We’ve all met How-To people. The type that carry around “How-To” manuals on just about every topic from cleaning to figuring out your ninth moon in Venus…  OK, maybe we’ll stick to the more practical of the manuals that are out there. I, on the other hand, have felt - or been made to feel - foolish for my insistence on improv in most situations. I grew up with a family that improvised at every key turning point, but was made to feel inadequate when Canadian raised kids seemed to have everything so orderly, so set, so…pedantic. The how-to manuals, if there ever were any in my household, never got read. There’s a reason my mother always said we were like “gypsies”. You may be envisioning skirt wearing, tambourine strumming people, but I mean to convey the slightly nomadic, make-do, make-shift improvisational side of the Roma. Oh, and we sometimes wore big skirts.

It’s an idea I revisit often noting that the grandest improvisers I know are always immigrants.  Immigrants who are rarely reliant on manuals, directions, courses, or packaged kits, because such inventions are over packaged frills for settled people, not fluid, transcendental, adapting newbies(ish). “We are still building our house on sticky foundation, so we bring our roots with us…or we make use of what we find”. Although I admit, sometimes I huff at this notion and ask: isn’t it just more streamlined and more time efficient to keep it simple? Oh, how easy it was to relate to Toula’s angst about her dad`s quirky fixation with cure-all Windex in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

From broken chairs holding open garage doors, to hoarding steel pressure cookers from the Friday Bazaars of Punjab, there’s little room for quick acquisition in displacement, bringing to life the mantra: waste not want not. History is detailed in the make-shift and resourceful nature of adapting into new places, and I see this in the first generation I’ve been surrounded by, sometimes stiflingly so.

Of course, there is some idealism in the new emigres way of life as they try to adapt. Improvisation is perhaps just a test of time. It seems upward mobility opens up a new world to disposable, quick-fixes. The ways of the old-country, as you learn to make-do with less reliable new world materials that quickly figure into your rush rush life of freeways and instant coffee days, begin to fade, become foreign and slightly repugnant. Status signifies the perfectly assembled toolbox as you begin to order and regulate trivial challenges into methodical and manageable pockets. You are no longer your own builder, in most respects. You’ve managed to learn enough lingo to pawn it off with ease. Improvisation and invention become fading traits, especially in second, third, and fourth generations.

Maybe Improv, and it’s fading relevance make for a good debate on integration, adaptation, or that hot topic of immigrant-youth radicalization. But that’s open for discussion.

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Sana Malik is one of the founders and editors of This is Worldtown.  Born in England and raised between there, Pakistan and Canada, she is constantly intrigued by the quirks and accompanying baggage of immigrant life.