Home / Archive by category "Elsewhere"

Nostalgia

standard
| by | Elsewhere |
1 Comment

 

Dubai at dusk

View from the Burj

I’m lying on a sofa bed on a high floor of the Burj Khalifa, staring out the windows at the sprawling metropolis at my feet. Here in Dubai, as everywhere else in my month away from Afghanistan, I am haunted by the same question: “What would it be like to live here?”

I was tempted in Philly, as I have never been before, when a friend told me that he used to rent a downtown 1 bedroom for about $750/mo. It was unheard of in any other major city on the East Coast, and since all I really need for my home base is the hustle and bustle of a large city, I momentarily wondered if Philly could be it.

I asked myself this also in Cambridge, MA when I met another friend at 1369 Coffee House, an old favorite of mine during college. What if I had stayed in the area after graduation? What if coffee with this friend could have been a weekly, rather than annual, thing? But it was an idle thought, since staying in Boston had neither been a real possibility nor a real desire for me.

I looked forward to it in Manhattan, which I had decided was the only U.S. city that could keep up with me. Manhattan was home to some of my oldest and best friends, and as we wandered the streets, stopping in at any coffee shop that caught our eye, enjoyed evenings at the Met and late nights in Meatpacking, I felt like I fit in the city. It was as if Manhattan and I were kindred spirits and our energies matched, or something. 

And yet, no place invoked that line of questioning more strongly than DC, where “What would it like to live here?” became “What would it be like had I stayed?” And so it is – nostalgia for the past trumps nostalgia for futures imagined, no matter how bright those futures seem.

DC caused such a strong reaction that I literally cried about it. Luckily, it wasn’t the snot-filled, red-faced, bawling type of cry, but rather the silent kind characterized only by a few fat drops that roll so slowly down one’s cheeks as to make you wonder if even the tears are too sad, too lethargic, to make any real effort.

It had been building for a while.

As our plane descended into Northern Virginia, we flew over lush green fields of farmland hedged by thin, winding slivers of interstate, nearly empty at this early morning hour. I thought of other early mornings on the Interstate after weekends away from the Beltway, listening to NPR, coffee in hand, feeling just as care-free as those car ads always promise. How long ago it all seemed now! I felt my breath catch and a knot form deep in my chest; in that moment, I could not remember why I had ever wanted to leave the United States. 

But the tears didn’t come then.

No, they waited for a more public space to make an appearance: the baggage claim. Carousel number 4 at Dulles’ International Arrivals Hall, to be exact. As the carousel hummed to life, I could feel that tightness dislodging from my chest – slowly, slowly, slowly – until finally one tear and then another spilled out of the corners of my eyes.

I was thinking of something my mother had once told me. Before I went to Afghanistan for the first time, she said, “You know that you can’t go back to a normal life after an experience like this.” At the time, her prediction was premature, and I brushed it off. I didn’t want to “go back” anyway. I didn’t want the normal life. In fact, much the opposite; many my life decisions have been driven largely by a deep desire to avoid normalcy.

But in that moment, in front of baggage claim, I no longer knew what I wanted, and the thought that I could not go back scared me. As was recently written in a blog post widely shared by expats…

“…you look at your life, and the two countries that hold it, and realize that you are now two distinct people. As much as your countries represent and fulfill different parts of you and what you enjoy about life, as much as you have formed unbreakable bonds with people you love in both places, as much as you feel truly at home in either one, so you are divided in two.”

I was hit by a deep nostalgia – for the life that I had lived before I left; for the life that part of me still hoped to return to; and for the lives that I would be missing, now, no matter what country I was in. 

Ordering the Disorder

standard
| by | Elsewhere |
4 Comments

“Europe is boring. Everyone sits around and drinks coffee and reads books all day. There’s nothing else to do. No excitement, no fun.”

K was an Arabic interpreter at the Internet Governance Forum. Originally from Lebanon, he had been working in Azerbaijan for years, with a four-year stint in Europe in-between. He was tall and slim, with a muscular grace that reminded me of a male ballerina, and he towered over me as we stood drinking cheap instant coffee. We had already covered the usual conference pleasantries, the basics of our respective personal histories, as well as our opinions on American foreign policy in Afghanistan, so we had built up a rapport when he made this pronouncement.

“Look, there are bars and clubs everywhere, but this is not what I’m talking about. Here, in Azerbaijan the driving is crazy. And you walk down the streets and see people fist-fighting and you are like, ‘Those idiots!’ but then the fight keeps your mind occupied, at least for a moment.” His hands had been stuffed in the back pockets of his jeans, and he took them out to indicate where he meant.

“Here, the police are friendly. They stop your car just to get to know you. And here, if you are missing a document or something, it’s still OK. No problem. You just pay a bribe and support the man’s second job. It’s not like that in Europe.”

K betrayed the hint of a smile and I was not not sure if this was because he was joking, or if he was simply reminiscing about some encounter with the police corruption that he so euphemistically and poetically described.

“I like the excitement. The disorder. The…chaos.” He paused, as if that was not quite the word he was looking for.

And it wasn’t. I knew what he meant. It was not the chaos that he was drawn to. Not exactly. It was the grittiness, the flaws, the seeming contradictions that stared him in the face on every street corner. But it was also more than even that.

The thing that most people don’t understand about conflict and crisis zones is that even the most complex, lawless-looking places are governed by rules. Those may be utterly unintelligible to us, but they exist. And it’s the slow process of recognition, discovery, and eventual understanding of the order amidst the disorder that is so appealing.

“In Lebanon, the political situation is not so good.” K sighed and shook his head, but the shadow that crossed his face quickly dispersed. He continued on to give me a brief and simplistic history of modern Lebanon. This time, he was fully aware of the irony of his words, pulling and teasing at them to reveal the extent of the contradictions.

I mused over his love for the daily grit of life in Azerbaijan but dislike of the at times life-threatening danger of living in Lebanon.

Everyone has a limit, it seems, as to how much discomfort and danger they can tolerate.  For K, the random stresses of Azerbaijan – far “worse” than anything in Western Europe – presented an acceptable level of dark reality. It was exciting. It broke up the monotony of everyday life. The political and security situation in Lebanon, on the other hand, was too much. And understandably so; though not officially classified as a conflict zone (as Afghanistan still seems to be) the threat of violence in Beirut especially is all too real.

But perhaps even more importantly, Lebanon was his country, making it too close to make light of, too close to look at impassively and with the sense of invulnerability and invincibility that he felt in Azerbaijan. There, the danger was foreign, and the relative mundanity of its crimes and car accidents were not only bearable, but even fun.

 

A woman in a headscarf approached us. It was time for him to get back to his interpreting duties. He grimaced at me. “Let’s talk more at lunch.”

I nodded and waved, wondering idly how we were going to find each other in the masses of hungry forum attendees. But I wasn’t too worried. We had our moment of connection and I felt as if I knew everything about him, and vice versa.

In our respective Central Asian countries, we were fellow expats – and kindred spirits.

Dubai

standard
| by | Elsewhere |
7 Comments
It is morning in Dubai, and I have been up since 04:30. I watched the sun rise over a sliver of marina, the light hitting the deep turquoise of the water, the gleaming white of the yachts, and the glittering glass of the tall buildings on both sides. I’m on the 16th floor – out of about 30 – in a luxury apartment building that belongs to a friend in Kabul, and even from “down here” the views are spectacular.
I’m in Dubai for just over 24 hours to get my visa back to Afghanistan, and then I head to Baku, Azerbaijan for the UN’s Internet Governance Forum.  I didn’t expect to like Dubai. Everything about this city is the antithesis of Kabul. I love history and culture and localization and even chaos, and Dubai is modernity, efficiency, globalization, and consumerism.
That Dubai is so close to Afghanistan – and to all of the other headline-making conflicts in Africa and the Middle East – is incredibly disorienting. A short 3.5 hour flight, and you leave the endless dust and fecal-matter-coated sky of Kabul; the burqas and the distinct discomfort of being a woman; the pockmarked roads and the ditches (I fell into another one on Saturday); the crashed cars from all over the world that get a second life in the streets of Afghanistan; and the constant presence of cheap weapons and the cheap men that wield them.
 –
On the way to Kabul International Airport, I felt incredibly sad to be leaving. It was silly, since I’d be back in Afghanistan – Kandahar, to be exact – in a week. But I missed this strange place, and it did not help that I was leaving in the dark of night.
But the flight from Kabul to Dubai is always in the early morning, and so the leaving of Kabul is almost always done while the sky is still dark, the streets are empty, and your only companion is the haunting melody that floats over the mosque’s loudspeakers. That, and the armed men, though even they seem less threatening in the sleepy pre-dawn.
I regretted my last-minute decision to attend the conference in Baku. As great of an opportunity as the IGF will be, there are still so many places in Afghanistan to visit, so many people to meet, so many interviews to conduct. Besides, I had just started Dari lessons, and finally was beginning to pick up on conversations around me.
–
My first impression of Dubai was of the heat. I was wearing a black turtleneck sweater dress over black jeans (jeggings, to be precise), a black coat that skimmed my knees, and a blue floral headscarf that an ex-boyfriend’s mother had brought for me from Kashmir. Appropriate outfit for Kabul, not so much for muggy Dubai, where women from all over the world descended with their 4″ heels, designer bags, and tight, tight clothing. Is that cleavage, really? Her ass is hanging out of her jeans! How is this still the Middle East?
It was not until I “acclimatized” a little that I realized how much I actually missed all of this. That feeling came as I was walking through the food court of the Dubai Mall with a new friend from the Afghan Embassy, though it had been building as we drove through the new freeways past villas and skyscrapers and a remarkable amount of green space for a city that rose out of the desert.
“Do you want Pizza? KFC? Burgers?” He asked.
“I want something local,” I responded. “Is there a local fast food?”
He laughed. In a city where the population is almost 90% foreign, what could I expect? We settled on Iranian fast food that was not very fast at all. It tasted just like Afghanistan’s, though my kebab was of shrimp instead of lamb.
–
I feel guilty that after just a month in Afghanistan, I could want all of this. I thought I was tougher. I have always prided myself in my ability to adapt and to get off the beaten expat path. But sitting here now – in the most comfortable (and the largest!) bed I’ve slept in since leaving the U.S., in this apartment with its full wall of windows, in this city that is global in every sense of the word – part of thinks that I could get used to this.
But at the same time, I can’t shake this growing suspicion that I am just an outsider looking in, and that this world – this normal world – no longer belongs to me.

In search of a place

standard
| by | Elsewhere |
2 Comments

“When you first arrive in a new city, nothing makes sense. Everything’s unknown, virgin… After you’ve lived here, walked these streets, you’ll know them inside out. You’ll know these people… It’ll belong to you.” -L’Auberge Espagnole

Whenever I’m about to start over in a new city/state/country, I begin to wax nostalgic for all of the places that I’ve called home, as well as all of the ones I’ve yet to know.

And since I’ve moved 4x to 4 different states in the past year – not to mention my upcoming 5th move to state # 5 – I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the power that place has held in my life.

I’ve always had a somewhat difficult relationship with it; growing up, I felt equally out of place in America, my adopted home, and China, my birth home, so I spent much of my time daydreaming about languages, cultures, and homelands not my own. Then I started actually leaving – to England, the Caribbean, India, and then to Spain, where I spent a year and a half.

But Spain didn’t work out, and when I returned to the U.S., my college travels were in search of a place so compelling that I would want to stay and claim it for my own.

I think that’s why the quote above speaks to me so much. I wanted to belong to a place; I wanted a place to belong to me. And every time that I started afresh, I couldn’t help but feel that excitement and that potential again. Is this one finally going to be it? Am I home, at last?

With my move to NYC drawing ever closer, I’m falling into that same line of questioning.

New York is energy. Diverse, passionate, intense energy. It pushes you, forces you to move, makes status quo an obscure impossibility. It’s the type of city that I know is going to make me crash – into people, ideas, and adventures – even when I am not actively looking for them.

But of course, the other side of “crash” is “burn”, and I can see myself getting burned out. I can already make out the tiny fissures around the perfect life in New York that I’m imagining for myself. It will be lonely, alienating, and overwhelming. Unlike DC, whose transience makes it friendlier, NYC will remain unimpressed – I’ll just be one of the many dream-chasing migrants that make it to (but perhaps never in) New York.

And yet, even knowing both sides, I feel like New York might exactly what I have been looking for. Here’s hoping that this time, I’m right.