“The 100 Years Living Club”
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Aging is not easy. Aging as foreigner to the country you live in, when you don’t speak the language, cannot drive, and have not assimiliated like your children have – is extremely difficult. Yet this is the life that more and more elderly immigrants face in the US. The elderly, who now make up America’s 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 percent of the country’s 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. We are not talking about illegal immigrants. Many are aging parents of naturalized American citizens, reuniting with their families. Patricia Leigh Brown of the New York Times has a story about these folks and their life.
Most of us never hear of them. Often, their problems can go unnoticed because they often do not seek help due to cultural differences. 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 child’s roof but often means trying to find their own way in a country whose traditions and institutions are foreign to them.
In Fremont, 40 miles out of San Francisco, some of these elderly immigrant have formed a support group calling themselves “The 100 Years Living Club”. Mr. 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.
