Funny how conditioning works – not that of the hair treatment variety.
A person flies off to another land and settles into the things of life and work. Some years later, having grown conditioned to her adoptive culture, the person returns to her homeland only to find life disorienting.
Depending on how deeply entrenched he has settled into that ‘other life’, the reentry and reorienting process for the returnee may leave him reeling. I’m clearly a misfit, he reasons.
Such a person may feel more at ease in the company of the clerk tending to the nearby Asian or Latin-run convenience store than with many of his acquaintances of an earlier time.
It happened with me at the intersection of Sixth and Birmingham. Where aromas of Indian Curry and Chinese dumplings hung in the air.
ISI’s area director Jim Tracy had reached out, inviting me to accompany him on his rounds – connecting socially in informal friendship with international students hailing from lands abroad. Malaysia, Venezuela, China, the Middle East. . .
I fussed with upside-down feelings day by day as I routinely shadowed Jim, venturing along from one apartment dwelling to the next. Where we happily sipped hot chai offered up by our gracious, momentary hosts. (But wait. Aren’t we. . . us ‘Yanks’. . . meant to be hosting them?)
I grew mildly surprised sensing how the needle of my social barometer tilted in uncommon directions. Feeling less at home within my own mainstream American culture than with the young college students coming from places far, far away. I had hardly begun to know these ‘outsiders’ yet an easy kinship felt more in reach.
For a while this tug-of-war left me unsettled, musing over my ‘space’ and my identity (aren’t I the same red-blooded American fellow who merely relocated for a while those years back?).
In time I made peace with befuddling but pardonable reality. I had changed.
Change had happened on the inside of me. Living in Africa for a couple decades among people groups of varied customs and languages had ruined me – in the best kind of way. Components of my worldview had shifted, broadened. My preferences on many fronts had tweaked. In short, I had taken up a strange and intriguing and somewhat messy cross-cultural identity.
This new normal, it’s going to need some time.
©2023 Jerry Lout