United by their loneliness, Americas elderly Indian immigrants……PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
They gather five days a week at a mall called the Hub, sitting on concrete planters and sipping thermoses of chai. These elderly immigrants from India are members of an all-male group called The 100 Years Living Club. They talk about crime in nearby Oakland, the cheapest flights to Delhi and how to deal with recalcitrant daughters-in-law.
Together, they fend off the well of loneliness and isolation that so often accompany the move to this country late in life from distant places, some culturally light years away.
If I dont come here, I have sealed lips, nobody to talk to, said Devendra Singh, a 79-year-old widower. Meeting beside the parking lot, the men were oblivious to their fellow mall rats, backpack-carrying teenagers swigging energy drinks.
In this country of twittering youth, Devendra and his friends form a gathering force: the elderly, who now make up Americas fastest-growing immigrant group. Since 1990, the number of foreign-born people over 65 has grown from 2.7 million to 4.3 million or about 11 per cent of the countrys recently arrived immigrants. Their ranks are expected to swell to 16 million by 2050. In California, one in nearly three seniors is now foreign born, according to a 2007 census survey.
Many are aging parents of naturalized American citizens, reuniting with their families. Yet experts say the ethnic elderly are among the most isolated people in America. Seventy per cent of recent older immigrants speak little or no English. Most do not drive. Some studies suggest depression and psychological problems are widespread, the result of language barriers, a lack of social connections and values that sometimes conflict with the dominant American culture, including those of their assimilated children.
The lives of transplanted elders are largely untracked, unknown outside their ethnic or religious communities. They never win spelling bees, said Judith Treas, a sociology professor and demographer at the University of California, Irvine. They do not join criminal gangs. And nobody worries about Americans losing jobs to Korean grandmothers.
Many who have followed their grown children here have fulfilling lives, but life in this country does not always go according to plan for seniors navigating the new, at times jagged, emotional terrain, which often means living under a childs roof.
Devendra Singh grew up in a boisterous Indian household with 14 family members. In Fremont, he moved in with his sons family and devoted himself to his grandchildren, picking them up from school and ferrying them to soccer practice. Then his son and daughter-in-law decided they wanted their privacy, said Devendra, an undertone of sadness in his voice. He reluctantly concluded he should move out.
So when he leaves the Hub, dead leaves swirling around its fake cobblestones, Devendra drives to the rented room in a house he found on Craigslist. His could be a dorm room, except for the arthritis heat wraps packed neatly in plastic bins.
In India there is a favourable bias toward the elders, Devendra said, sitting amid Hindu religious posters and a photograph of his late wife. Here people think about what is convenient and inconvenient for them.
Sociologists call Devendra Singh and his cohort the .5 generation, distinct from the 1.5 generation younger transplants who became bicultural through school and work. Immigrant elders leave a familiar home, some without electricity or running water, for a multigenerational home in communities like Fremont that demographers call ethnoburbs.
A generation ago, Fremont was 76 per cent Caucasian. Today, nearly one-half of its residents are Asian, 14 per cent are Latino and it is home to one of the countrys largest groups of Afghan refugees (it was a setting for the best-selling book The Kite Runner).
Along the way, a former beauty college has become a mosque; a movie house became a Bollywood multiplex; a bank, an Afghan market, and a stucco-lined street renamed Gurdwara, after the Gurdwara Sahib Sikh Temple.
Reliant on their children, late-life immigrants are a vulnerable population. They come anticipating a great deal of family togetherness, Prof. Treas said. But American society isnt organized in a way that responds to their cultural expectations.
Hardev Singh, 76, and his wife, Pal Keur, 67, part of Fremonts large Sikh community, live above the office of the Fremont Frontier Motel, its lone nod to a Western motif a dilapidated wagon wheel sign.
They rented the fluorescent-lighted apartment after living for three years with their daughter, Kamaljit Purewal, her husband, his mother and two grandchildren. As the children grew, Hardev and Pal were relegated to the garage, transformed into a room. As Hardev said, in winter it was too much cold.( Their daughter, Purewal, said that she tried to give them a better life, but felt unappreciated because her parents favoured her older brother in India. If youre a happy family, a small house is a big house, she said. )
Fraught family dynamics when elderly parents move in with children often leave older members without a voice in decision-making, whether about buying a house or using the shower.
Pravinchandra Patel, the 84-year-old founder of the 100 Years Living Club, intervened when he heard that the son in one family was taking his parents monthly Supplemental Security Income check, for $658, then doling out $20 for spending money.
I ask the son, How much money do you figure you owe your parents for your education? he said.
Fremont, 40 miles south of San Francisco, is now the Bay Areas fourth-largest city, with voters from 152 countries. Physical distances can be compounded by psychic ones: 13 per cent of the citys immigrant seniors live in households isolated by language. Theirs is a late-life journey without a map.
For the men in the 100 Years Living Club, the road leads to the Hub, where they have been meeting for 14 years, since the Target store was a Montgomery Ward. Patel, who was an herbal doctor in India, started the group after he noticed his friends were in house prisons, as he put it, without even the confidence to use a bus. The men keep their spirits alive by sharing homemade chaat snacks. They are the lucky ones.
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