Diaspora Blues

1.

If you live long enough in a foreign land, you become like a lone molecule absorbed and assimilated into the host, your DNA retrofitted and reprogrammed for its new circumstances. I’ve been here awhile, just trying to survive and get ahead, and so it never really occurred to me that I’m not the same girl who first stepped off the plane and onto this soil. While I still don’t feel that these are “my people”, I somehow felt even more out of place last year when I went back home to visit my family.

So perhaps I’m something in between — neither here nor there, though with each passing day more here than there.

I mention all this because he is a new arrival, and he reeks of the strong cultural aroma of our shared homeland. He is completely adrift and awkward in this milieu. In a way it’s endearing but it also reminds me of how alienated I felt at first. It makes me feel embarrassed at how I must have come across in those days.

In him I realize how our culture of origin is an inversion of this host culture. Where the locals are loud and bellicose, he is quiet and painfully modest. Where the locals keep each other at arm’s length, he is face-to-face. It can be quite off-putting, even for someone like me who knows where it’s coming from.

2.