Trust me, it's a blessing to be a foreigner everywhere!

A few years after moving to Oregon, I authored an op-ed on how I have come to appreciate one part of my identity as India's ambassador.  Unlike early in my American life when I used to tire of people asking me inane and profound questions about India just because I look and speak like one from that country, I later started enjoying that foreigner status--an irony that the wisdom dawned on me after gaining US citizenship.  At least then it dawned, eh!

I know well that I am almost always viewed as an "Indian" at work, at stores, and even in my neighborhood.  A foreigner who is an American.

When visiting India, this "Indian" is again a foreigner--on the streets, in the stores, and even in my parents' eyes.  The other day my father said "you don't know things here.  You are talking like an American." ;)

Of course, when I visit Costa Rica or Ecuador or any country, I am a foreigner.  It is not about how I feel, but about how I am perceived.

Why is this an advantage?  There is no way I will be able to articulate the idea like how Pico Iyer states it:

It’s a blessing to be a foreigner everywhere, detached and able to see the fun in things.

The older me does not worry about it the "foreigner" that I am, and in fact views this special status as a tremendous advantage.  :

As some are born with the blessing of beauty or a musical gift, as some can run very fast without seeming to try, so I was given from birth, I felt, the benefit of being on intimate terms with outsiderdom.

Of course, my travels and experiences are nothing compared to Iyer's, but his essay absolutely speaks to me.  

It’s fashionable in some circles to talk of Otherness as a burden to be borne, and there will always be some who feel threatened by—and correspondingly hostile to—anyone who looks and sounds different from themselves. But in my experience, foreignness can as often be an asset.

My op-ed that I am an ambassador for India, for instance, is the "asset" statement that Iyer makes.  When students ask me whether I am burdened by the otherness, they almost seem ready for me to trash the system and talk about the horrors of being an "other" and are then surprised when they hear me talk positively.  But then, when younger, I would have offered only criticisms ;)

nearly everywhere I knew was foreign, which meant that nearly everywhere had the power to unsettle and surprise me, forever.

Exactly!

Damn these writers who can convey ideas so well; I wish this "iyer" could write like that Iyer! ;)

The foreigner iyer in a "veshti"

Nostalgia and the impossibility of returning home

There is always a small little feeling of panic when I am away from the US and this is profound evidence to me that America has truly become my home.  Even though, I came here as a foreigner a quarter of a century ago.  As I noted in this post, which was during my hundred days in India, I acutely felt being foreign in a land that was simultaneously familiar and yet strange.  More evidence that the US is what my heart also recognizes as home.

This two-year old piece in The Economist carries with it a warning, presumably for people like me:

however well you carry it off, however much you enjoy it, there is a dangerous undertow to being a foreigner, even a genteel foreigner. Somewhere at the back of it all lurks homesickness, which metastasises over time into its incurable variant, nostalgia. And nostalgia has much in common with the Freudian idea of melancholia—a continuing, debilitating sense of loss, somewhere within which lies anger at the thing lost. It is not the possibility of returning home which feeds nostalgia, but the impossibility of it.

I can't remember feeling any homesickness.  But, there have been plenty of moments over the two and a half decades when I have been hit with nostalgia.  The high school reunion went a long way towards taking care of that nostalgia.  Interestingly enough, the wonderful experiences at the reunion and after seem to have wiped out the yearning that I always had for my old school and the town.  Does that mean the end of nostalgia, at least with respect to these?

Life now is so amazingly different now from years past, in terms of how easy it has become to move to new places and make ourselves at home there.  If I was a foreigner visiting India, where I was born and raised, then consider my classmate, "KK," who was also at the reunion: India-born, he came to the US like many of us did, for graduate schooling.  He earned his doctorate, started working here, became a citizen, and now has been in China for more than six years as an "expat."   So, is "KK" an "Indian expat" or an "American expat" is a question that we would never have had the opportunity to ask even a couple of decades ago!

As the Economist concludes:

Life is full of choices, and to choose one thing is to forgo another. The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity—the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them.

 Freedom, yes!