Global Nomads and TCKS- 22: What we are left with

Here I describe the legacy of the global nomad childhood for me:

What I have taken away from this itinerant childhood: a learning stance; the confusing but deep conviction that there are multiple truths and that mine is not the only one; a wish to honor others and not impose on them. Most of all, a NEED for other cultures: for the smell of fish markets, for the sound of Japanese, for the smell of batik, for the bong of a temple bell, for the suck on my boot of a wet Dutch field, for the smell of airplanes, for the sprawl of a transit lounge, for the taste of sticky Japanese rice, for the texture of a reed mat, for the sight of thatched rooftops against clean blue sky, for the ocean that sails me to a new place.

What have you taken away from your nomadic childhood? What do you want to keep? What do you want to discard? Where do you want to go, to be, from here?  Bring some of it back here.

 Of Many Lands: Journal of a Traveling Childhood 

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Global Nomads and TCKS- 17: The grief of departure

In this passage from my book Of Many Lands, I recall the grief brought on by my departure from The Netherlands:

 Holland was my land of soggy farm fields, of Van Gogh, of wind­mills thrumping in the wind and frigid winter walks by the sea. It is the place I attended a Victorian house of a school, where I fell off a fat pony three times in an hour, where I read seven Enid Blytons in a week. It is the place I tasted pure freedom, zooming around Wassenaar on my bike, and the place I learned I could play soccer as well as a boy. Holland is the place my mother wore her long, baggy raincoat and translated Dutch at a rug-covered table, and where my father rode to work on his bike. It is where I made a twelve foot gum wrapper chain, and where I ran for student council and lost because I was a girl. It is the place I first tasted the elixir of belonging to a crowd, and it is the site of my first kiss.

When I left Holland at age thirteen I wept all the way in the car to Le Havre. When the grief was finally spent, something in me was broken. It was the kind of fracture that hurts with the sharpest pain the first time around. Holland was my first broken heart.

Did your heart ever break when you left a place? Think of that place and the things you loved doing there. Then remember the feeling of leaving there. Describe both.

Global Nomads and TCKS- 15: The discomfort of re-entry back “home”

In an excerpt from Of Many Lands, I describe my difficulty in finding a place for myself in my passport country:

The first year I am in Washington—I am 14 now—I spend each weekend earn­ing money for a planned summer trip back to Holland. I am determined to go back, even though most of my friends have left. The second year in Washing­ton I spend thinking about Borneo, the place my father has been assigned and for which he leaves half-way into my school year, the place we will move at the end of the year. It is as though I never quite put my feet down in Washing­ton. Washington is a place my family lives in between the REAL places. Finally, when I am in my late twenties, as I discover landscapes I love, dig into a field of work, and forge fast friendships, the U.S. begins to feel less like a movie set.

What is your relationship to your home country? Is it your REAL country? What have you done, or can you do, to make some place your real country? Reflect on this.

Global Nomads and TCKS- 12: America: To love and to hate

Here is a bit of hemming and hawing about what I love and don’t love about my country:

It is strange. The things I love about my country are the very things I hate. I love the rawness of the American spirit and I hate its crudeness. I love Ameri­can boldness and I despise its brashness. I love Twinkies and Ripples chips and Oreos—they reflect a special brand of American brilliance-and I also hate their aftertaste. I love the American passion for independence and yet I hate the way it dissolves to selfishness. I hate American sloppiness but I love dressing casually in cut-offs and a T-shirt and being able to go to a restaurant that way if I want. I adore the extravagance in any direction that is possible in the U.S., but I despise the rampant materialism. I love the direct look in an American’s eye, and I love the basic honesty, but I also hate the lack of style and politeness. I love and I hate the lack of rules for social interaction. I love devil-may-care and I love the perfect centerpiece. I love the egalitarianism, the true story that in America you can rise from rags to riches, that you can be born poor and gain respect. Most of all, I love the sense of possibility that suffuses the air of my country. In America, you can ride over the horizon.

Think of the things you love and the things you dislike about your home coun­try. Lay them out in specifics.

Of Many Lands: Journal of a Traveling Childhood

 

Global Nomads and TCKS- 10: The pleasure of asking for carrots in another language

I reflect here on the pleasure of speaking another language:

One day I went out marketing with my mother in Tokyo. At each little shop— the butcher’s and the baker’s and the vegetable seller’s—I did the talking, asking for a kilo of carrots or onions, a sack of sugar buns, a pound of Kobe beef, using the Japanese from my summer tutorial. Each time a clerk at a shop responded to my words by loading carrots into a paper cone or tying up buns in paper and colored string, I felt a little dollop of triumph drop through my body.

Do you remember the delight of communicating in a new language? Recollect a time you felt that sense of satisfaction. Or recollect your frustration with having to tackle a new language. Or bring back that time you goofed up in another language or couldn’t understand what was going on around you.

Of Many Lands: Journal of a Traveling Childhood

Global Nomads and TCKS- 7: The love of homes abroad

Here is a passage from my writing guide for global nomads, Of Many Lands: Journal of a Traveling Childhood:

 Holland is for me what childhood should be: freedom, bikes, canals, fields. The brick row house in downtown The Hague where I spent the five middle years of my childhood was the best home I ever had. To think of its big, leaky bedrooms with fireplaces, its ballroom-size bathrooms, its furniture-stuffed attics is to bring me a sensation of sleepy protectedness. A canopy that holds fast even under drumming rain. That home had for me what Patricia Hampl, the memoirist, calls “the radiance of the past,” for it was home the way it is when you are young: the home your parents give you.

Bring to mind the homes of your childhood.  When you think of those houses, which of them glow?  Describe one of them, being sure to incorporate concrete details, and using all your senses.