Soy Originalemente de

One of the first phrases I learnt to say in Spanish after moving to Chile was “soy originalmente de la India.” Every time I met anyone, however proud I was of my Spanish pronunciation, I’d immediately get asked where I was really from. My friends and I began joking about my trademark response, and the way my voice changed into a high-pitched, child-like tone when I tried to express myself in a language so foreign to me. Every time I said this phrase, I would be reminded that however confident I felt using this language in my head, I’d feel like a stranger in this country as soon as the words left my mouth.

Recently I’ve been thinking of this idea – the idea of being a stranger in some places. I think to most people, it’s implied that you feel like a stranger in one place, because you belong to another. The idea of belonging is necessary in order to notbelong. Yet I have also increasingly found others like me – other kids who don’t belong in the traditional way.

The truth is that I’m not even originally from India. I have never lived there. I was born in Singapore, but Singaporean laws led me to inherit my parent’s citizenship, and my physical appearance makes it easy for me to introduce myself as Indian. Though I speak Kannada and frequently travel to Bangalore to visit family members, I can’t forget the time a street vendor mistook me for a tourist in front of Mysore palace and addressed me in English. Or the fact that I haven’t attended school in India and don’t share the same knowledge of Indian history as my cousins. When classmates ask me about Hindu practices or popular tourist destinations that they’ve visited, I often don’t know how to answer.

Some have tried to convince me that I’m actually Singaporean – I was born in Singapore, so I am Singaporean. It’s that simple, and the same rules must apply everywhere in this world. But my ties to Singapore are limited to the vague, washed-out memories I have of my first three years of life. I don’t speak Singlish, I don’t remember eating at any of their famous food courts -- Singapore isn’t home.

No, if I could truly call one place home, it would be Tübingen. The small town in the south of Germany where I spent eight years of my childhood. It was here that I graduated from Kindergarten and Elementary School. I learned to read and write, went through a horse phase, played in the snow in the winter and polished off daily ice creams during the summer. It is the place where I feel most safe, accepted, and calm. I yearn to see the graffiti on the walls of the train station and visit the same crepe stand that has been standing for more than a decade. But I don’t “look German”, have not kept in touch with most of my childhood friends, and my German fluency is declining.

I have to apply for a tourist visa every time I want to visit what I would call my home and introducing myself to someone as German would require a lot of explaining. Plus, it would be false. Because while I think it’s logical to open Christmas presents on the evening of the 24th of December, my family does not celebrate Christmas. While we love Spätzle, Maultaschen, and Brezel, our daily meals consist of lentils, chapatis and basmati rice.

Moving to the US aged 11 was like entering an intermission. Nobody asked where I was from. Tolerance and value for diversity is definitely not guaranteed in the US, but it’s far more normalized and intrinsic to the national identity than in Germany. I didn’t speak great English at the start, but neither did many other kids at my public school. Part of me was itching to show every new friend pictures of my home town in Germany and the river that flowed through it. I wanted to criticize the fact that we received a soggy microwaved pizza as part of our daily school lunches, but I knew this only seemed wrong to me because of the free, healthy, home cooked meals my German public school served. My background defined me, but it seemed like it was just one of many other diverse backgrounds. I wanted to hear about all these different experiences, but everyone else appeared to prefer glossing over them.

In 2015, just towards the end of eight grade, we moved to Chile. I didn’t speak any Spanish. Yet, every day from 8:30am in the morning to 4:30pm in the afternoon I would sit in front of my Spanishspeaking teachers attempting to explain mitosis, Chilean history, and Spanish poetry, with words that entered one ear and got stuck before they could even exit out of the other. I couldn’t understand anything.

I attended local protests and co-directed a short documentary but always felt, in the back of my mind, that I wasn’t Chilean enough to declare my passion for some issues. There was a wall, and I couldn’t take ownership for my feelings beyond that wall, no matter how at home I felt. I didn’t sound Chilean, or look Chilean, have the years of memories or the documentation to prove it.

Where am I really from?

I don’t feel Indian enough, nor Singaporean enough. I can’t call myself a German, don’t feel at home in the US, and haven’t been here long enough to be Chilean. I’ve been thinking about this more recently because my family will have moved to Memphis by the time you’re reading these words.

As I continue moving, I find my heart and my identity more and more occupied by the past– less likely to fit and adapt, and less malleable. I started off as a “clean slate”, but as I keep on moving, I will never be able to return to that clean slate. I’ll never be able to experience a new culture with the fresh eyes that I started my journey with. It’s sad that I will never feel as home in Memphis or Chile as I made myself feel in Germany when I was younger. And truthfully, I doubt that I will find any place in the future that truly becomes my own.

I doubt that I’m the only one who feels like there is no opening for a puzzle piece like mine. It has been stretched to the extent that it no longer fits into the bigger picture.

It is an absolute privilege to have these experiences. I really don’t want to sound like I’m complaining. I’m so grateful for moving, leaving a piece of me in different corners of the world and having so many different parts, often contradictory, within me. I’m grateful for all the things I’ve learned in the process of reconciling my competing identities. Yet, in times like these, when the whole world stands still and I’m forced to reflect, I notice that all of our identities are so different. Or, at times when I try to place my piece in a new puzzle, I realize how hard it is for others to recognize mine as compatible. There are so many international students at ANU and so many more all over the world. As our world expands, what most of us end up having in common is that we are all so different from one another.

In my sociology class last semester, we learned about Durkheim’s Mechanic and Organic Solidarity. Durkheim tried to understand the social consequences of urbanisation, industrialisation and the increasing diversity of background and occupation in French cities. He came to the conclusion that differences would complement one another, and we would find cohesion in those cleavages. A decade later, this process is as relevant as ever, on so many levels. For one, children of globalisation like myself attempt to “fit.”. And as a consequence of people like me, the landscapes we try to “fit” in will change as well.