Transience

dépaysement (French, n.):
            the feeling that comes from not being in one’s home country – of being a foreigner or an immigrant, of being somewhat displaced from your origin. 

If you know me at all, you should be aware of my “nerd crush,” which is a term I use for a person’s (often obscure) academic, intellectual, or artistic interest that incites such passionate exploration that one would call that person a full-blown nerd.  My own nerd crush is the idea of “home.”  A bunch of anthropology classes and a Bachelor’s degree later, that idea has transformed into "the construction of transnational identity within modern global ethnoscapes" (thanks, Arjun Appadurai).  In normal people speak, I like studying why people move around and the things they retain about their cultural identities once they do.  Now, as a temporary American ex-pat in South Africa, I have my own story to add to the displacement dialogue.

Before delving into that topic directly, I always tend to forget my already evident transnational identity.  I myself am an immigrant to the United States, moving from the Philippines to the Bronx and living there ever since I was a year old.  I’ve always considered myself an American, as I had no true reference of myself otherwise.  It was interesting growing up Asian-American and being defined by my ethnic difference when all I wanted was to blend in, and this was complicated further by the fact that my neighborhood was an ethnic hodge-podge of other immigrants mostly from Latin America and the Caribbean.  The cultural “tossed salad” in which I was brought up was the only culture I truly knew, and that culture, to me, was what being American truly meant.  It wasn’t meatloaf-and-mashed potatoes; it was my dad’s chicken adobo and my friend’s mom’s fried plantains.  In a place as ethnically diverse as the Bronx, being an immigrant was synonymous with being an American by virtue of the fact that everyone just was.  As much as I was technically an outsider, it what that exact minority status that made me an insider in my own environment, and it was what defined me as an American.

It has been a month since I have arrived in South Africa.  Though I’ve extensively traveled before, this has been the longest I’ve ever been in a single country outside of the United States since I first moved there as a baby.  I have been transplanted to different sides of the world before, catapulted into the bowels of the earth.  I have seen the most stunningly beautiful feats of nature and human ingenuity that the world has to offer, and I have seen much of the world’s dark underbelly, as well.  In my travels, I have experienced culture shock.  Upon returning from them, have experienced reverse culture shock.  But only now am I felling this new thing.  It’s dépaysement.

I wouldn’t call it discomfort.  I am actually quite comfortable here.  At the same time, I wouldn’t say that I was completely at ease, either.  The Internet does wonders with keeping people in contact, regardless of distance, and even though the people closest to me may not be physically present in my life, I know that they are still a text, phone, or Skype call away.  And it’s not like I feel estranged.  Not only does my network of friends who have moved around the entire span of the United States, I also have friends studying in Denmark and Japan, I know people teaching in Spain and China, and only a few weeks ago, I was having drinks with friends who are now researching in India and Bangladesh, among many other places around the world.  I’m not the only one in a new environment, and that gives me peace of mind that I am not alone.

However, I think what I’m feeling is this sense of dépaysement.  It’s not sadness.  I don’t feel that.  It’s not loneliness.  I don’t feel that, either.  I’m not completely confident in calling it culture shock because I don’t think I’ve been challenged too much outside of my norm, or at least it’s not a constant bombardment of newness.  I think, to put it simply, it’s the feeling of knowing that I’m not in my home country.  This doesn’t denote good or bad; it only denotes difference.  It’s not that I’m longing for home.  It’s not like I was trying to get away from it in the first place.  In short, I’m just in a state of displacement.

The thing I may be struggling with most is this condition of impermanence.  There’s something about being a young adult that carries this sense of temporality, as if it is inherently built into being a twenty-something.  I think it’s the uncertainty of purpose, of belonging, of control, and that can be overwhelming.  Where will I be in eleven months?  Will I actually stay there for a long period of time?  When will I stop amassing new mailing addresses as AutoFill options when I pay for my purchases on Amazon?  I don’t have the answers to these questions.  I don’t know when I will.  That’s the crux of being a young person: trying to plant one’s feet when the ground is constantly shifting.

The bigger question, though, is whether this temporariness will be fulfilling.  I think what I’m scared of more than impermanence is the constancy of impermanence, to always be in a liminal state between being completely new and being completely comfortable, of forever being a global nomad.  In lofty dreams that I have for the future, I would love continue traveling and being an international jetsetter, but I’ve always failed to dream about where “home” will be.  Whatever this concept of home is, it’s part of the human experience to have it.  Every person deserves to have something to call home, and now is my time to find it.