Narrative Medicine Project

My interviewee's immigration story begins with his father, who had arrived in the U.S. in the 1900's for religious reasons, leaving my interviewee, his four siblings, and mother in Burma.^[1] Due to safety issues in Burma, my interviewee and his family moved to a refugee camp in India in the 2000's. Around this time, his father had applied and been awarded asylum in the U.S., and he petitioned for family reunification with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society of Pennsylvania (HIAS PA). My interviewee and the rest of his family members arrived in Philadelphia, PA in that same decade, the process expedited due to his father’s continued health issues. At that time, the Burmese refugee community in Philadelphia was still small. Nonetheless, it was—and still is—an extremely diverse community, with people hailing from many Burmese states, languages, and ethnic groups and anchored by religious institutions like churches.

When the interviewee arrived in the U.S., he had already acquired English language and computer literacy skills through community centers at the refugee camp in India. As such, he was able to begin serving as a contracted interpreter within a few years after his arrival. In fact, he eventually began working at HIAS PA as an independent contracted interpreter.

Throughout the years, he has done well at HIAS PA, bringing his experience as an asylee full circle. In addition to having worked as an interpreter for Burmese languages at the agency, he has also worked as a Reception and Placement case aide, Housing Coordinator, and Matching Grant Employment Program Director at the agency. He shared that one of the most fulfilling experiences at HIAS PA has been seeing his former clients buy homes and complete college—an outcome he is able to witness due to the length of time he has spent working for the organization.

He explains that one of the strengths of his community is that there is more or less a shared culture and language, the commonalities of which give folks the desire to connect with each other. His community also utilizes social media platforms like Facebook to share information and resources with each other. Moreover, as the Burmese refugee community expands, there has been greater social capital that community members have access to. For example, job options for the Burmese community used to be confined to factory jobs that pay the federal minimum wage. However, in recent years, community members have obtained higher paying entry-level jobs, such as Amazon warehouse jobs, which pay almost $20/hour, expanding the possibilities for entry-level work for new refugees. One concomitant weakness of the community is that members will follow each other blindly at times due to the trust they have in one another.

The interviewee also clarified that his relationship to the community has changed. Due to his professional obligations in the Asylee Outreach Program at HIAS PA, he no longer has less of a direct connection to incoming Burmese refugees. However, he still bears witness to the mutual aid and support that occurs within the community.

Covid-19 has also impacted his community in profound ways. Information in the U.S. is easily accessible, lending itself to a diverse array of ideas and notions about the pandemic and health. For a group that relies heavily on other community members over professionals and experts at times, it is easy for misinformation to spread. Moreover, because Burmese culture is so communal, people will still attend funeral services despite knowing that the deceased person died from Covid-19. However, Sum also notes that the community was not resistant to being vaccinated and boosted for Covid-19. For this, he is thankful, as the vaccine has undoubtedly kept people in his community alive.

From his perspective, racism impacts the community, but the community might not attribute such impacts directly to racism. The community also has vastly different cultural norms than the U.S., complicating the way the issue of gun violence, for example, is interpreted. The example he provided is as follows: in the hypothetical shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white civilian with clear racial biases, someone from his community may see the issue as being gun control rather than racism, even though someone else might see both being implicated by such a scenario.

^[1] Although the country is now recognized as Myanmar, the interviewee explains that the name is still hard to reconcile, and he continues to call his home country Burma. As such, I will use this language as well.