Ways In Which I Am Obviously Foreign: No. 1

Things That Make me Happy
Originally uploaded by Blue Dragonfly Girl

There are clearly many ways in which I'm obviously not Brazilian. These ways become evident from the moment I open my mouth and say something (and sometimes before).

However, there are other more subtle ways, that I hadn't anticipated, and am slowly discovering.

Way No. 1: I like milk in my tea.

This is incredibly strange here.

I remember when I first brewed up some chai in A.'s kitchen. When she saw me putting milk into it, she said, "Oh, milk?! I don't think I'll like that." She didn't try any.

I thought it was just her personal taste until a few days later I went out for coffee with a professor and a doctoral student at a university cafe. I asked for black tea and when they served it with sugar packets on the side, I wondered aloud if there was any milk.

Both the professor and the doctoral student smiled broadly. "That's not normal here," they said, "You'll have to make a point to ask for milk."

"Wow, you're just like my grandmother," said the professor, "She too liked milk in her tea, despite what anyone else said."

And then last night I was hanging out with a Brazilian who is considering doing a Master's in counseling in an English-speaking country. We ordered some herbal tea at a beautiful cafe with a view of the water.

"So you see," I said, "I've recently discovered that I do some things considered weird here."

He looked at me waiting for whatever "weird" thing I was going to say.

"For example," I said, "I like milk in my tea."

He started trying to suppress laughter.

"See!" I said, "You're laughing too."

"Yeah," he said, "I think I used to have milk in my tea as a young child, but not anymore. What kind of tea are you talking about?"

"Well, black tea," I said.

"Is it different from our black tea?" he asked.

"Nope, it's the same. I just like milk in it."

He shook his head, amused.

And there you have it.

Ways In Which I Am Obviously Foreign: No. 1

Musings on Being Foreign

Journal Entry from a month in Tamil Nadu
Originally uploaded by Blue Dragonfly Girl

My father, an American living in France, sent me a link to an article in The Economist, titled "The others." (Thanks, Pop!) Essentially it continues upon the theme I began in my last post on what it is like to live in a place that is not our original home:

The author writes:

"...however well you carry it off, however much you enjoy it, there is a dangerous undertow to being a foreigner... Somewhere at the back of it all lurks homesickness, which metastasizes 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." (p. 87)

This fuller version of nostalgia (though I'm not sure about the angry part...is anger really the root emotion?) reminds me of the Portuguese word for it: saudade. The word means so much more than just missing something and is translated in my Harper Collins dictionary as "longing, yearning and nostalgia."

Re-watching Garden State last night, I was reminded that in some ways, the foreigner's experience of saudade can tie to the experience of leaving one's childhood home for the first time. As the main character says:

"You'll see one day when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it's gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It's like you feel homesick for a place that doesn't even exist. Maybe it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I don't know, but I miss the idea of it, you know. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place. "

Once you do leave what you've always known you can't truly go back again because it won't be the same and you won't be the same. I don't know that it's a bad thing. In Austin, I miss New England. In New England, I miss Austin. But it doesn't mean that I'm unhappy. It's more like a Beth Orton song, a wistful, bittersweet melancholy that's also beautiful because it's just life.

---
Reference:


(2009, December 19). The others. The Economist, 85-87.