Kind Curiosity

 This has been a long and strange season for me. I have found myself, for the first time ever, being the person who has “been here a while” and it still throws me off. 

I lost a husband. I own a house. I’ve been employed by the same place for five years. I know where things are and what places used to be. My world timeline has stretched longer than I can believe. 

But, I still breathe easier in airports, and always eat my Korean food with metal chopsticks. I taught my students an Indonesian word because it was easier than finding an incorrect substitute. I prefer to sit cross legged. I planted palm trees in my back yard. I wear my batik and I don’t know where to wear my galabeya. My frustration is in Spanish and when I’m tired my English grammar fails me. 

I am surrounded by a deeply insulated monoculture that is not my own and it is hard. This long staying in a place that is not my culture but seems like it should be is hard. It is harder than living in the Middle East, or South East Asia, and harder than learning any languages I have learned. 

People ask me questions to get to know me but it seems that they are the wrong questions or I give the wrong answers. The longer I stay the more obvious it is to me that my culture is different. I have been thinking a lot about that classic TCK image of the culture iceberg. The majority of the cultural values and ideas are underwater and it turns out I’m not so good at swimming here. I cannot count the number of meetings I have sat in where I find myself incredibly confused, not with the what, but with the why and how. I have sat in meetings where I see the same confusion on the faces around me as I speak. Forget being on the same page, we aren’t in the same library.

Grief tipped my iceberg over and no one knew what to do, including myself. I noticed that I don’t have TCK friends. That’s been hard. I MarcoPolo my dorm sister now and ask her if I’m crazy. I might be but mostly I’m different. 

I went with some of my people from this world to Spain to work with TCKs. One of them said to me that I seemed peaceful. I said, “I am. I’m with my people. I’m in my world. I’m eating rice pudding twice a day.”

But now, back in this tricky place, where I am staying, where I have a place of belonging but don’t actually belong, I find myself repeating a phrase again and again to myself and those around me:

Kind curiosity. 

The kindly curious have been my life savers. They are the ones that will stop after making a cultural reference and give me context just in case then ask if I knew that one. They are the ones who will ask that one question further. What was the dorm like? Do you miss it? Is it hard to be here? 

I remind myself of the same. Even though I understand the language and know my way around, I am still a stranger here and I need to learn. I am still asking the dumb questions and I am still learning how very different this place is, and how very different I am. 

And maybe that has been the most interesting part. I am learning so much about myself. I found out greetings are so important to me. I discovered my heart holds to honor/shame. I was told that using someone’s name as you debate can sound manipulative and it still doesn’t make sense to me. I am trying my hardest to be American on-time, which means early. I realized I don’t ever know what time it actually is or what time things happen. 

TCKs will never have a box to check on a customs form. We will not have a cultural moment in this world. We will probably walk widely undetected through spaces that we will borrow. But every once in a while we will find a moment where a curious mind wants to know more, and by letting them in we will each find more of ourselves there too. 

Be kind.

Be curious.

Hidden Immigrant

 Imagine you walk out of an airport and someone comes up to you and begins speaking in their native language. You are mistaken for a local but you aren’t and you don’t understand a word they are saying. You glance around for help but the person is getting frustrated with you and you don’t know why. They walk away angry and you stand there confused. 

Hunger sets in and you wander into a bakery, drawn by the tantalizing smell of fresh bread. You look around. There is a cash register, there are trays, the bread seems to be accesible with tongs, but when you reach for one someone behind the counter starts yelling at you. You put it back and go to the cash register. The people behind the counter are whispering and you manage to butcher your way through an order. They have to count out the money for you as you hold your hand open with coins. As you leave with your warm bread you can hear them all laughing at you.

These experiences continue with different reactions and by the time you are headed to bed you are exhausted and so confused. You brush your teeth and as rise from bending and spitting you see yourself in the mirror. You look like a local. Your parents share a heritage with this country. You even know some words and songs from when you were a kid. But the experience of the days blunders confirms that you are not from here.

This is an amplified version of the life of a TCK when they return to their passport country. I am six years into living in my passport country, three years into working at the same organization. I am burnt out. I am culturally exhausted. 

It can feel like no matter how many times I explain that I am not from here at the end of the day I am held accountable for all of the ways I am different as wrongs. I am a hidden immigrant.

The term hidden immigrant is used for TCKs who return to their passport countries. They look and even sound like the people around them, but inside of them is something very different. The struggle that differentiates this kind of difference from that of being in another country is the assumption of sameness. When someone is clearly a foreigner there is an extension of awareness that said person would not know the customs or the culture. This often comes with, if not grace, at least an offering of explanation. When one is assumed to be the same there can be a severe lack of both. 

Most TCKs experience this the harshest when they return to their passport countries for university. The world they grew up in seemed “normal” because everyone around them was also in that world, but placed in a space where everyone else seems to know a different world can be a shocking revelation and often feels like being plunged into cold, deep water and having everyone around you ask you why you aren’t swimming, after all, you have legs to kick and arms to paddle. And you may learn how to tread water or doggy paddle, but you will not win any races and your butterfly stroke will probably always lead to a mouthful of water. Without having learned to float you will get exhausted. 

In these kinds of circumstances there are two great helpers. The first is the more seasoned TCK, who has learned how to float or knows where to find a life jacket. The second is the curious person who not only asks why you can’t swim but takes time to teach you how to float and asks what you used your feet and arms for before. They are the person who explains the swimming terms for you, just in case, because they know you didn’t grow up with them. 

My non-TCK people, love your TCKs by researching, asking questions, listening, and using your imagination to try and understand. Teach us how to float. Remember we aren’t great swimmers even though we have arms and legs.

My TCK people, I see you flailing your arms. I too have swallowed a lot of water and my body is tired. Make time to take a deep breath and lay on your back and rest. Look up at the sun, hold on to the edge. Share my floatation device. Our legs can run and jump, and even sort of swim. And because we know what drowning looks like from experience, we can spot others who are drowning too and help them. It’s okay to stay in the pool. It’s okay to get out of the pool sometimes too. It makes sense that you are tired of swimming. I am too. Let’s float together and talk about running on grass before we start to kick again.

Icebergs

I have been living in this country for 5 years now. And I have been in this apartment, at this work, with these people for almost 3 years. I am restless and also exhausted. It is hard to explain this to my monocultural friends. They hear escapism and struggle to understand why I would feel that I don’t fit in even though I am accepted and loved in my communities. Especially since it has been 3 years.

Many days I find myself listening to things happening around me, wondering if I understand motivations, processes, or even joys or offenses. If culture is an iceberg, then 3 years has allowed me to explore most of the top of this iceberg. 5 years means I can tell you where everything is on the top of this iceberg. But I cannot tell you what is underneath. I can guess, but I cannot know.

It is hard to find out that someone is upset with you and have no reference to know why. It is even harder to not know that someone is upset with you and yet, you will never guess it because the thing you did “wrong” isn’t even on your radar of what wrong is.

I have talked before about the idea of “normal” and how it is a very slippery term that can be as unique as skin tone or DNA. But, how can you know what you don’t know? For most of the people in my community, there are things that were never overtly taught to them but were infused into them and their thought processes and understandings of the world. This is true for me as well. When one lives as a majority there is very little to challenge or highlight those formations. But, if one lives as a minority, those things are challenged often. 

For the TCK, life is almost always lived as a minority. The TCK culture, though found in many people, is rarely concentrated into a populace but rather spread and scattered in smatterings across the globe. What does this mean?

For me, in this season of life, where I find myself to be a hidden immigrant and in the overwhelming minority culture, it means I am always adjusting and guessing what sits below that water. It is hard work. It can be stressful or interesting. Some days I am endlessly curious, other days I am frustrated. 

But God help the monoculture human who finds themselves in a space of majority TCKs. It can be a shock. I am hungry for that space. In the meantime, I am eternally grateful for the friends who make room for the top of my iceberg. The people who ask if I am familiar with a cultural reference (with no judgement) before moving forward to reference it. The people who ask curious questions. The people who listen to my strange stories. The people who remember my “unnormal” things and thereby make them slightly more normal. They are not my TCKs but they are my people.

Happy Holidays

Pandemic

I just sat in a very long meeting where several people stared across a table at masked faces trying to make decisions for the many students, families, and teachers that come to this building to learn and grow together. We tried to make choices and policies for a community with a glaring lack of solid information and a plethora of contingent situations. I sat and listened and inside I was in mourning.

This is not the hardest season of my life.

I think back on the moments, growing up in Ecuador when we had to navigate what school was as volcanic ash descended on the city. We sat in dorm rooms with packets of worksheets, windows taped shut as dorm brothers sang, “it’s the end of the world as we know it,” making the youngest kids cry.

I think back to watching a tank roll down the empty street in front of me. Tear gas and the sound of gunfire still lingered in the air, and with a quickened pulse and a packed bag of essentials I waited for news of a fallen government, evacuation orders, or both.

I think back to laying in my bed after having just thrown up. I  painstakingly dragged myself across the cool tile floor, exhausted from this Dengue Fever chewing away at my blood, covered in rashes, too weak to lift water to my mouth, and burning up.

I have been through worse, is what I think looking around at creased brows surrounding me at 6 foot intervals. 

And still, I want to mourn. I am a TCK who has walked in and out of many cultures, communities, and scenarios. I know this digital space we are forced to live in because all of my people live on the other side of the world and thus the other side of a screen. But I want to mourn. I know what can be lost here. That’s what this is. Loss. And I know that saying goodbye in loss is valuable and important. So tonight as I plan many virtual tutorials, attempting to use the gifts life has given me in adjusting and adapting to guide others, I will take time to mourn what this Virus is dropping my community into: loss. And then, like I have experienced again and again, life will move forward, things will end and other things will begin. This is the turning of the earth. Remember: it is hard now, but life will not be like this forever..


How have your previous life experiences prepared you for this season of life?

Trapped (a poem for this time)

I am trapped in between.
I am standing in a world that says, “if you have experienced this you are a person of color” along with, “if you look like this you are white and have experienced something else” and I feel trapped.
I read the stories and listen to the feelings of my dark skinned friends and I nod because many of those stories echo my stories and many of those feelings are my feelings.
But then I look in the mirror and I am white. My friends look at me and they cannot help it, they see white. The blanket placed over my world and life is white.
But underneath I hold so many colors. I am a minority. I am diverse. My stories are often unheard or my feelings are often discredited. I cannot tell you how often I am told to feel and think differently, because that is how I am “supposed” to feel and think. White people feelings and thoughts.
But I picked up that story of the black girl running from everyone else who wanted to touch her hair and something in me said, “that’s my story too”. Only I’m not black. My hair isn’t big and curly, it’s  just red.
I listen to the hearts of men saying that they are tired of learning everyone else’s histories and I think of how many histories I have learned to countries I feel I don’t belong to. But what even would a history textbook for me look like? Its impossible.
I lean in as I hear that lovely woman cry out that she has always had to listen and adjust to the culture of the white person, and I think of every world I have lived in where I was the one listening and adjusting. Every. World. Always.
And I want to celebrate these movements toward listening, I want to elevate and amplify voices that have gone unheard, stories that have gone untold.
I want to right the wrongs that have been engrained in the sweeping proclamations spoken over a people group because of the color of their skin and deciding for them what life should or shouldn’t be.
I want to see diversity flourish.
And yet, I am painfully aware that there will never be a movement across the world that declares that the TCK voice needs to be heard and that our stories need to be understood.
There will never be a hashtag to combat the way I am treated as a white minority amongst colored countries that I love but that target me for the color of my skin deciding what I am by it.
I will always be the white person who is more at home but never belonging to the diverse spaces and the diverse voices because I don’t know any other way to be.
I am trapped between these worlds with no way to move.
I don’t want to move for so many reasons. I guess. But still.
I make myself small, again, for the bigger stories around me while hearing that it’s time for the people of color to stop making themselves small. And the people who grew up being big stand next to me, trying to be small for the first time, nodding at me like I have finally found my place, unaware that this is where I have lived my whole life.
It is where I will continue to live.
I guess that’s okay. It’s just hard to know that history will never be made for me.
I am trapped in between.
I will hurt in ways people may never understand as I listen to the hurts of my colored friends.
I will work towards justice because I always have, in extreme ways and in everyday ways, valuing every person, seeing unseen people, hearing quiet voices, like I always have, but in places you will never travel to, with people you will never know, in ways you may never understand.
I will use this white privileged you give me to try and bridge gaps, to pull people from one side to the other since I am already trapped in between.
I will be silent as someone declares that I have never experienced what they are saying even if I have because they will not hear it through my skin.
I will be gracious when I hear frustrating dismissals and take on false assumptions of my childhood, worldview, and understanding because to correct will not help anyone but me. .
I will try and celebrate my own stories quietly in my heart.
I will try to mourn my own stories quietly in my heart.

I will try to be quietly trapped in between.

헷갈려

Sorry, it has been a little while since I last updated this blog. A lot has been going on in my personal life including some identity changes. Anyone know what that is like? 

In Korean there is a word, 헷갈려 (hesgallyeo), which means confused. The beginning of the word 헷 means futile and the end 갈려 means to be divided. To be divided futilely, or confused. Eg: Whoa, that TCK is so 헷갈려...

I heard it first from a TCK and immediately fell in love with it. (I already love language, more on that later.) It’s a word for the thing you feel when in one country you are the American and in the other you are the girl from Ecuador. It’s what happens when you are identified by your heritage in a culture you know and your culture in your heritage country. It’s what happens when you aren’t sure how to answer that dreaded question, “where are you from?”

I’ve moved once again. This was number 32 in my 29 years of life. It came unexpectedly. I don’t mind change, or maybe I don’t know anything different so it is comforting. But whenever I start over in a new place I have this strange opportunity to decide, who am I going to be? I am always me but what parts of me will these people know?

Sometimes we get to be intentional about what parts of us we are known for, sometimes they are decided for us, but with every move we get to reveal what we want to about ourselves. We get to share as much or as little of our story as we want. 

So here is the question, who are you?

In this season I have been struggling to feel known for the things I am used to being known for. A wise friend of mine asked me, “what do you WANT to be known for?” It’s a good question worth pondering. 

Right now I am in Alabama with a wonderful organization called Kaleidoscope that works with TCKs. My last trip with them was incredible; this one is too. Nothing is better for a TCK who loves to talk about what being a TCK is than getting to do that with other people who want to do the same thing and with a bunch of TCKs. I’ll do it next month and again in January because sharing and talking through what being a TCK is and means is so important to me. But also, being with a bunch of TCKs is where I feel most myself. Where the things I don’t bother to explain don’t need to be explained. 

I’m already thinking about moving again. Am I crazy? Probably. It will be in at least a year but after that I don’t know what will happen. If I move to a new community, who will I be? What will define me? I hope that all of us who live with a little 헷갈려 in us will remember we aren’t alone. Everyone changes and grows. Let’s all give ourselves a little bit of room to be confused and be ourselves. Let’s listen to stories and wait before we put people in boxes. 

Who are you?

Mountains In My Blood

I was born in Lima, Perú, a city framed by ocean and mountains. Not just any mountains, though. The mighty Andes Mountains. I wonder if that is all that it took, to be brought into this world looking out over water and up at rock. If it wasn't enough, the years I spent in Quito, a valley surrounded by volcanoes and mountains, did it. The mountains seeped into my blood.

There is something about when the wind blows and the sky clears, and a mountain stands before me. It reminds me that I am anchored to the earth, that there are things that hold out and hold on. Placement. Protection.

In Pennsylvania I found myself feeling so lost and adrift as I looked over flat cornfields. I could see, and see, and see, too far with nothing to stop my mind and eyes.

When I was flying into Los Angeles my heart heaved such a deep sigh as I looked out the window to mountains and water. This place can hold me, it can be my home.

Malang, Indonesia, on a hilltop practicing riding a scooter on bumpy roads with no guardrails, the sky was clear and there stood a mountain. Yes. I can be in this place, my heart sang out.

My husband and I are buying a house. It terrifies me. I have never owned a house. I have never lived in a house we owned. It seems so permanent and if I think too long, I run out of changes to make, and run into a long stability that I have never experienced or known. I try to think what it would be like to just stay. Stay. To be the person watching others leave. I will do that next month. To know the same people and the same places. To have the same friends as the year before and the year before. What will we talk about? Will everyone get sick of me? Will I be able to do this? I have never done it before.

Austin doesn't have mountains. It has a lake of water and city, food and people. But no mountains and when I think about living here without my mountains I get nervous. But it is appropriate. Buying a house, "settling down" feels like a place without mountains. It keeps going with few and small interruptions but no stopping points. Small changes but with the on and on.

Once in Austria, we took a train down into a town shrouded by fog. We walked, talked, ate and shopped for a few hours, and then suddenly a breeze swept in and we looked up and there was a massive mountain standing, looming over the little town. It had been there the whole time, only hidden by fog, but now with the sun shining down it was impossible to miss.

I got a tattoo. It's behind my left ear. It is small, just a wave and some mountains. Simple. Whispering to the outside what courses strong inside of me. Ocean and mountains. Always a part of my story even if you can't see them. Just like every TCK, carrying their stories on the inside, the things that have shaped them and run through their blood that you cannot see until the wind blows a certain way and the sky clears, their hair blows back, and then there they are. The mountains.

What things make up who you are?