents lead you into things, drop you at the park, walk you into a new experience. My parents didn’t have time. So if I didn’t have someone beside me, I didn’t try. Not because I couldn’t, but because I wouldn’t. It was just my parents and my two younger siblings, the five of us in a whole new world. So if one of us was brave, the rest would follow.
SPEAKER 1:
That last part really resonates. The idea that if one person in your family was brave enough to step out, the others could follow. That kind of interdependence, it’s survival, but it’s also trust.
SPEAKER 2:
It’s not that I lacked courage. It’s just, it had to be shared. That’s how we made it through things. Even if it didn’t always look like love or connection on the outside. It was happening.
SPEAKER 1:
Do you feel like that’s still true now? That your sense of belonging is tied to that kind of collective strength?
SPEAKER 2:
Yes. But it’s also evolving. Meeting you, for example. Our whole relationship, it gave me new ground. Not freedom exactly,
but expansion. Space I didn’t know I needed.
SPEAKER 1:
It’s fascinating to me how there’s so much resonance between us, even though we migrated at different points. As you know, I arrived in Canada as an adult. I am a first-generation immigrant, with memories of a before and after. But you were raised inside the after. I’ve always been curious about what grows in that space, the children of migration. What it feels like to grow up surrounded by it, to be shaped by decisions made before you were born.
SPEAKER 2:
Yeah. Your crossing was literal. Mine was inherited. But both leave you with things you carry. Things you don’t always see until you’re sitting across from someone who recognizes them.
“Because once you cross the river, you never want to get wet again. You protect your kids from even the smallest chances of failure. But your kid doesn’t have the same perspective—you’ve seen the flood, they’ve just seen the shoreline.”
II
Return
SPEAKER 1: first-generation immigrant / SPEAKER 2: second-generation Canadian
SPEAKER 1: How are you feeling right now?
SPEAKER 2: Honestly? Perfect. The air smells like flowers, and it’s warm but not too warm.
SPEAKER 1:Yeah, last time was beautiful too, but today, today just feels like it’s settling in deeper. It’s quieter. There’s something about today that feels… more at peace.
SPEAKER 2: There’s so much beauty in peace.
SPEAKER 1: Last time, we talked a little about grief, how your mom lost her father young, and
how you inherited that loss. Can you walk me through what grief meant to you?
SPEAKER 2:When you go through trauma, you lose something. Sometimes it’s your sense of
direction, like the life you thought you were building gets derailed. You start grieving not just
what happened, but what could have been.
Growing up, my parents didn’t openly show grief. They kept their traumas contained. It felt like
they made a clean break from their old lives, like everything from “the other land” stayed there.
We were nuclear. That focus on family made us strong, but it also made us… dependent. If you
only have each other, you always have each other, but that’s both a comfort and a cage.
SPEAKER 1:Hmm, so the first lesson is: help each other, because no one else will?
SPEAKER 2: My dad drilled it into us. He’d always say, “You can’t trust anyone but your family. People will try to divide you, don’t let them.” He framed division as a kind of evil. I think he was hurt from his own broken relationships with his brothers. He projected that onto us. To him, unity was everything. If we weren’t united, it meant someone else had won. As a kid, I didn’t have the words to ask, “But if unity is everything, why aren’t you united with your family?”
SPEAKER 1: That’s such a common thread in South Asian households. Like, you’re taught to find pride in unity, but also taught to compete. It creates this weird space where you’re suspicious of outsiders and still unsure about insiders.
SPEAKER 2: Right. And then there’s this emotional jealousy. Like, why does it feel like when others rise, I fall? Someone else’s joy casts a shadow on my own timeline. It’s not rational, but it’s real. All the comparisons, the expectations, they build up until it becomes too much. For me, it got so intense, it pushed me to quit school.
SPEAKER 1: Would you be comfortable talking about it?
SPEAKER 2: Around 2017. I had an emergency breakdown. I was so zoned out I ran a red light. I got help and the psychiatrist was kind. He helped me name what was happening. It wasn’t just one thing. It was everything. So around that time, it was decided that I’d take a break
and go with my mom to India. She had just lost her brother, my godfather. A family friend suggested the trip, thinking it would help us both reset. They booked it for three weeks. I didn’t want to go. The last time I went was when I was five. I was scared. I told my mom two
weeks would be enough. She said, “It takes three days just to settle in.”
SPEAKER 1: What was it like once you were there?
SPEAKER 2:It changed me. Completely. I let the trip happen to me. It was surreal, like I was still asleep but my body went through the motions. I had my period, I was motion-sick, dehydrated, and couldn’t sleep. But the moment we arrived, it felt like a breath I hadn’t taken in years. I met 25 relatives, most of whom I’d never spoken to before. It was immediate love. Unconditional. I remembered the stairs in my mom’s house from when I was five, I ran up them like no time had passed.
SPEAKER 1: Wow, like muscle memory.
SPEAKER 2: Yes. It felt like home. And I wanted more. I didn’t want the trip to end. I got greedy for it. I wanted to transfer universities, stay there longer. My sister back home supported me by extending the trip. She took care of everything while I was away. Eventually, I stayed for almost three months. It became clear: school wasn’t for me anymore. I’d been lying to myself every semester, withdrawing, hoping something would click until next enrolment. But I was drowning. When I came back, my sister saw the change. She said, “I don’t
think school is your thing right now.” That was my confirmation. I didn’t go back. I never stepped foot on campus again.
SPEAKER 1: And that was it.
SPEAKER 2: That was it.
SPEAKER 1: So what was it about India that made it feel like such a reset?
SPEAKER 2: India works for Indians. That’s what hit me. At first, it was chaos. There are no traffic signs, no signals, but it works. The bus stops at the right moment, the people cross roads at an unlabeled crossing. I realized, it’s not what you know, it’s who you ask. You learn to rely on people. Then there were coincidences. My godfather had passed away, and it just so happened that his daughter came to India at the same time we were in Haridwar. She was there to release his ashes. Same city, same week. In the evening we were by the river, I heard the same song they played at his funeral. A song I’d never heard before or since. Just twice, at his funeral, and then, there.
SPEAKER 1: Goosebumps.
SPEAKER 2: Right? I felt like the main character in a movie. Like something, someone, was speaking to me.
SPEAKER 1: Did you feel different when it was time to leave?
SPEAKER 2: I was in tears. It felt like being sent off after a wedding. Like I was leaving a part of myself behind. And I kept asking, what am I leaving? I was born in Canada. I’m a citizen. But this place, my mom’s home, my ancestral home, it felt like home, too.
SPEAKER 1: It’s like you had two embassies. One in Canada. One in India.
SPEAKER 2: Exactly. And the lines blurred when I saw other Canadians there, students with little Canadian flags on their backpacks. I thought, those are my people. But when they looked at me, they didn’t see that. And then, the language thing. When I returned to Edmonton, it felt like I lost my English! I tried to talk to my sister and couldn’t find the right words. On the other hand, Punjabi just flowed. It was instant. I sat at the dining table and realized I was thinking in Punjabi.
SPEAKER 1: That’s so powerful. That’s embodiment.
SPEAKER 2:It really was. I let go of English. I let go of school. I let go of shame. And in doing that, I picked up something else. I picked myself up.
III
Construction
SPEAKER 1: first-generation immigrant / SPEAKER 2: second-generation Canadian
SPEAKER 1: How are you feeling today?
SPEAKER 2: Good. Rested.
SPEAKER 1: Today is also… kind of significant, right? It’s Canada Day.
SPEAKER 2: Yeah, it’s also the 20-year anniversary of when we bought our house in Edmonton. That was our possession date. I was 12.
SPEAKER 1: Wow, I didn’t know that! And just to orient our readers a bit, you are from Edmonton, but you relocated to Vancouver at the time of our first conversation. It’s been a few months since. It feels like you’re settled in the new city now. Do you want to talk about that shift?
SPEAKER 2: I’d say I feel more rooted when I have a routine. Routine gives you something to measure by, otherwise, you just feel like you’re floating. It hit me more when I went back to Edmonton for a short trip last month. When you step away, you realize how much you were shaped by an environment you didn’t even question. It’s easy to fall back into those old grooves. It made me appreciate how much more I’m capable of now, not because I’m better, but because I’m not in that same loop.
SPEAKER 1: And you’re volunteering at the Carnegie Community Centre, right?
SPEAKER 2:Yeah, I volunteer at a learning centre in the Downtown Eastside. People come in to learn English, get help with forms, resumes, or sometimes just for company.
SPEAKER 1: What about the people you meet there, do you connect with migrants?
SPEAKER 2: Definitely. Especially older migrants still trying to learn English. People think they don’t want to integrate, but they do. They just learn slower. They repeat lessons over and over again, and they still come back. That dedication reminds me of my dad. For their generation, education was the only ladder out of poverty.
SPEAKER 1: Hmm, in the last session, we discussed you travelling between Edmonton and India for a trip. Now you’ve experienced another movement but within Canada, from Edmonton to Vancouver. How do those movements compare in parallel?
SPEAKER 2: I don’t know if this is profound or just the most basic truth ever, but what I’ve learned is, if the environment doesn’t push me to adapt, I won’t adapt. If I feel stuck, or like I’m not moving forward, I should literally just go somewhere else. Whether it’s something small, like taking a different route on a walk, or just forcing myself out of my room or something bigger, like a trip, just move! I always overestimate how hard it’s going to be. Even going back to Edmonton last month, I was sobbing. Then, when I was leaving Edmonton again, it was hard, having to move across different versions of yourself.
SPEAKER 1: That reminds me of something from our last session, the idea that you had two embassies. That metaphor still fascinates me. It implies that the migrant body itself becomes a nation, with outposts of emotion, and identity rooted in different geographies. It suggests places where you are protected, known, and even expected, even if not always fully understood. Do you feel like you’ve built a new embassy here in Vancouver?
SPEAKER 2: I do. But it came in layers. At first, I felt invincible, touristy. Then reality kicked in with new fears of having to follow routine. But coming back from Edmonton, I looked out the bus window and thought, these are my streets. I know them. I belong here. Not fully, maybe. But more than before.
SPEAKER 1:That’s good to hear! I’ll ask you something we’ve been circling around. Do you feel like your story belongs to one city, country, one generation, or something else entirely?
SPEAKER 2: When you ask that, I think of my grandmother, my dad’s mom. She was basically the reason we’re all here. The one who started the wave. She got all her children married in India, and still found a way to bring everyone here. She babysat all of us. She’s the beginning of this lineage that made our lives in Canada possible. And so when I think about whose story it is… it’s hers. And my dad’s. And my mom’s. But it’s also mine. Like, my story is uniquely Canadian in the sense that I grew up inside this immigrant structure, with that identical starting point that so many of our parents had. Low-wage jobs. Double shifts. Sacrifices. The parents froze themselves in time when they arrived. The culture they brought stayed with them, even while the countries they left kept evolving. You realize they didn’t even name what they were going through. We’ve only started to give them names now, anxiety, depression, burnout. They just called it life.
SPEAKER 1:And we’ve been passing it on, generation after generation, saying: that’s life.
SPEAKER 2: I think the hardest truth is, it’s never been easy. Not for any migrant. And it’s probably not going to get easier. Every generation has to adapt to something new. It could be something small, like rolling your ankle, or something massive like a pandemic. There’s always great difficulty. But the ones who survive aren’t the smartest, they’re the most adaptable.
SPEAKER 1: Hmm, could you elaborate on this?
SPEAKER 2: Being adaptable is the skill we never talk about. Instead, we’re trained to prioritize safety above all else. When you never adapt, you’re less likely to survive the next challenge.
SPEAKER 1: You mean we should celebrate adaptation?
SPEAKER 2: There’s a Canada Day, but no Migrants’ Day. Yet migration lives on, in an endless living repository of stories that stretch across languages and lifetimes. Migration is not the edge of a story. It is the centre. The beginning, again and again.
SPEAKER 1:When you said “a living repository.” It almost feels like architecture, something layered, designed, perhaps by intention or accident. Is that what belonging is? Not something we find, but something we construct.
SPEAKER 2:And it’s always under construction.
SPEAKER 1:Yes, I am trying to envision this ‘migrant’s embassy’. Its architecture is assembled across time. It is a honeycomb of archives, where one hexagon holds the story of the milk by your bedside, another of the scraped birthmark, another of the red light you ran through, another of the Haridwar river, or the moment Punjabi came back to you like a breath. Memory. Layered.
SPEAKER 2:Yes, I think of each story as a beam, each retelling a brick. In Canada, with its layered, diverse population of migrants, this structure is always being built and rebuilt collectively. Every migrant who speaks adds to the foundation. So now when I think about embassies from our earlier conversation, I think they’re inside every migrant. They open and close, depending on which part of us is being interrogated, which part of us is being integrated. That’s the nature of migrant architecture: it’s dynamic. The structure keeps evolving, expanding in all directions. It’s a design that resists collapse, and even adapts to collapse.
SPEAKER 1: Yes, extremely dynamic, I think migration isn’t just a movement across land. It isn’t even a movement across time. It reaches forward and backward all at once.
SPEAKER 2:We are the architects, we are the architecture. My story is a collective, even when it feels solitary at times. I really hope, when you read this story, it’s not only you reading, but also the eyes behind your eyes. Your ancestors who took the leap of faith, trusting in a future they would never see. Those who stayed back, holding the land and its songs, so there would still be something for you to return to. All the memory-maps we carry within us, quietly trying to piece themselves back together, story by story. And in telling these stories, we keep arriving.
