But what it’s hard to appreciate until you’ve arrived in your new country, until it’s too late, is that no matter what you do, no matter how hard you work or how successful you become, it doesn’t really change how others see you—because the harder you try to transform yourself in order to fit in, the more you reveal yourself to be the outsider you always were. The very process of changing yourself, then, becomes an act of self-preservation: You’re just trying to prove that you belong, to make yourself acceptable to your new country so that you can survive inside of it.
