The Romanians from Down Under To my Victoria from the South Pacific Islands"Ko te mana o tenei matenga whetu aianeE poturi i ro o te rangi e piki mai"* In Aotearoa (New Zealand), I met happy Romanians. Their happiness was either blended with sadness, or boosted up by it. In the eyes of each Romanian immigrant, however adapted and well-off now, I saw the flicker of sadness, like a distinctive mark, even though the rule – posted all over the public places – is "smile, always smile!" I have always smiled with a happy sadness in my eyes myself. Our soul is made up of two emotional streams. The nostalgia for the country left behind, and the real affection for the adoptive country. We bequeath this tender sadness to our descendants.When you arrive in Aotearoa, you experience the joy of moving to the "Promised Land": the new world, the ocean and the mountains, Precambrian flora, geological wonders, Christmas celebrated right in midsummer, and a perfect social system. One feels the joy of a man who has the whole world in his hand. "The farthest paradise," I said to myself. It's like a honeymoon.Followed by an inner fall, a kind of yearning: the depression of settling down.I suggest here a psychological diagram of the immigrant, applicable especially to Romanians, who are incurable lyricists, conservative and frustrated, and hard to uproot from their native land. This diagram has four stages, or strokes:a) The honeymoon is the first: the joy of landing in Polynesia. The joy is part of the planning itself, and the emotional fuel needed for tearing oneself away from home.b) Marriage stress is the second stage. Instead of "settle-down depression", I suggest the expression "marriage stress": the bewildered immigrant starts to feel the pressure of newness, the time-zone change, the psychological discomfort of utter novelty, the acceptance of new compliances. On a 100-degree scale of stress, marriage stress scores 50, that is very high, which means a serious, semi-lethal affective disorder. It stems from the shaking of previous Wallachian inertia and snugness, and the burden of new responsibilities.c) The Center-of-the-World shift is the third stage. Soon, in parallel with "marriage stress", the center of the world altogether moves forever to the geographical area one occupies now. It moves to Wellington, to a western gulf on the Pacific shore. The center of the world is now Aotearoa. The rest vanishes, becomes blurred, abstract and hazy. Europe looks smaller and smaller, lost in the mist. To the people down under, Europe is small, even inexistent. I actually felt there that Europe no longer existed. I was reading in the newspapers about it, I saw on TV that a war was over in the Balkans, I heard that the Euro currency was invented, but everything was abstract, as if I was reading about the Trojan War. Or, as if Europeans themselves read about Samoa, Tonga, or Aotearoa – plausible abstractions to them. Thus, the center of the world, as far as I was concerned, had moved to the Pacific. As a writer, I felt I could testify in front of New Zealanders that Europe exists, and when in Europe, I can testify that Aotearoa exists, and the Romanians from down under indeed exist too.d) The Lazarus syndrome appears at the last stage. After marriage, or adjustment-to-happiness, stress, after the center of the world has moved to the new country, one experiences what psychologists name "the Lazarus syndrome": the feeling of coming back to a new life. It is like the elation of triumph, the euphoria of rebirth to a patient after successful surgery: the feeling that a new, great, rich, and free life is about to begin. "Kia meatia Tau e pai ai…"(Let Thy will be done, in Maori language)The Romanian community from Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, speaks Romanian at home: correct Romanian, with fewer Anglicisms than may be found in the Romanian spoken at Bucharest. Romanians stick together. On Sundays, they gather at St. Maria Church on Adelaide Road. They pay visits to friends and relatives. There are 84 ethnic groups in New Zealand and the government encourages the preservation of their identities. I saw harmony and elegant relationships, but no intrusion. A Romanian has had a good Polynesian friend at work for years, but does not invite him to his place; neither does his friend invite him to his tribe. Nor do they salute each other with "honghi" (the specific Polynesian nose-rubbing "kiss"). When I prompted a honghi salute between a Romanian and a Polynesian, the former said to me: "I've lived here my whole life, but this is the first time I'm doing honghi with a Polynesian!" I had the tendency to gently "annex" the Maoris, calling them "my Dacians".Compared with the Anglo-Saxon majority, Romanians have a more noticeable cultural penchant. Their idealism is more obvious. I wonder how they manage to reach such a high status and own houses worth 4-500,000 dollars, with their ancestral (Mioritic!) lyricism! They work hard, for this is the rule in the Dominion, yet have a lively spiritual life. They keep traditional holidays. One always finds in their houses a two-language library, the Bible next to Eminescu, classics next to the latest books from Romanian publishing houses. They keep icons from Romania and small bags of Romanian soil by them. Only in New Zealand did I notice this cult of native soil with the Romanian diaspora. I also noticed that the Romanians from New Zealand feel they are no longer wanted in their motherland. That nobody is waiting for them to come back. That nobody calls them back. Whether they fled during the dictatorship years, chose to emigrate by themselves, were dispossessed by force by the communists, or renounced their property of their own will, they have the feeling that nobody is expecting them in their native country any longer, and no-one really wants them.Nevertheless, they feel very close to Romania. At night, they are in permanent dialogue with Bucharest on the internet. They are worried about the troubles their country goes through, and the rising prices of medicine. They watch their former compatriots at all the Olympic Games and keep their fingers crossed. They read the Romanian press in the morning, eleven hours before Romanians… because there the sun rises 11 hours before Bucharest. They follow the political developments, are hurt by economic failures, and on Ascension Day give alms for relatives in the country and the souls of the dead that remained at home.I met happy Romanians in Aotearoa. But, as I said, all the immigrants' eyes have a flicker of sadness. An endless, gentle sadness. Perhaps ethnicity is a "cultural gene" one cannot shake off except by death…
* Two lines from Eminescu's poem La steaua in Maori (Polynesian): "The icon of this now dead star / Slow in the sky it rises."
by Vasile Andru (b. 1942)
