Moving to a new country means weighing up a great many factors carefully. For a lot of people, emigration is a chance to explore an unfamiliar culture and build a new life — full of unknowns and risk. Yet the process comes with its own string of challenges, above all adapting to a completely new way of living and to the local culture.
Have you ever wondered whether emigration is right for you? This article introduces the psychological theories around emigration and uses three questions to guide your thinking as you reach the important decision of whether or not to emigrate.
Question 1: Do you long for life and culture abroad?
Popular destinations for Chinese emigrants include Western countries such as the UK, Canada and Australia — places whose cultures differ markedly from those of Asian cities. Cultural differences can come as a psychological shock to newcomers, making it a major challenge to build their own identity and find their place in society. Many friends who choose to emigrate find themselves wrestling with this very question: after moving, should you hold on to the identity and way of life of your home country, or blend into local society and become fully one of its own?
On this point, the scholar John Berry put forward the concept of acculturation, used to describe the process by which the mutual influence and exchange between different cultures gradually leads an individual or group to adapt to another culture. When a person or group enters a new cultural environment, their existing culture interacts with the new one, producing changes in and adaptation of the way they live (Berry, 2015). Acculturation generally has four outcomes. One is integration — keeping your original culture while also blending into the foreign one, getting the best of both. Yet the challenges that cultural difference brings are hard to gauge, and achieving cultural integration is far from easy.
Chinese society places great weight on collectivism, emphasising family and the group, whereas the cultures of Western countries tend towards individualism, emphasising individual interests. This cultural opposition makes it hard for people to balance the two. As a result, one possible outcome after emigration is assimilation — fully embracing the foreign culture and abandoning Chinese culture, becoming British, Canadian, American and so on. Another outcome is separation — after emigrating, keeping entirely to your own culture without blending into the foreign one, and staying within a small community of your original culture. And the worst outcome is marginalisation — being unable to absorb the foreign culture after emigrating, while also failing to retain your original culture.
The first three outcomes each have their pros and cons, so anyone considering emigration must first think about which way of life they long for before they go.
Question 2: After emigrating, how do you hope your identity will change?
Would you hope your family keeps the identity of its original culture for generations to come, staying at a distance from the foreign community? Or would you hope to be assimilated, to become fully one of the locals, treating your former home as nothing more than a memory? Or do you hope to hold on to both? Thinking this question through can surely guide you towards a choice you feel at peace with. When you arrive somewhere new, will you do your utmost to blend into the local community, or will you first make friends with some fellow Chinese? The answer in your heart may already reflect your truest leanings. The fact is, when it comes to emigrating abroad, there is no such thing as a single correct way to live. How to live, and with which identity to live, is a question you need to think about carefully. Although emigration means learning many new cultures and ways of life abroad — a process that may be full of challenges — it can also be a chance to give yourself a fresh start.
Question 3: If emigration goes smoothly, who is the ideal you five years on?
Imagine the five years after emigrating: if everything goes well, what would your ideal self be like? Where would you work, would you start a family, and what would the life you long for look like? These questions can help you picture, in concrete terms, the ideal self-image you hold in your heart — which is why imagining yourself five years after emigrating is a good way to build an identity. The social psychologist Henri Tajfel once put forward Social Identity Theory, which holds that identity is vital to a person's self-esteem and sense of belonging. Human beings have outstanding communication skills that allow them to organise into groups and move towards goals together, which is why the identity bound up in that process matters a great deal as culture takes shape (Tajfel & Turner, 2004) — and why marginalisation, in this context, may be a bad thing.
According to Social Identity Theory, identity is built mainly through two channels: one is group behaviour, such as how, in your home city, residents might together take part in social movements — shared action that builds the participants' identity and sense of belonging; the other is a group's distinctive and superior qualities, such as the way German-made appliances always give an impression of rigour and precision. These give us pause for thought: beyond sharing a life within Chinese culture and society, what else belongs to the qualities of the Chinese identity?
For overseas Chinese who emigrate, if you hope your original identity will be passed on, you need to build a narrative that lets others know where that original identity comes from — which cultural background it springs from. This is not a topic any one person can answer alone; it is something a community of emigrants needs to think about and discuss together.
Download MindForest to weigh your emigration decision and adapt to a new life with psychology
Considering emigration and adapting to a new life is a complex and challenging process. MindForest is a psychology-based AI app that offers a range of tools and strategies to help you make a smooth transition to your new life.
1) A tailor-made emigration plan: MindForest excels at breaking the complex emigration process down into small, achievable steps, using AI to help you clarify the goal of each step, so you can prepare for emigration and adapt to a new environment in an orderly way.
2) Your personal AI guide: MindForest lets you interact with an AI guide around the clock, anytime and anywhere. By adjusting your mindset, habits and environment, it helps you blend into a new society more quickly and find the way of life that suits you.
3) An inspiration journal: MindForest can generate a bespoke inspiration journal for you by assessing your conversations with the AI, prompting you to think deeply about the various questions that come up in the emigration process and helping you formulate a clear emigration strategy.
Download MindForest now to help you overcome the difficulties of emigrating and adapting to a new life.
References
Berry, J. W. (2015). Acculturation. In J. E. Grusec & P. D. Hastings (Eds.), Handbook of socialization: Theory and research (2nd ed., pp. 520–538). The Guilford Press.
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (2004). The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior. In J. T. Jost & J. Sidanius (Eds.),Political psychology: Key readings(pp. 276–293). Psychology Press.https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203505984-16
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