Reverse Immigration

My first day at the job I was lectured by another teacher for wearing shoes inside the school. He scolded me in a language familiar, yet completely foreign to my ears. I was late getting on the bus, so it didn't phase me in the slightest. I remember hearing him laugh later on with the other teachers thinking that I was another student. I laughed too. I was fresh out of college and everything about my face and features looked the same as them. It was reassuring knowing that for once in my life everyone else around me looked like me.

But they weren't like me.

Growing up in the West, I would hear things constantly about how the way I acted was reflected in my ethnicity. If I was quiet it was because of the color of my skin. If I was smart it was because my eyes were sharper letting me read more meticulously than my peers. I would grow accustomed to the familiar ebb and flow of conversations, "Hello, how are you?", "Where are you from?", "How did your parents meet?", "How do they even speak together?" It was difficult to say the least. Especially the expectations that I could speak a language deemed one of the hardest for English language learners to learn.

So, I ran away to my "homeland." Although, I would be lying if I said that I didn't go there partly because it was a country full of outcasts and outsiders. From those looking in from the outside it appears to be a neon paradise full of excitement and novelty. But once you step inside, you realize that the allure of the country is all smoke and mirrors just pale imitations of a fairy tale like the main cultural export they found.

The first few years were great. I quickly realized that if I didn't speak and just nodded my head silently I blended in perfectly. I finally didn't feel like an alien in my own skin. Even though I was an outsider I found many things there comforting. I liked how conscientious everyone else was and I enjoyed the food. A lot of it were things I grew up eating, but I found that I missed a lot more things from my childhood like pho, pizza, and burritos. During those days, I would've done anything for a carnitas burrito from La Taqueria, but nowadays I would do the same for some noodles from that tiny shop by the freeway next to the novelty shop that sold adult goods. It seems the human condition is predisposed to craving what it can't immediately have.

I remember as I stood off to the side as our cultural representative gave a speech to the locals on our behalf. I counted the filler words, the equivalents to "ah" and "um" he used in our language on my fingers. He reached over twenty before the speech was over. The people next to me said he did a good job. I think about that a lot. If the color of his skin was different too would it have been even more impressive? I noticed that as I was in the country that depending on how you looked you were treated differently.

Wherever you go there is a certain hierarchy to life no matter how trivial it may be. I wonder too if I was just predisposed to seeing the world under this lens after being forced to grow up with three cultures or maybe the dominant culture I was raised in puts precedence over your race. It seemed to me that if you looked like the local people then the expectation was that your language abilities had to be higher than those who looked more foreign. Unfortunately I looked the most similar to the local people being of similar ethnic heritage, but my language abilities were some of the lowest of all my peers.

I used to wonder if people thought I was merely dimwitted whenever they met me or if they could immediately tell I was a foreigner. When I travelled through the countryside I showed my passport and was met with a look of confusion. People were dumbfounded on how someone with a frame such as mine could be from a country as big and boisterous. I don't blame them either, despite having lived there for over a century the only time I feel my national heritage is when I lived abroad. Other foreigners could tell immediately where I was born from my accent and demeanor. Even the local people would treat me as my fellow countrymen after awhile, because of how different I was from them.

It's funny really. My entire life in my birth country, where I hold citizenship, I was told that I wasn't enough. I was defined by my ethnicity. However, once I left to try to reclaim my heritage I was treated the way I would've expected in my real homeland, the place my family has lived since the Great Depression. If I ever want to feel like I belong somewhere I can either choose to be silent and hide amongst the crowds, or I can speak my mind in places where I'm not allowed too. The true irony of it all is that I can only fit in by sticking out.