Beyond Boundaries: My Journey from Bangladesh to USA

My journey from Bangladesh to the United States was not just a long journey of 40 hours. It was an exploration of identity, culture and the concept of “home.” As a girl, growing up in a Bangladeshi Muslim family, home was an idea that combined cultural norms, expectations from family, and the varied roles and restrictions that were imposed to women. From a feminist perspective, this journey has revealed the layers of navigating multiple identities and the fluidity of home as a space. In traditional Bangladesh, women are expected to play the role as a caretaker, good mother, obedient daughter, and potential wife at home. Here, the concept of “home” for woman often means numerous obligation and restriction. Home is not just a physical place here but also a symbolic space where one’s acts, behavior, freedom, and even dreams are controlled. This idea of women’s roles imposed by culture and society was pointed by Whitson (2017) in Spaces of Culture and Identity Production: Home, Consumption, and the Media where the author referred the concept of viewing woman “as victims of culture” that connects culture, power and identity. Yet, stepping into the U.S. did not change these complexities; it added new dimensions to what home and identity could mean to me.

Photograph: During my journey to USA at Istanbul Airport

One of my earliest childhood memories that I can still remember is when I was about eight years old. My mother, a strong determined woman, always encouraged me and my sisters (We are three sisters) to dream big and focus on our studies. However, not everyone in our family had the same vision. I can remember one incident when some of our relatives visited our home. The living room was full of the smell of freshly brewed tea and the chatter of aunts and uncles. As the conversation shifted somehow to family matters, one of my uncles turned to my mother and asked, “What’s the benefit of educating your daughters so much? After all, they’ll just end up in someone else’s house.” He laughed dismissively, and others chimed in with similar sentiments. Another relative added, “You’re wasting your husband’s money on these girls. If only you had a son to make the family proud. “Then my mom replied, “one day my daughters will make us proud, they don’t need a brother to make themselves valuable”. Her strong words shaped my understanding of gender roles, education and how people in a patriarchic society devalue women’s potential at a very early age. Despite constant criticism, my parents never get hurt for having three daughters and not having a son. However, a study conducted by the University of Kent in the UK has showed a decline in "son preference" by women of childbearing age in Bangladesh. The study also shows that decisions on fertility are still influenced according to son preference. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X20304812

My migration to the U.S. has insisted me to rethink what home meant to me, away from the expectations of a traditional family and the cultural boundaries back in Bangladesh. But the idea of home is dynamic. It fluctuates between the bitter memories of childhood as female child and the lived reality of being a foreign student in a new land as an adult woman. My journey is not about choosing one home over another but about creating a sense of belonging that reflects the plurality of my experiences as a woman.