Master of Creative Writing 760-553 Minor Thesis
I lost the world where I belonged. Now I don't belong anywhere:
Writing Third Culture Experiences
Eunice Liew
The University of Melbourne
Student Number: 139046
Year: 2007
Statement of Originality
This dissertation contains no material accepted for any other degree or diploma. To the best of my knowledge the thesis contains no material previously written or published by another person, except where appropriate acknowledgement is made in the bibliography and notes.
Signed: Eunice Liew
Date: 7 December 2007
2 Contents
Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………… 4
Dissertation ……………………………………………………………………………. 5
Creative Work Title Page …………………………………………………………….. 36
The Path of Dreams ………………………………………………………... 37
Imaginary Friend …………………………………………………………….. 49
Appendix ………………………………………………………………………………... 59
Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………. 62
3
Abstract
In 1990 the Hubble Telescope was launched into outer space, and for the first time, human beings were able to see the universe more clearly. It was also the year that I started to understand myself in relation to the rest of the world. I have always felt like an outsider because I left my country of origin when I was an infant. However, 1990 was the year that my family began moving from country to country more frequently. I eventually lost my ability to identify with my first culture. I was thirteen and I became a Third Culture Kid. I am now a
Third Culture Adult (or Adult Third Culture Kid).
This thesis explores the writing of Third Culture experiences. I have chosen to discuss
Isabel Allende’s work because, as a diplomat’s daughter, she has lived in Latin America,
Europe, and the Middle East during her childhood (Allende 2003: 106-109). Specifically, I will discuss her memoir of her first culture, My Invented Country (2003) and her novel, The
House of the Spirits (1985). I will discuss Allende’s writing in relation to what Julia Kristeva calls “the stranger within”, by which she means the uncanny within the self that Sigmund
Freud also calls the unheimlich or “unhomely” (Kristeva 1991: 191). Allende’s writing, particularly The House of the Spirits, which is full of magical images, is an example of the uncanny stranger within as it might be expressed through storytelling. I will discuss Allende’s writing in relation to Jerome Bruner’s storied self because Allende’s stories are undoubtedly affected by her Third Culture self. Lastly, I will discuss my own writing in relation to the
Third Culture experience. I will also relate all of these things to David C. Pollock and Ruth E.
Van Reken’s discussion of the experience, its challenges and benefits, and its defining link to the life of the Global Nomad.
4
Introduction
What is a Third Culture?
In the 1950s, children who did not identify with their culture of origin, because their parents travelled internationally for work, were named Third Culture Kids1. This term is still used to apply to people who grow up in more than one culture, yet are estranged from all of them, including their culture of origin. Third Culture Kids (referred to from now on as TCKs) was a term first used by sociologists Drs. John and Ruth Hill Useem2. More recently, David C.
Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken discussed the TCK experience in their book Third Culture
Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds (2001). In it, the authors quote the
Useems saying that TCKs identify with the lifestyle of the expatriate community3 as an
“interstitial culture or ‘culture between cultures’” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 20-21). The authors go on to say, “instead of simply watching, studying, or analysing other cultures,
TCKs actually live in different cultural worlds as they travel back and forth between their home and host cultures” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 22, 27).
The Useems did their original research on Western expatriates who were living in designated spaces usually isolated from the local culture, including spaces “such as military bases, missionary compounds, and business enclaves” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 20-21).
However, since the 1950s the world has changed and the meaning of the expression TCK has come under review4. Indeed “some argue that the terms third culture or third culture kid are
1 “Sociologists Drs. John and Ruth Hill Useem first coined the term third culture in the 1950s when they went to India for a year to study Americans who lived and worked there. […] The Useems also met expatriates from other countries and soon discovered that [the expatriates] had formed a lifestyle that was different from either their home or host culture, but it was one they shared in that setting” (Pollock and Reken, 2001: 20). 2
5 now misnomers” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 20-21). In the twenty-first century, globalisation means that more families live abroad, and most expatriate families do not live in communities completely isolated from the culture of their host countries. “The Japanese families who live in Kokomo, Indiana, and work for Delco-Remy don’t live in a Delco-Remy compound”
(Pollock and Reken 2001: 21). Since TCKs are no longer restricted to the culture of isolated communities as it was in the 1950s, the culture of a TCK has become one that is informed by the cultures of many countries. Perhaps a more accurate definition of a TCK would be a chronically uprooted child, uprooted not only from his/her first culture, but also from many second cultures.
TCKs in countless countries still share remarkably important life experiences through the very process of living and growing up in and among different cultures. The experiences they share arguably affect their sense of self – “the deeper parts of their being” (Pollock and
Reken 2001:20-21). For some TCKs, home is defined by whichever country their parents happen to be working and living, and this means that their point of origin changes frequently.
“Often [TCKs] whose parents move every two years rarely consider geography as the determining factor in what they consider home” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 123).
Moving to different countries throughout childhood is not the same as the experience of diversity within a particular culture. Nor is it the same as experiencing diversity in other countries as an adult, because “when people first go to another culture as adults, they experience culture shock and need a period of adjustment, but their value system, sense of identity, and the establishment of core relationships with family and friends have already developed in the home culture” (Pollock and Reken 2001:39). It takes more than “a two-week or even a two-month vacation” in a foreign country in order to develop classic TCK characteristics (Pollock and Reken 2001: 22, 27). “Families that are posted to different countries experience their “entire world, value system and points of reference changing overnight” (Pollock and Reken 2001:39). Also, the Third Culture identity is formed during the “the developmental years – from birth to eighteen years of age.” Therefore, it is important
6 that the “cross-cultural experience occurs during the years when [the] child’s sense of identity, relationships with others, and view of the world are being formed in the most basic ways” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 22, 27). Most children form their identities in childhood, the period when many TCKs are moving from country to country. As a result, the TCK’s worldview and cultural references are a mélange of different cultural experiences, without a fixed frame of reference or home culture with which to compare those experiences.
Because TCKs are constantly entering new cultures, they do not have any choice but to identify as the “other.” The shared identity of the TCK and of the Adult Third Culture Kid
(ATCK5) is one that is defined by “otherness”. Being “foreign” within all cultures is their shared experience and also their continuity. It is this experience therefore that forms the basis of their stories. Pollock and Reken say “sometimes TCKs and ATCKs appear arrogant because they have chosen a permanent identity as being ‘different’ from others. [However] what is labelled as arrogance in TCKs is simply an attempt to share their normal life experiences. […] Non-TCK friends don’t realise TCKs have no other stories to tell” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 104-105).
Before I continue, I think it is necessary to clarify two things. When referring to both
TCKs and ATCKs, I will use the term Global Nomad. I might also define such an experience as interstitial, which means something between things. The Global Nomad is a person that is
(either metaphorically or culturally) between one culture and another.
That TCKs or Global Nomads6 have no “other stories to tell”, indicates how deeply ingrained their nomadic experience is in their core identities. The TCKs and Global Nomads are interstitial by nurture7, part of a modern, undefined expatriate community, but in fact committed to nowhere in particular.
5 Adult Third Culture Kids (ATCKs) are people who have grown up with the TCK experience (Pollock and Reken 2001: 6). 6 On October 21st 1994, in the Virginian-Pilot, Gary Edwards describes a “global nomad” as someone who has spent a large part of their youth living outside their passport country because of their parent’s occupation.
7 Jerome Bruner discusses the self as both storied8 and also “a remembered self, the remembering reaching far back beyond our own birth, back to the cultural and language forms that specify the defining properties of a Self” (Bruner 1994: 52-53). Basically, the “Self” of the TCK/ATCK is a result of remembering the experience of leaving, entering, and living in different cultures. TCKs and ATCKs live in a “neither/nor world […] that is neither fully the world of their parent’s culture (or cultures) nor fully the world of the other [Secondary] culture[s]” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 6).
In my thesis, I show that there is an undercurrent of grief in the stories of Third Culture experiences. Unresolved grief of not having a “home” is a key feature of the Global Nomad experience. This unresolved grief is rarely discussed and much less understood. People say,
“It must be great to see the world.” Or they ask, “But what do TCKs have to grieve about?”
(Pollock and Reken 2001: 165). In conversations one then says, of course it’s great… (my childhood friends do not know me anymore, but)… it’s really great here in Shanghai/New
York/Paris/Kathmandu… (I don’t remember anything about my passport country, but)… etcetera. For the TCK grief is the last taboo: one travels to lots of places paid for by one’s parents, therefore one is not allowed to be unhappy.
Because of the richness of their lives “some TCKs refuse to accept the idea that unresolved grief could possibly an issue for them. […] They agree they’ve had wonderful, interesting lives” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 166). But unresolved grief is present in writings about the Third Culture experience. According to Sigmund Freud, dreams are “wish- fulfilments” and since the Global Nomad wishes for a home, these thoughts become the catalysts for creative expression (Freud 1901: 644): “every child at play behaves like a creative writer in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him. […] The creative writer does the same as a child at
8 “The narrative mode is one of the few ways we have for organizing indefinitely long diachronic sequences involving the activities of ourselves, our fellows, and the symbolic world of culture” (Bruner 1994: 52).
8 play [….] Language has preserved this relationship between children’s play and poetic creation” (Freud 1901: 144).
Julia Kristeva discusses the grief of the “other” in Strangers to Ourselves (1991). She says that there are two kinds of foreigners: the kind that waste away in “an agonizing struggle between what no longer is and what will never be” and the kind that “transcend: living neither before nor now but beyond, they are bent with a passion that, although tenacious, will remain forever unsatisfied. It is a passion for another land, always a promised one” (1991: 10). I believe that the Global Nomad is in the second category – the outsider with a passion for a promised land. Global Nomads can experience “nostalgia” for a “home” which doesn’t actually exist in their experiences, and this “home” is not necessarily the home of their first culture. Most Global Nomads are expected to repatriate to their passport countries at some point and this can create grief for the “homes” that they leave behind in their second cultures.
The binary of self/other relies on the idea of belonging to a place, and that lacking identification with such belonging, the state of the Global Nomad is statelessness9. But this is a syllogistic argument: statelessness is their state; the Global Nomad’s home is the unhomely10 (Kristeva 1991: 182-183). This does not mean that Global Nomads lack identification11. They identify with the unhomely home. Sometimes, travel itself consolidates their sense of identity, constituting an “anti-nostalgia” for an “anti-home.” Being uprooted is perhaps the most consistent feature of their lives and because it is constant, many TCKs
“develop a migratory instinct that controls their lives” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 121,125).
I argue that the unresolved grief of the Global Nomad is manifested in the unconscious and because of this, it is observable in writing. For the Global Nomad writing is a way to create identity out of otherness and a state out of statelessness. In order to examine this idea, I will discuss the writing of Isabel Allende, who was a child of a diplomat and grew
9 See Appendix 2. 10 “With the Freudian notion of the unconscious the involution of the strange in the psyche loses its pathological aspect and integrates within the assumed unity of human beings an otherness that is both biological and symbolic and becomes an integral part of the same” (Kristeva 1991: 181). 11 See Appendix 3.
9 up in more than one country (Griego 2004: par. 1). I will also discuss my own fiction, which explores the experience of being a Global Nomad, who simultaneously belongs nowhere and everywhere.
What is a “Third Culture Text”?
In researching this paper on the Third Culture Kid experience, I have found almost nothing written about its expression in (or relationship to) creative writing. “Third Culture” and
“Global Nomadism” are not genres or author categories because there are not enough writers who identify themselves in this way. Categorizing authors as “Global Nomads” is about as random as making a category for writers whose parents are mechanics. For example, according to Chris Hall12 the author J. G. Ballard13 finds aspects of his passport country alienating and this makes him an outsider. Though Ballard14 is worth exploring for this thesis,
I believe that his work is more influenced by the horrors of WWII than by his experience as a
Global Nomad. I have found that the majority of writing by an “other” is usually about the contrast between an originating culture and a host culture. An example is Amy Tan’s The Joy
Luck Club (1990), about Chinese immigrant women and their daughters. Since the culture of the TCK is one that encompasses many cultures, literature about the TCK experience is rare.
At this point, I would like to make a brief allusion to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of
One’s Own (1945) because of arguable similarities between women’s historical experience as outsiders and the experience of Global Nomads. Woolf says, on the subject of women and fiction, that it is a problem with no conclusion15. When A Room of One’s Own was first published in 1928, women were not allowed into libraries unless “accompanied by Fellow of
12 “He is always going to have an outsider’s perspective; one that, for example, finds the London suburb of Shepperton where he lives “lunar and abstract” in the summer” (Hall 1997: par 6). Accessed 22nd September 2007, from
10 the College or furnished with a letter of introduction” (Woolf 1945: 9). Also, historically, women have been excluded from a system that allowed a nation’s citizens to vote, work, and use public spaces. Because women have even been excluded from citizenship, symbolically they have existed outside the social contract16 (the implicit agreement among people that results in the organization of society) as contractually non-citizens, “foreigners” or
“outsiders”. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf implies that because women were removed from the social contract that allowed the use of public spaces (eg. libraries), then for men they were outsiders. Likewise, Global Nomads exist outside the social contract as it is known to non-Global Nomads. Just like Woolf’s outsider, the subject of Global Nomads and fiction is not a problem with a neat conclusion because the problem has yet to be broadly acknowledged. One of the reasons for this is, although the experience of being a Global
Nomad has become increasingly common, most do try to fit in however superficially and do not seek to identify themselves as “different” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 107-119).
In light of these problems, I have chosen to explore the writing of Isabel Allende. In her memoir, My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile (2003), Allende describes her passport country as one that is an invention of her mind: a “mythic country that from being missed so profoundly has replaced the real country” (2003: 180-181). Although she has often identified herself as Chilean, Allende is a Global Nomad and her writing contains elements of the self as other as well as of the self as an invention. Within her work there is also evidence of unresolved grief and nostalgia for a home that does not exist. In addition to My Invented Country, I will also examine her novel The House of the Spirits
(1985) as an example of her fiction.
My Invented Country is an autobiographical-based narrative of Allende’s relationship to
Chile, the country of her birth. In this work, she describes her extended family and her way of
16 “If the social contract, far from being that of equal men, is based on an essentially sacrificial relationship of separation and articulation of differences which in this way produces communicable meaning, what is our place in this order of sacrifice and/or of language?” (Kristeva 1986: 199).
11 life in Chile before she went into exile during the military coup that eventuated in the death of the president (her fraternal relative) Salvador Allende. Allende now lives in America where she has been since 1987 (Griego 2004: par. 1). As explained in chapter one, Allende was born the child of diplomats and lived in various countries during her childhood. Her experience can therefore be identified as similar to that of a TCK.
In chapter two, I discuss the importance of storytelling and identity formation as it relates to the TCK experience. The narrative of The House of the Spirits emphasizes the importance of storytelling, especially its importance to outsiders. In chapter three, I define
Third Culture writing as writing that is informed by the memories of a TCK. I also attempt to discuss my own creative writing, which is the writing of such a Third Culture experience.
12
Chapter One
Isabel Allende’s Invented Country
I lost the world where I belonged. Now I don't belong anywhere. -Isabel Allende (Umpierre 2002:129).
In the introduction of My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, Allende admits that she decided to write a memoir about Chile because a stranger at a conference asked her what role nostalgia played in her novels (2003: x-xii). She says that she didn’t realise she was writing about nostalgia (2003: x-xii). She also says that she only started to feel
“American” after the September 11th 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre (2003: x-xii). It was because of the attack that she started to think of what America meant to her; she realised that it was also her home, even though she identified herself as Chilean (2003: x-xii).
However, Allende says that she is a person of varying cultural influences, and the Chile that she remembers isn’t so much the geographic Chile, but the Chile of her memory, the Chile of her imagination. She says that “every book contributes to the completion of that ‘country inside [her] head,’” (Allende 2003:179). Allende is the foreigner that Kristeva describes as always being drawn to the imaginary home that doesn’t exist (1991:10).
Allende wrote My Invented Country as a memoir of the home of her ancestors
(Allende 2003: 177; Rodden 2004: 67). But even though Chile is an important part of her identity as an author, by identifying Chile as the country of her memory and imagination,
Allende has effectively written a memoir about the effect of being a TCK:
I have often said that my nostalgia dates from the time of the military coup of 1973, when my country changed so much that I can no longer recognize it, but in fact it must have begun much earlier. My childhood and adolescence were marked with journeys and farewells. I hadn’t yet put down roots in one place when it was time to pack our suitcases and move to another. I wrote everything down in my notebook
13 with the industry of a notary, as if even then I foresaw that only writing would anchor me to reality. […] When she gave me that notebook, my mother somehow intuited that I would have to dig up my Chilean roots, and that lacking a land into which to sink them I would have to do that on paper. […] In my childhood and youth, I lived in Bolivia, the Middle East, and Europe […] I learned a little French and English, and also learned to eat suspicious-looking food without asking questions (Allende 2003: 106-109).
Allende was born to Chilean diplomat parents in Lima in 1942 and, after her parents separated, her mother’s second partner, Ramón Huidobro, was also a diplomat (Griego 2004: par. 1). When she was ten, Huidobro was appointed secretary of the embassy in Bolivia so she went to an American school there. When they then went to live in Lebanon, she attended a
British school in there (Zapata 2002: 8 and 12). As was mentioned earlier, as a child she also lived in Europe (Allende 2003: 106-109; Griego 2004: par. 1). Also, from 1973 to 1986,
Allende lived in Caracas to escape a military coup against the president Salvador Allende, her relative (Griego 2004: par. 1). In 1987 she moved to San Francisco to be with her second husband, William Gordon, who is an American lawyer (Griego 2004: par. 1; Rodden 2004:
131). She says that from the moment she left Chile and began to “travel from country to country” she “became the new girl in the neighbourhood, the foreigner at school, the strange one who dressed differently and didn’t even know how to talk like everyone else” (Allende
2003: 78-79). She says, “I couldn’t picture the time I would return to familiar territory in
Santiago, but when finally that happened, several years later, I didn’t fit in there either”(Allende 2003: 78-79). Like most Global Nomads, Allende “never develop[ed] true cultural balance anywhere” (Pollock and Reken 2001:93).
After having recommitted to Chile from a childhood of wandering and then having to leave Chile again as an adult, Allende describes herself as becoming “homeless, a woman without a country. […] For some writers exile is a desired location out of which they can write” (Umpierre 2002:133-134). In the introduction to My Invented Country Allende says:
Once I heard a famous Afro-American writer say that from the time she was a little girl she felt like a stranger in her family and her hometown. She added that nearly all
14 writers have experienced that feeling, even if they have never left their native city. […] Writing, when all is said and done, is an attempt to understand one’s own circumstance and to clarify the confusion of existence, including insecurities that do not torment normal people, only chronic nonconformists, many of whom end up as writers after having failed in other undertakings. (2003: xiv).
Allende’s description of the reason one writes – “an attempt to understand one’s own circumstance and to clarify the confusion of existence” – is something that many Global
Nomads spend a lifetime trying to do. According to Pollok and Reken, the Global Nomad often goes through a period of delayed grief as an effect of their fractured childhoods
(between the ages of twenty-five and forty) (2001: 181). Delayed grief is actually something like nostalgia – both sentiments look back to the past. For Allende, this nostalgia is something she has worked through by writing about Chile, which is depicted in her writing through the haze of her imagination. She says, for example, that in Chile at her grandfather’s house, they would eat lunches that could “provoke heartburn in the healthiest eater” and that her parents, who are “over eighty, consume ninety eggs, a quart of cream, a pound of butter, and four pounds of cheese per week” (2003: 87-88). One can assume that Allende’s parents don’t really eat that many eggs or that much cream, butter, and cheese in a week. Allende represents her memories, the basis upon which she forms her view of the world and her self, as mysteries she attempts to decode through writing. Allende says that most of her work “is an attempt to bring an illusory order to the natural chaos of life, to decode the mysteries of memory, to search for [her] identity” (Rodden 2004: XI). Allende admits that she “can’t pretend to know what part of [her] memory is reliable and how much [she has] invented, because the job of defining the line between them is beyond [her] ability” (2003: 178-179). In an effort to recover phantom memories, things from the past with “fuzzy outlines”, she (re)invents them as fiction (2003: 78-79).
15 Outsider Magic
It’s as if my life has been nothing but a series of illusions […] and the landscape is no more substantial than a dream. - Isabel Allende (Allende 2003: 78-79).
The genre or narrative style of Magical Realism (realismo mágico), also known as
“marvellous realism” (realismo maravilloso), has been defined as an attempt “to create ‘new realities’ or to treat the existing ones with a different perspective from that of the social realism of the 1930s” (Angulo 1995: xi). It is a style that gives culture, history, and geography precedence and juxtaposes those elements with a subjective view of reality. It has been described as an “ontological and ideological” way for South American writers to “define their culture within the western context” (Angulo 9). Initially, Magical Realism was used by
“Franz Roh [to] address post-expressionist art in the 1920's. The term was later taken up by
Venezuelan writer Arturo Uslar Pietri in 1948 in reference to a literature with surrealist elements” (Zapata-Whelan 2003: par 3). However, the Magical Realism I would like to discuss is not the same as the one by the surrealists, that is, it “isn’t as grounded in reality”
(Angulo 1995: 4).
Due to the difficulty of a highly mobile childhood, the surrealistic elements of Magic
Realism is, albeit indirectly, an apt description of the Global Nomad experience. Pollok and
Reken have described the Global Nomad experience as “intangible” (Pollock and Reken
2001: 72). It is the uncanny experience of flying to and from different homes in different countries, and not the other elements of Magic Realism such as the historical and geographical aspects commonly associated with the style, that affects the Global Nomad.
In the first chapter of Gabriel García Márquez’s Magic Realist novel, A Hundred Years of
Solitude (1970), magic is introduced into the story by Melquíades who comes to the village with “two metal ingots” (magnets) that are able to attract lost items (1970: 1-2). Melquíades is
16 a gypsy, in other words, Márquez introduces magic through a character who is an outsider.
Similarly, in Allende’s My Invented Country the outsider is the country itself because the country is foreign to Allende; and in The House of the Spirits, Rosa introduces magic through her physicality, her beauty and her green hair, both of which make her an outsider (Allende
1985: 6). For Kristeva, magic is related to the experience of being an outsider itself, as it is also the experience of the uncanny, or that which is foreign within – the Freudian unheimlich:
When we flee from or struggle against the foreigner, we are fighting our unconscious – that ‘improper’ facet of our impossible ‘own and proper.’ Delicately, analytically, Freud does not speak of foreigners: he teaches us how to detect foreignness in ourselves. (Kristeva 1991:191).
According to Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves, “everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light” (Kristeva 1991:181). Unheimlich in
English means “uncanny, and the Greeks simply call [it] xenos, ‘foreign’ (Kristeva 1991:
191). Kristeva says that the direct translation of unheimlich is “unhomely”. Kristeva interprets
Freud as saying that “foreignness, an uncanny one […] irrigates our very speaking-being, estranged by other logics, including the heterogeneity of biology” (Kristeva 1991: 170).
“Freud wanted to demonstrate at the outset, on the basis of a semantic study of the German adjective heimlich and it’s antonym unheimlich that a negative meaning close to that of the antonym is already tied to the positive term heimlich, friendly comfortable” (Kristeva 1991:
182). This notion of antonyms is similar to the contradictory nostalgia of the Global Nomad: where there is no nostalgia for a home, but rather a nostalgia for a home that doesn’t exist, a home of the imaginary, a home wherein resides the unresolved grief of the Global Nomad. In writing, the uncanny is the bearer of unresolved grief and once the grief is resolved through an exploration of the uncanny, where the Global Nomad can find his/her true home.
According to Kristeva “we are foreigners to ourselves”. In other words: we all contain
“foreignness” within ourselves (Kristeva 1991: 170). As such, the Global Nomad, the ultimate gypsy, is not only foreign on the outside but also foreign on the inside. A hybrid of many
17 cultures, he/she belongs everywhere and simultaneously nowhere at once (Pollock and Reken
2001: 124-125).
Allende longs for what Kristeva describes as a “passion for a promised land”
(Kristeva 1991:10). Maybe this is why she has been called a writer who “relies increasingly on formula [;] formidable parental figures, love at first sight, illegitimate birth, and mansions that expand over the years (Graham 2001:39). Allende also says that she remembers “fleeting images” and her landscapes are “no more substantial than a dream” (2003: 78-79). With her repetitive themes and subjective realities, Allende appears in her autobiographical writing as a melancholic person forever obsessed with the thing she lost, the missing “maternal object”, her mother-land (Kristeva 1989: 9). Absence allows Allende to “mythologize” the gaps in history caused by displacement and she is compelled to fill in the gap by recreating history as fiction. “In general, exile is advantageous for a writer, Allende believes, precisely because it generates imaginative space and multiple perspectives” (Rodden 2004: 14).
Allende is not strictly a writer of Magical Realism, but she is sometimes identified as one because The House of the Spirits was influenced by Gabriel García Márquez’s A Hundred
Years of Solitude17. Márquez is perhaps the best-known Latin American author of this style of writing18. Allende says that “if the brutality of Latin American history and politics were recounted without this element of imagination, its true dimensions would not be reflected”
(Zapata-Whelan par 7-8). This “element of imagination” allowed Allende to safely write about the brutalities of Latin American history and politics, the activists lost in the struggle of
Latin American history and politics, and also her own loss: the loss of her home through exile
(Rodden 2004: 79). Allende’s use of Magic Realism is more of an “early influence than a personal language. Each of her subsequent novels after The House of the Spirits makes progressively less use of ghosts, inexplicable occurrences, and a casual reordering of reality”
17 Allende doesn’t believe that she is consciously influenced by Márquez, but she admits to telling similar stories: “I think that is has much more to do with the fact that we were both raised by our grandparents. He tells the stories his grandmother told him, and I do the same” (Rodden: 2004: 254). 18 Gabriel García Márquez was influenced by Kafka’s Metamorphosis and lived overseas as an adult; but technically this does not make him a TCK
18 (Graham 2001: 38-39). One may therefore ask, “after shedding the influence of Márquez what is Allende left with?” (Graham 2001: 38-39). I would argue that Allende is left with the other distinguishing thread that runs through her fiction: the theme of families and histories in which the narrators are often feminists19 and the images are typically dream-like (Allende
2003: 78-79).
Memory in Third Culture Writing
I can’t pretend to know what part of my memory is reliable and how much I’ve invented. - Isabel Allende (Allende 2003: 178-179).
One of the most important aspects of the Global Nomad’s developed awareness of self and other is that their “cross-cultural experience occurs [when they are children and their] sense of identity, relationships with others, and view of the world are being formed in the most basic ways” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 27).
In “The ‘Remembered’ Self” (1994), Jerome Bruner says that the “Self is not an entity that one can simply remember. It is a complex mental edifice that one constructs by the use of a variety of mental processes, one of which must surely be remembering” (1994: 41).
One of the processes of remembering is remembering things selectively, and the selections that we remember are guided by a need “to emphasize agency, to recover memories related to the initiation of relatively autonomous acts governed by our intentional states – our wishes, desires, beliefs, and expectancies” (1994: 41). In other words, we remember things that allow us to be the focus of the memory – hence the word “agency”, meaning you are the subject of your own story. Thus, all our stories, be they dreams, memories, or stories that we write, make us the protagonist. Similarly, Freud says that children dream in order to satisfy the innermost desires of their egos – they dream as wish fulfilment – and creative writers are like
19 “All the women in my book [The House of the Spirits] are feminists in their fashion; that is, they ask to be free and complete human beings, to be able to fulfil themselves, not to be dependent on men” (Rodden 2004: 51).
19 children at play (Freud 1901: 644, 659). We are the subjects of our dreams. We are the subjects of our stories.
Bruner says that “the Self is ‘storied,’ or narrative in structure. When you ask people what they are really like, they tell a great many stories involving the usual elements of narrative […]: there is an agent [meaning, an autonomous active Self] engaged in action deploying certain instruments for achieving a goal in a particular scene, and somehow things have gone awry between these elements to produce trouble” (1994: 43). It makes sense that as a writer, Allende is drawn to magical and dreamlike images in her writing because she writes about the home within herself. Allende has a home within her memory, and her memory is her home. Allende’s inventions are not only a way that a writer of fiction might tell their story, it is also a way that she understands herself. But perhaps the elements of narrative that she uses are not so usual: Magical Realism is a manifestation of the unconscious in Allende’s writing and a method through which she deals with her outsider identity.
As was suggested before, the most common themes of Allende’s fiction are families, histories, and memories. “Repossessing historical experience which reclaim[s] the past is
Allende's [life work]. In The House of the Spirits, she writes to keep alive the memory of her country, Chile” (Foreman, 1992:369), and in Portrait in Sepia, Allende uses a narrator to tell the story in order to make sense of and remember the past. For Allende,
memory is grounded in a recuperated relation to the historical. Allende […] like the storytelling women protagonists [she creates], [is] animated by the desire to preserve pasts too often trivialized, built over, or erased, and to pass them on. (Foreman, 1992:369).
It makes sense then to understand Allende as a TCK addressing her loss of home through her creative writing.
Because nostalgia is a longing for the missing object and TCKs spend a lifetime being uprooted from the missing object – their first culture, longing becomes what Kristeva describes as an obsession (Kristeva 1991:10). Kristeva says that the nostalgic person can be,
20
confronted with ‘the omnipotence of thought,’ which, in order to constitute itself invalidates the arbitrariness of signs and the autonomy of reality as well and places them both under the sway of fantasies expressing infantile desires or fears. (1991:186).
The Global Nomad is one that is obsessed with the absence of inclusion and is nostalgic for the home he or she had been exiled from: “the foreigner is a dreamer making love with absence, the exquisitely depressed” (Kristeva 1991:10). Allende says that she thinks
“nostalgia is a melancholy and slightly saccharine sentiment, like tenderness.” Yet the idea that her writing is nostalgic makes her look deep within herself to write about Chile (Allende
2003: x-xii).
But nostalgia informs Allende’s writing about Chile and America. It enabled her to position herself within America as a migrant. Nostalgia in Allende’s writing is driven not by an attachment to her country of origin, but to the fact that she felt like a foreigner in both her culture of origin and her second culture (Umpierre 2002: 129). Nostalgia led Allende to write about her country of origin as if it were an “invention” or a home of her imagining. (Allende
2003: x-xii). On this basis, Allende is the second kind of foreigner that Kristeva describes,
living neither before or now but beyond, they are bent with a passion that, although tenacious, will remain forever unsatisfied. It is a passion for another land, always a promised one. (Kristeva 1991: 10).
21
Chapter Two
The House of the Spirits
She was already in the habit of writing down important matters, and afterwards, when she was mute, she also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own. - Isabel Allende (1985: 3)
The House of the Spirits can be identified as historiographic metafiction20. It is also most commonly considered a magical realist novel. It is perhaps the Allende novel most influenced by magical realism21. In the novel, corrupt politicians are overthrown by idealistic communists and they inturn are overthrown by a corrupt military. Throughout there are mystical figures: women born with green hair and women who are clairvoyant (1985: 6, 23).
The events of The House of the Spirits start in the early 1900s and end in the late 1960s. The style of the story is influenced by A Hundred Years of Solitude.
Here is a plot outline: Nívea and Severo del Valle have a daughter, Rosa (also known as Rosa the Beautiful). Rosa is engaged to marry Esteban Trueba. When Rosa dies, Esteban marries her sister, Clara, who can foresee the future. Clara has a child, Blanca. When Blanca becomes pregnant by Pedro Tercero García, Esteban forbids her to marry him because he is of lower caste. Instead, he forces her to marry Jean de Satigny. Later, Blanca separates from
Jean de Satigny, gives birth to her daughter, Alba, and continues to see Pedro in secret. Her mother Clara dies. Her daughter Alba falls in love with Miguel, the younger brother of
Amanda, (Amanda is the lover of her uncles, Nicholas and Jamie). While all this is happening, Esteban becomes a senator of the conservative party, the communists overthrow the conservative party, and then they are overthrown by a military regime. Esteban’s
20 “[Historiographic metafiction] both install[s] and then blur[s] the line between fiction and history […] but the simultaneous and overt assertion and crossing of boundaries is more postmodern” (Hutcheon 1988: 113). 21 See Appendix 4.
22 granddaughter, Alba, is put in detention and tortured by the military police. By the end of the novel, Alba is pregnant with either Miguel’s child or the child of one of the men who raped her while she was in detention. Here is a pictographic representation of character relationships in The House of the Spirits.
Nívea del Valle Severo del Valle
Rosa, fiancée of Esteban Trueba Clara Esteban (dies).
Nicholas Jamie Pedro Blanca Jean de Satigny, husband of Blanca. Amanda, Miguel Alba sister of Miguel. Child, father unknown.
Storytelling is an important theme in The House of the Spirits. The novel begins and ends with Clara writing the story as a child in order to make an account of the time her uncle,
Mateo, spent away from home. It starts with a line from Clara’s notebooks, “Barrabás came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy”(Allende 1985: 3). It ends with that exact same line, revealing that Alba used the notebooks to write and narrate The House of the Spirits as the family history:
My grandmother wrote in her notebooks that bore witness to life for fifty years. […] I have them here at my feet, bound with coloured ribbons, divided according to events and not in chronological order, just as she arranged them before she left. Clara wrote them so they would help me now to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own. The first is an ordinary school copybook with twenty pages, written in a child’s delicate calligraphy. It begins like this: Barrabás came to us by sea…. (Allende 1985: 368).
23 Barrabás, the gigantic dog, is a construction that bookends the story in the same way that storytelling – another construction – is used to structure The House of the Spirits. Similarly,
Blanca invents imaginary animals in her craftwork and she doesn’t know that many years before her, Rosa also invented imaginary animals (1985: 148-149). Allende suggests the talent of inventing things – imaginary animals or histories – is a trait that females can inherit; but perhaps this is because the female characters in The House of the Spirits are also indirectly representative of Allende, who wrote the story to make sense of, and to preserve the past. She says that writing The House of Spirits was a way to “recapture [her] lost country” and to
“reunite [her] scattered family, to revive the dead and preserve their memories, which were beginning to be blown away in the whirlwind of exile” (Allende 2003: 177). Perhaps she felt that “words could capture the country and the family she [lost by moving away, and it was also] a way of putting in a scrapbook family memoirs or, metaphorically, making a video to remember her own country” (Umpierre 2002: 133-134).
Allende started writing the novel during her grandfather’s demise and perhaps this was her way of imagining death as another way of being rather than an ending, granting her grandfather a sort of immortality. Allende’s grandfather told her that “if you can keep people in your memory, they will live forever” (Rodden 2004: 55). In the book, Clara’s death is described as “being born: just a change” (Allende 1985: 247). Alba says that “if [Clara] could easily communicate with those from the Hereafter […] she would be able to do the same with those of the Here-and-Now. Thus, instead of whimpering when the time came, [Clara] hoped
Alba would be calm, because in her case death would not be a separation, but a way of being more united” (Allende 1985: 247). Allende describes the “skeletons hidden in [her family’s] armoire” as having “planted the seeds of literature” in her life. She says that in every story she writes she tries to “exorcise one of them” (Allende 2003: 90).
There is evidence of Allende’s Global Nomad or TCK experience in The House of the Spirits as TCKs often have unresolved family stories because they are removed from their extended
24 family connections at a young age and some “TCKs grieve for the past no longer available to them” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 172). Many of the characters are outsiders or displaced people. For example, Nicholás, the family eccentric, goes to India and returns with a desire to
“find God on less travelled paths” (1985: 253). Allende admits that she writes characters that identify with “marginals” or are “outcasts” (Rodden 2004: 80-81). Allende also includes references to her childhood experience living in Europe. For example, the Count de Satigny is described as a man from France who smoked cigarettes imported from Lebanon (1985: 157).
When not describing a character’s exotic origins or a character’s incompatibility with their home culture, Allende describes characters that invent their own realities. When Blanca avoids school and stays in the country so she can continue sneaking out at night to see Pedro
Tercero, she makes clay objects to pass the time during the day. Blanca creates a “miniature world of house-hold animals and people engaged in every trade: carpenters, laundresses, cooks, each with his or her own tiny tools and furniture” out of clay (1985: 148-149).
Eventually, Blanca starts to make “imaginary animals, gluing half an elephant to half a crocodile”, carrying on a tradition that Rosa the Beautiful, her grandaunt, started when she embroidered imaginary animals onto cloth. Her mother, Clara, decides that “there must be a genetic memory that prevents it from being swallowed by oblivion” (1985: 148-149). In The
House of the Spirits, the magic of Allende’s writing and imagination is also Allende’s
“genetic memory” and her “home”.
In the previous chapter, I mentioned that Jerome Bruner said that the self is remembered: the self is “a complex mental edifice that one constructs by […] remembering [and also the things we remember are selectively guided by] our wishes, desires, beliefs, and expectancies” (1994:
41). Because the Global Nomad moves from country to country, they create sections of memory punctuated by fast transitions via modes of transport – airplanes, trains, ships – and this in turn creates a series of memories of each country, stuck together like pieces of a puzzle. Allende says that “nobody is carved in stone” and that “most of [her] writing is an
25 attempt to bring an illusory order to the natural chaos of life, to decode the mysteries of memory, to search for [her] own identity” (Rodden 2004: xi). For Allende, “writing is like a catharsis; it’s a way of getting inside the past” (Rodden 2004: 79).
Because the self is constructed by memory, and the Global Nomad has many memories of different countries, the identity of the Global Nomad is a kind of jigsaw puzzle.
In The House of the Spirits some of the characters actually attempt to put their stories together
“as if […] assembling a jigsaw puzzle” (Allende 1985: 368). By the end of the story, Alba attempts to “put the puzzle together” by writing about her family, and also by using Clara’s notebooks to tell the story:
I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future. (Allende 1985: 368).
Alba writes in order to make sense of the past and to construct her family history, that is, to construct her identity (Bruner’s remembered self).
Inventing identities is not a new experience for the Global Nomad. In a way, invented countries, invented memories, and invented identities are the Global Nomad heritage. In The
House of the Spirits there are many examples of storytelling as replacement realities or as a way to create the self. For example, when Blanca tells Alba about her secret meetings with
Pedro, she only tells her “anecdotes about him” and teaches her “his songs [because the past] had grown hazy with time” (Allende 1985: 265). As Bruner says the self “is a perpetually rewritten story, [and also] the Self is a remembered self, the remembering reaches far back beyond our own birth, back to the cultural and language forms that specify the defining properties of a Self” (Bruner 1994: 53). Allende says, “most of my writing is an attempt to
[…] decode the mysteries of memory” (Rodden 2004: xi).
If Allende’s stories were her dreams, this would be congruent with Freud’s ideas about childhood dreams being a form of wish fulfilment. Thus the TCK or Global Nomad
26 survives a childhood of unresolved grief because of the telling of stories, explaining why
Allende wrote about children and families in The House of the Spirits.
By inventing her identity through memory and also through the culture and language of her
Global Nomad experience, Allende manages to construct her own lexical archetypes and
“myths”. For example, most of her work is about strong, goddess-like, female figures, and weak or violent, male figures. Portrait in Sepia (2001) and Eva Luna (1988) are both works with these lexical archetypes. In The House of the Spirits, the characters’ descriptions and characters’ actions act to bolster the image of the archetypical feminine and archetypical masculine. For example, Rosa, who exists “squarely on the tenuous line between human being and a creature of myth”, is eviscerated on the table in the kitchen which, at the time, was where many women spent the majority of their day (Allende 1985: 6). And another example: the hyper-masculine Esteban Trueba spends his youth terrorizing and impregnating the young women in the countryside and lives his old age in war rooms (Allende 1985: 260).
Some of this “myth invention” occurs in The House of Spirits quite literally. For example, Blanca tells Alba stories about “the magic books of the enchanted trucks of her great granduncle Marcos, which her poor memory had transformed into new tales,” and in some of these tales there are princes who sleep a hundred years, damsels who fight dragons, and a wolf lost in a forest who is “disemboweled by a little girl for no reason whatsoever” (Allende
1985: 258). Blanca could never repeat the stories exactly as she told them the first time, so
Alba started writing the stories down to remember them, and this led to her recording the things that she thought were important, “just as her Grandmother Clara had before her”
(Allende 1985: 258). There are many Scheherazade characters in Allende’s stories. For example, Eva Luna (1988), published three years after The House of the Spirits, is a novel about a female storyteller. “Allende freely acknowledges that she identifies with Eva Luna.
[…] The Stories of Eva Luna begins and ends with quotations from A Thousand and One
Nights” (Rodden 2004: 15). Consistent with this, there are many selves in Allende’s stories,
27 and many invented mythologies and figures. In the interview excerpt below, Allende re-tells the story of Santa Claus a magical realist figure:
“Mai, tell me a story.” Mai is the affectionate name Alejandro invented for Isabel when he was learning to talk. “Do you want a story about pirates?” “No, about Santa Claus.” “Once upon a time,” begins the young, attractive grandmother, “there was a horrid old man with horns and a devil face who peeked in windows at night, and if the children were poor, he didn’t bring them any gifts – gifts were just for rich little boys and girls….” (Zapata 2002: 135).
It is just like a Global Nomad to say that they believe in the kind of story that can be told in any language or in any community. Allende says the story of The House of the Spirits could have happened anywhere and that “human beings are the same everywhere; the differences are not so great” (Rodden 2004: 52). Allende believes that through writing “all sorrows can be borne […] if you put them into a story or tell a story about them” (Rodden 2004: 23). Allende works through the unresolved grief of a TCK childhood not only through nostalgic writing about Chile but also through the creation of her own Third Culture mythology.
28 Chapter Three
What is Third Culture Writing?
In the slow practice of writing […] I have constructed a land that I call my country. That is where I come from. (Allende 2003:179). - Isabel Allende
Third Culture Writing is a writing that is informed by memory, by the experience of being an outsider, and by an awareness of an uncanny strangeness within the self. It is also writing as a means to resolve unresolved grief. By losing a specific landscape, language, accent, and everything that surrounds them, the Global Nomad as a writer creates these things through the creation of worlds within fiction. The Global Nomad writer makes a magic make-believe country in which they can live. Travel itself becomes a new stratagem, a sort of punctuation in the syntax of the stories by Global Nomads, much in the way that it has punctuated their lives. The gaps (journeys) become like the punctuation in a sentence, the white space in a poem, or a gap between chapters, creating a structure based on ongoing movement.
According to Bruner, even though the “Self is a remembered self, the remembering reaches far back beyond our own birth, back to the cultural and language forms that specify the defining properties of a Self” (Bruner 1994: 53). For the Global Nomad, the cultures and languages that inform their understanding of Self are diverse, so the remembered self stems from a Third Culture heritage that informs their core values. One can say that the language of a Global Nomad depends on the state of being interstitial, of living in between spaces.
Kristeva says that language is a symbolic barrier that structures the repressed and that, because intellectual uncertainty weakens them, signs and reality are not autonomous; they can merge to produce the uncanny (Kristeva 1991:186-187).
Uncanniness occurs when the boundaries between imagination and reality are erased. […] The clash with the other, the identification of the self with that good or bad other
29 that transgresses the fragile boundaries of the uncertain self, would thus be at the source of an uncanny strangeness whose excessive features, as represented in literature, cannot hide its permanent presence in ‘normal’ psychical dynamics. (Kristeva 1991:188-189).
In Allende’s and other TCK or Global Nomad writing, this is evident in the way that magic realism and language become a means for expressing the remembered “reality” of a place, as opposed to its actual reality.
Luz María Umpierre, who writes about Allende as a marginal writer, is herself marginal in being a lesbian who, she says, found her home in writing. For Umpierre, being exiled from home meant that she was able to “stand in opposition to [her] own victimization” and to be able to speak about her truth from abroad, thus making language her home and
“creating [her] own home of words” (Umpierre 2002:135-136). Like Umpierrie, Allende, found a home in her words, which allows her to identify and locate herself in relation to her past and present.
Writing of Third Culture Experiences
Exile has had an effect on hundreds of thousands of human beings. We live in an era where masses of people come and go across a hostile planet, desolate and violent. -Isabel Allende (Rodden 2004: 58).
In this section, I will attempt to discuss some of my own creative writing in relation to the topic of Third Culture Writing, and attempt to understand my own writing in relation to the syntactical landscape of the interstitial person. I will contrast my analysis of Allende with an exegesis of my own creative writing about memory, time, and space. I am also a Global
Nomad as I left my country of origin, Malaysia, when I was a year old and my family travelled to four different countries between 1977 and 1997. I have also continued to travel and from 1997 to 2007, I have lived in four more different countries.
30 Initially, I wanted to write a series of short narratives from the point of view of a travelling storyteller or a gypsy. I wanted the stories to be “cultureless” or compatible with experiencing many cultures (the Third Culture experience is both “cultureless” and part of many cultures). I wrote the stories in this thesis – “The Path of Dreams” and “The City of
Lights” – as a response to what Allende calls “a tragic contingent”, the experiences of
“refugees, immigrant, exiles” and “deportees” (Rodden 2004: 58). As I don’t necessarily believe that a displaced person is tragic, I wanted to see where the Global Nomad fitted into
Allende’s “contingent” category. I acknowledge that Allende has never actually used the words “Third Culture Kid” or “Global Nomad.
“The Path of Dreams” was inspired by Allende’s Eva Luna as well as by Angela Carter’s The
Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979). The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories are retold fairytales and Eva Luna is narrated by a female Scheherazade22, almost as if she is telling fairytales: “My name is Eva Luna, which means life, according to a book of names my mother consulted.” Eva goes on to describe her father as coming from a place where “the hundred rivers meet” and her mother as coming from an “enchanted region” (Allende 1988: 1). “The
Path of Dreams” contains a number of “magic” or fairytale-like elements. For example, characters include the fish-like (mermaid) or fairy godmother figure, a groom who turns into a sock, and a clock striking twelve “on a distant shore […] far away”. The fairytale in “The
Path of Dreams” contrasts with the “reality” of the narrator who is writing a letter to her absent roommate. By the end of the story, the differences between reality and fairytale finally merge. By adopting this style, I hope to illustrate an uncanny strangeness akin to the TCK and
Global Nomad experience: the world as un-reality, the home as “unhomely”. After ending her relationship with her boyfriend, the narrator chooses to leave the country rather than stay for her roommate’s wedding. Many TCKs “define their sense of rootedness in terms of their relationships rather than geography [so they] go to greater lengths than some people might
22 In the index, Allende wrote this from A Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Nights: “Then he said to Scheherazade: ‘Sister, for the sake of Allah, tell us a story that will help pass the night….”
31 consider normal to nurture relational ties with others” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 131). So for the narrator, the end of her most defining relationship – “I was home wherever he was home. I always had a suitcase, two pairs of shoes, and Jason” – meant that she had become a person without a home except the “uncanny” home in her memory. Kristeva says that the outsider “is from nowhere, from everywhere, [a] citizen of the world, cosmopolitan” (Kristeva 1991: 30).
For the TCK, some of the most “chronically disrupted relationships are the core relationships of life”, for example, the relationship between relatives and in the case of “The
Path of Dreams”, the relationship between childhood friends (Pollock and Reken 2001: 169).
Some TCKs struggle with a fear of intimacy because they fear loss and for that reason they refuse to say their goodbyes (Pollock and Reken 2001: 139, 141). In “The Path of Dreams” the narrator never actually says she mails the letter she is writing to her roommate – she mails the mermaid back to her instead. But this is not to say that the ending to “The Path of
Dreams” is pessimistic. Kristeva also says that “the strange happiness of the foreigner consists in maintaining that feeling eternity or that perpetual transience”, and in “The Path of
Dreams”, by sailing away in a paper boat, the narrator is most at home (Kristeva 1991: 4). As
Pollok and Reken say, “ultimately, coming to terms with grief means learning to feel at home within ourselves” (2001: 318).
My second story, “The City of Lights” is about a young woman who goes “home” to India after a lifetime of exposure to different values. This short story explores unresolved grief, relational effects, and repatriation. In Paris, when the taxi driver asks Rakhi where she is from, she is initially unable to answer because she is from as many countries and cultures as she has ever lived in. Back in India, Rakhi becomes a “hidden immigrant”. Pollok and Reken describe a “hidden immigrant23” as someone who looks like the rest of the population but
23 “Community members look at the hidden immigrant TCKs, presuming they can do every common task others around know how to do, [but] their expectations are wrong, [and] neither side forgives the other as they would a true immigrant or obvious foreigner for unexpected behaviour or even ignorance” (Pollok and Reken 2001: 54-56).
32 thinks differently. They describe this experience as one of the greatest challenges of the
Global Nomad (2001: 54-56).
Rakhi denies her feelings of sadness or grief. She avoids talking about the people she left behind in Paris. Pollok and Reken suggest that rather than admitting sadness or grief, the
TCK says, “I don’t really like those people very much anyway” (2001: 64). When the narrator suggests that Rakhi might miss her friend Francis, Rakhi accuses the narrator of not knowing anything. In the end, Rakhi’s “lost paradise is the mirage of the past [she] will never be able to recover” (Kristeva 1991: 10), and her “Hard-hearted indifference is perhaps no more than the respectable aspect of nostalgia.” (Kristeva 1991: 10).
Pollock and Reken say that if grief is unresolved, we “arrive at our next destination with this unfinished business clinging to us and influencing new relationships. Bitterness in one area of our lives almost always seeps out in another” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 65). In
“The City of Lights”, by the time the wedding ceremonies start, the narrator comes to understand the meaning of being an exile within a first culture when she vicariously experiences the destruction of Rakhi’s former self. “Exile always involves a shattering of the former body” (Kristeva 1991: 30), and the narrator starts to see herself in pieces symbolically reborn through the experience: “if I dared to look down I might have seen myself disappearing – first my toenails, my toes, my ankles, and then everything else”.
Free of the ties that bind them to other people, the Global Nomad feels “completely free.
Nevertheless, the consummate name of such a freedom is solitude” (Kristeva 1991:12). For
Kristeva the word “solitude” implies that there is no other providing a defining guidepost for the self (1991:12). But, according to Pollock and Reken, as the world changes “we are careening toward the global village […], where the campfire in the middle is a TV set telling us what we should all buy and how we should all look” (2001: 52). Pollok and Reken also
33 point out that the “deeper levels24 of culture are slower to change than the surface ones”
(2001: 52). So while on the surface level, the Global Nomad appears to be completely free of national ties, on a deeper level, he/she is shaped by the particularities of his/her Third Culture experience; and this experience becomes their heritage. As such, neither “The Path of
Dreams” nor “The City of Lights” end on a pessimistic note. In both cases, the narrators construct “homes” in their memories of different cultures. They construct, as Bruner suggests, remembered selves informed by their unique heritage (Bruner 1994: 53).
24 L. Robert Kohls defines “surface culture” as: behaviour, words, customs, and traditions. He defines “deep culture” as: beliefs, values, assumptions, and thought processes (Pollock and Reken 2001: 40-41).
34
Conclusion
Kristeva says that “by recognizing our uncanny strangeness we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the outside. The foreigner is within me, hence we are all foreigners” (Kristeva
1991: 192). Recognizing the uncanny within, the Global Nomad is such a foreigner, able to find the place within him/herself that connects to everyone else. Kristeva also suggests that the recognition of the uncanny within us all might lead to “a cosmopolitanism of a new sort that, cutting across governments, economies, and markets, might work for mankind whose solidarity is founded on the consciousness of its unconscious – desiring, destructive, fearful empty, impossible” (Kristeva 1991: 192). Consistent with this idea, the Global Nomad experiences a sense of belonging not to anything, but to everything.
As Umpierre suggests, if we are exiles, we can see “our societies from a distance, our homes from afar, and our homelands from abroad, we can regain the realm of words which returns us always to language, our ultimate home” (Umpierre 2002:136). Similarly, the
“home” of the Global Nomad is informed by Bruner’s storied self, a Self informed by the memories of homes we are exiled from and also homes we are exiles in.
Considering that the creative writing of Global Nomads is not often discussed, this discussion itself might be an adequate conclusion for the time being. I shall end this part of my thesis with a quote from Allende in which she demonstrates the entwining of writing with wandering and homelessness that is so profound for the Global Nomad or TCK:
I am a writer because I was born with a good ear for stories, and I was lucky enough to have an eccentric family and the destiny of a wanderer. The profession of literature has defined me. Word by word I have created the person I am and the invented country in which I live. (Allende 2003: 197-198).
35
The Path of Dreams
and
The City of Lights
Short Stories
by
Eunice Liew
36
The Path of Dreams
37 George and Mary sat in the dark, under the flickering screen of a Frank Capra film. They held hands, fingers entwined, their ankles crossed and uncrossed, feet shuffling popcorn under their seats. When the film ended, they followed the trail of Technicolor gum out to the lobby, and walked through the doors of the run-down 70mm movie theatre. Once outside, the sun burnt the tips of their ears and shoulders. As they walked, Mary felt a breeze of foreboding cut between them. Her feet felt chilly.
They walked to an expensive restaurant. Mary laughed at the kissing double-duck motif on the menu. She ordered sushi. George ordered ribs and mashed potatoes. She ordered a peppermint sundae. He ordered champagne. The waiter arrived with the glasses and inside
Mary’s glass something glittered, and diamonds asked the question: will you? Their feet twisted inwards with tension: one pair in espadrilles and the other in runners, where beads of sweat collided and made socks as wet as lakes.
On the path of dreams, summers are never long enough. The chill-grey wind swirled dry, brown leaves around the front porch, caused the swing to rock itself. Inside the house there was candlelight and white, paper roses dangled from doorknobs as if in bloom. Everyone was in semi-formal dress and sitting around a rectangular table. There was a partner for every partner and the guests ate salmon soufflés with spoons engraved with the date. Two caterers, their tea towel aprons tucked into their waistbands, walked in and out of the kitchen, moving deftly around the table re-filling glasses and whisking plates away. As soon as the table was cleared, they re-emerged with bowls of sorbet balanced along the length of each arm, wearing one as a hat. George and Mary sat at one end of the table. They both wore white. They fiddled with their rings.
As the night wore on, the dishes were collected and the glasses were drunk dry.
Everyone ate slices of peppermint cake before pushing back their chairs. It was between night and morning and on a distant shore, in a house far away, a clock could be heard striking twelve. It was the hour when everyone started to think of home. But the front door swung
38 open and into the house swept the chill-grey season with its leaf skeletons and dust. A dull clunking of shoes came right after it.
A woman wearing a silvery gown and a mother-of-pearl encrusted crown walked casually through the front door. Her face was as white as a creature from the deepest waters, a woman-fish. She walked slowly to the table and tipped a guest – a man – out of a chair. She sat down, fishing a cigarette out of her purse and lighting it. Everyone watched as she inhaled, exhaled, and stubbed out her cigarette in the remainder of the cake, knocking apart the tiny bride and groom figures. Her watery eyes watched them watching her, in silence.
Suddenly, she tapped a spoon against a glass and exposing a row of little fish teeth she raised the glass in front of her.
“A toast!”
She leaned into the table, some tinsel from her sleeves plunging into the frosting of the cake.
She adjusted herself, smoothing the strange gown she’d bought so long ago, in another time and place, when it was the height of fashion. She coughed, raised her glass, and then looking directly at George and Mary, declared.
“Congratulations! May you live like socks!”
Everyone was quiet. Then there was a cough. Then someone sneezed. And, “Hear, hear!” said the father of the groom suddenly standing, swaying, raising his glass, and slapping the table, “Live like a pair of socks!”
“Live like a pair!” responded the guests drinking merrily. Why shouldn’t George and
Mary live like two matching socks? But as they lowered their glasses, it was Mary that heard the woman start to chuckle. It was a chuckle that grew louder and louder, until it was so distorted it was a deafening cackle that all could hear. And the more she cackled, the more she became obscured by the thickening cloud of cigarette smoke that surrounded her.
“She’s disappeared!” cried the bridesmaids, aghast. Everyone stared and blinked, silently, eyes watering in the smoky room. But slowly, the smoke cleared and there was the woman looking at them with her cigarette hanging off a dry lower lip. Then the woman
39 stubbed her cigarette in the cake, adjusted her crown, which was slipping, and made her way to the front door. She was gone. Mary almost ran after her, almost screamed, stay, but the strange urge quickly vanished. And she stood watching as a leaf skeleton drifted towards one of the candles and disintegrated in the flame, lifting the spell or so it seemed. Another bottle of wine was uncorked. And the wine was poured out. And the room became noisy with chatter and laughter. Outside, the wind beat violently against the front door.
I look at the cherry tree scratching the windowpane, trying to claw its way inside. It is almost five in the evening and already it is getting dark. I am in Boston and you are in Minnesota. I see the shadows deepen in the courtyard of the student dormitory, which used to be a church, and I think of you, Mary, writing the wedding invitation that I now hold in my hand. I imagine that you wrote the invitation in your mother’s house. You took a white card from a stack of fancy cards festooned with intaglio roses, and wrote in cursive, dipping your lilac quill into your lilac ink, to tell me: You must come! Love, Mrs. Bailey. You sign your name as if you are already married. Your little joke. And then you wrote the date. And then you wrote your address.
I imagine your wedding will be exactly the way you have described it. You will have a bouquet of white roses and you will eat salmon soufflés at your reception. Everything will be as you have described it many times: a big house with four children – one for each year that you endured in Boston away from George, every year talking about your dream to anyone who would listen.
Mary… my college roommate… your side of the room was a rainbow explosion, mine was like an Edward Hopper painting: shades of black, brown, and grey, the colours of facts (sometimes nightmares). In this room, while talking about your George, you once told me that I lacked romance. I didn’t understand you… because I remember telling you that I was born in an aeroplane and one day I would like to die in one.
40 It is completely dark in the dorms now. Almost everyone has gone home for the spring break. I look out the window and see the wind snatch cherry blossoms off the branches, dashing them against the glass. I see petals, snow-white, spinning, and suddenly it starts to snow: a late blizzard in spring. I wish you had stayed for the rest of the semester.
Do you remember when you were packing to go home? Your shoes took up exactly an eighth of the floor space between the dresser and the front door. Your faerie collection was in a big box with Styrofoam packing peanuts. I could never own so many things because my luggage would weigh too much. Now your side of the room is empty. Your shoes, your faeries and your business texts are gone. And now everything is the colour of fact. I can hear the janitor running the water in the common bathrooms. His shoes echo against the tiles like the footsteps of a ghost. I have been thinking that I need to go too… somewhere….
Mary’s new home with George is littered with paper roses, dirty dishes, and leftover cake. It is late, the guests have gone home, and the candles have burnt to stubs, their flames sinking into pools of wax.
“It’s dandruff,” says George, kicking the confetti on the carpet. He kicks the confetti around the living room – like a kitten with a ball of yarn. He is kitten-like, thinks Mary, easy to distract by confetti… and maybe balls of yarn.
“Should we vacuum?” says Mary.
“No. Let’s tango,” says George, putting a paper rose between his teeth.
“Shouldn’t we switch off the lights?” says Mary.
“Let’s tango upstairs,” says George, spitting out the rose, swinging Mary’s small frame over his shoulder, and struggling up the stairs.
Upstairs, there are boxes in place of furniture and a bed with no sheets. Two suitcases are lying open on top of the boxes, one for George, one for Mary.
41 Mary takes off her dress and folds it into the suitcase. George takes some sheets out of his suitcase and fits them onto the bed. He takes off his tuxedo and puts on long johns, pyjama bottoms, an undershirt, and a pyjama top.
“What are you doing?” says Mary.
“I’m tired and drunk,” says George, pulling off his pyjama top, and then his pyjama bottoms. “Okay, let me brush my teeth first.” He takes his pyjamas to the bathroom, closing the door behind him. His shadow breaks the slit of light under the door and Mary hears him turn the tap on. Mary unpins her golden hair. After five minutes, the tap is still on. Mary lies on the bed. After ten minutes, the tap is still on. Mary closes her eyes. After fifteen minutes, the tap is still on and Mary sits up to stare at the slit of light under the bathroom door. It is now a long slit of light unbroken by shadow.
Mary looks at the digital clock by the bedside. After another five minutes, she goes to the door and knocks and the sound echoes as if the bathroom were empty. So she opens the door slowly. George’s long johns and undershirt are on the floor in a heap and his toothbrush is in the sink. She sees nothing else at first but there on the edge of the bathtub she thinks she sees something moving in rapid jerks.
A sock is sitting on the edge of the bathtub! A sock, crying on the edge of the bathtub.
Although the sock has no eyes to make tears with, Mary knew that it was crying because it was making sobbing noises and jerking about. Apart from this, Mary could see that it was as much as sock as a sock can be. If it had a chest, it would have heaved with sorrow.
“Jesus. What?” exclaims Mary.
“I don’t know,” George replies in a soft, muffled voice, because socks don’t have mouths to speak with. “I was just, you know, standing there with my toothbrush and then suddenly. I don’t know, it just happened.”
“Oh!” says Mary, and then she added, rather soothingly, “Honey, it’s not so bad.”
42 “Not bad?” cries George in horror. Mary tries to look at him but her gaze drops to the floor. She can’t help it. He looks so small, so weak, and naked… since socks don’t wear clothes.
“Why don’t we sleep on it?” says Mary. She turns off the tap. She switches off the bathroom light and picks up George with two fingers. She tucks him into the bedcovers and gets into bed herself. Mary lay awake staring at the moonlight illuminating the dark cracks in the ceiling. It’s only a nightmare, she thinks, everything will be fine in the morning.
“You don’t love me,” says George after a while.
“Don’t be an idiot, George. I married you,” says Mary.
“You married me before I was a sock,” says George. “Before, I could eat mashed potatoes and barbecued ribs, now I have no mouth! Before, I could watch movies, now I have no eyes! I wanted to go sailing around the world and I could do that before, and now, well….”
George wrinkles his toe and rolls limply off the bed. He manages to cross the bedroom floor like a caterpillar. George inches over to the bedroom door and slides under it. He will sleep on the couch.
The next morning Mary tries not to think. She avoids the couch but vacuums the confetti in the dining room and takes down the paper roses. She cleans up the dinner things: plates, glasses, the engraved spoons, and the leftover cake. She unpacks box after box of things to put on shelves: teapots, cookbooks, photo albums, seashells, and a miniature sailboat collection. She puts the boxes into trash bags, takes the trash bags out.
After a while – maybe hours – Mary remembers that she hasn’t made time to brush her teeth that morning. Mary goes to the bathroom and starts picking up clothes: George’s trousers, underpants, t-shirts, and socks. George’s socks are everywhere, socks that she had asked him not to leave on the floor. Then she fills the bathtub and sprinkles bath salts into the steaming water. She gets into the water and thinks about the sock. She closes her eyes to try to get the image out of her mind. She opens her eyes. She sees her toes become thinner and thinner until they are threads, knotted, knitted, like the view of certain fabrics under a
43 microscope. And in close-up the threads start to fray. She closes her eyes again. She sinks deeper into the bathtub, swallows and splutters. She had fallen asleep for a moment. She gets out of the bathtub and goes to the sink to brush her teeth. As she squeezes the toothpaste onto her toothbrush, she notices that George left his razor in the sink and shaving cream on the tap.
As she brushes her teeth, Mary looks into the mirror and regards her own eyes. It occurs to her that she had not looked at her face in a long time. Mary put on some trousers and a turtleneck sweater. On the way down the stairs she picks up more of George’s socks. She takes the dirty socks to the laundry room. She puts them in the washing machine with his other clothes. She walks to the kitchen to make breakfast… or lunch… or dinner. Where did the time go? Was George still on the couch?
She puts pork ribs in the oven and pours instant mash potato mix from a packet into the mixer. She sets the table for two: two forks and knives, two plates, a teacup and a can of beer. She takes the TV and VCR from the lounge, plugs it into a kitchen power outlet, and puts on It’s a Wonderful Life.
Soon George, awoken by the overture, inches into the kitchen.
“Why don’t you turn back into a man?” says Mary, putting some mash into her
mouth, watching as George struggles to inch up the chair leg.
“Why can’t you make less noise when you eat?” says George. Mary puts down her fork, picks him up and puts him on the table in front of the TV and the plate of steaming mash and ribs. George’s small woolly frame shakes with joy. He bends his toe towards the plate and takes a great leap into it, rolling over and over into the gravy. He pounds himself into the mash. He tries as hard as a sock can try but he can’t taste a thing. At last he stops and lies limply in the brown sauce.
Mary can’t look. George has become a wrinkly, moth-eaten thing. She goes to the living room to get her keys and trips over an unopened box with the words, BUSINESS
TEXTS, written on it. She has a flashback of a younger Mary who wanted to start a rare-fish aquarium. The younger Mary filled the box with university lecture notes. The younger Mary
44 wrote BUSINESS TEXTS on it. It was many moons ago… in a faraway and forgotten town.
But remembering reminds Mary that she never got around to starting a rare-fish aquarium.
She slams the front door on the way out.
Mary, I am thinking of your faerie collection on top of your bookshelf full of business texts. I remember there were faeries made of clay and glass, and a silver-tailed mermaid with a mother-of-pearl crown in her tinselly hair. You gave her to me, remember? You picked me up at the airport one Christmas. I had been waiting for Jason for three hours. You found me asleep in the food court with my face in my suitcase, sucking my thumb. You told me that
Jason had gone away with some work colleagues. One of them was the woman in his graduate
Spanish Studies classes. They were sailing somewhere on the West Coast. So we drove to his apartment and rummaged through his drawers, found and destroyed all the letters I had sent to him, all the pictures I had painted for him, all of our history. We also put naphthalene in the bag of cat food.
Later that evening we ate two pints of Ben and Jerry’s Chubby Hubby and Mint
Chocolate Chunk and watched It’s a Wonderful Life on TV. The thing about that movie, you said, was that “the female fixes everything”. As I started crying for the umpteenth time that night, you handed me the mermaid and told me to keep it. Are you sure? I asked. I’ve got an extra, you said, and you lifted your shirt and showed me the mermaid tattoo on your stomach.
You said that you were worried that after you married George, the doctor might have to cut the mermaid to get your baby out when you had a baby, which of course we were sure you would. And you said it would be a girl named Mary, just like you and your mother. And she would be born in your house, just as you were born in your mother’s. And she would grow up in your town, where you grew up. You would grow roses in the garden. You would collect more faeries. And then you said that I should go home to see my parents for the spring break.
I burned our letters in the snow that night – the letters I wrote to Jason, the letters we found in his drawers. I stared into the flame and in my mind, I could see the words writing
45 themselves backwards off the pages, going back into my pen, and back into my heart. I gave his ring to the janitor. It was four o’clock in the morning when I finished talking to the little mermaid about everything: ten and a half years of memories trashed in a single afternoon; we even left a bowl of cat food out and killed the kitten that I got with him from the pound.
I have known him forever. We were babies together. We played with paper boats in the bathtub and our sailors were coat buttons. We lived in Rome together. We lived in Tokyo. We were teenagers in the same schools. I always had a suitcase, two pairs of shoes, and Jason.
Because our families worked together, they travelled together, and it was easy for me to be with him. When I woke, I felt as if I’d left my dreams on another planet.
In one hand I have your letter, Mary, and in my other hand I am holding the mermaid. I tell her that I am going to take some time off from my art history degree. I tell her to tell you that I’m sorry – about missing the wedding. I tell her that my air-tickets are non-refundable. I have even sold my telephone.
I open my window. I can feel the wind on my face – like a million tongues of a million cats: rough, sharp, and wet. I close my window. I want to walk all the way to Harvard Bridge
– in the dark, through the wind and snow – I imagine walking to Harvard Bridge in the middle of a blizzard. I would throw the mermaid into the Charles River. I would watch her swim home to you, Mary, and she would deliver my message to you: I am going away… somewhere.
Mary is not thinking straight. She is not thinking about cleaning or cooking or business texts or George. She drives up and down streets, and then onto a highway. She drives until she reaches Kmart… Target… “Movies: Seven Dollars on Wednesdays”… in the strip mall where she circles the enormous parking lot in her car. She waits and watches as it starts to snow. She watches couples walk out of shops with swollen shopping bags, and couples walking out of the movies with fingers entwined, watching each other as if dazzled by the lights on a movie screen. She waits and watches the many feet of couples coming and going – their meeting the
46 earth and springing upwards in unison. Among the shoppers, Mary sees a woman wearing a tinselly gown and mother-of-pearl crown was coming out of the supermarket. Mary’s feels her heart catch in her throat. The woman is pushing a cart full of groceries with her skirts wrapped around the cart handle so as not to get her hem wet. She pushes the cart slowly; it’s as if she were a water creature unused to moving on land. Mary watches as no one stops to help the woman. Suddenly, Mary gets out of the car and runs towards her.
"Wait!" says Mary. But the woman seems not to hear her. She even looks in Mary’s direction but her watery eyes look straight through Mary as if she isn’t there. The woman keeps walking. "Wait! I need to talk to you!" Mary tears off her mittens and without thinking she gets back in the car. Once in the driver’s seat, she thumps her foot down on the gas and drives straight at the woman with the cart. Groceries shoot through the air as the woman is thrown backwards against the windscreen, over the top of the car, and off the boot. Mary gets out of the car and sees that the woman is face down in a box of frozen fish fingers. Couples coming out of the store stare at the scene. A child is screaming. A security guard emerges wanting know what is happening. Mary watches as a young woman points a finger at her and says something that sounded like:
“Look at Mary!” Her mouth moving slowly, it seems, as if in slow motion. “Mary,” she says, “doesn’t know how to keep a house!”
Mary could feel her heart pounding through her toes, through her boots, against the frozen asphalt, painted black, crusted with the white of snow and salt, merging to produce the shade of her nightmares. Snow fell on her face. Her mascara streaks down her cheeks like black tears. She gets back in the car and turns on the wipers. She quickly drives home.
Mary runs upstairs and gets her suitcase. She empties it and refills it with things that they might need – male things, female things. She drags it down the stairs and throws it into the trunk of the car. She digs George out of the dinner plate and washes him gently, wiping him dry with a towel. She lays him on the passenger seat. She gets in. She drives.
47 “Nice of you to come back,” says George. After a while he says, “Where did you go?” Still, Mary says nothing. “You missed the end of the movie.”
“We’ve seen it a dozen times before,” says Mary.
“I never remember the ending,” says George.
They drive for hours. They run out of gas. They get out of the car. They are at a lake. Mary sits facing the lake. She has her suitcase. She has her sock, her George. She hugs her knees and tries not to see or think about the suitcase and the sock on either side of her. She stares out at the icy lake, which is vast and white, impenetrable.
I pack the mermaid into a little box. I copy your address from the wedding invitation onto the front. In the morning, I will mail the box and after that, I will go to the airport. I put the little box on the floor. It is almost too dark to see. I do not turn on the light. I feel my way to the door and lock it. I feel my way back to the bed and lie down on the mattress, which does not have sheets because I sold my bedding. I am fully dressed: overcoat, jeans, turtleneck, mittens, socks and boots. I know that only one thing is certain: inside the airplane cabin, the feeling that there is air above and below me. I have no ultimate destination. I will eat re- heated foods, adjust wristwatches, and watch the seasons change in the course of one flight.
But now I close my eyes and in my mind I drift away. I drift away to somewhere.
I am alone, somewhere, on the shore of a lake, which connects to a river, which connects to another lake, which connects to a river connecting all the lakes and all the rivers of the earth like the many arms of an ancient deity. I run out to the water where I see a paper boat. The paper boat is a galleon for coat-button sailors. I am a coat-button sailor. I climb into the paper boat. I sail away and a clamour of ducks watch the boat cut the skin of the lake. The sun sets. The shore fades from view. It is spring and I am home.
48 The City of Lights
49 I am wearing airline earphones. I am flying to Mumbai, India. In-flight announcements are seconds of synaptic stillness in a frenetic life. I stay awake through time zones, dreaming in unblinking snatches. It’s a habit I’ve had since I was little: not sleeping or sleeping in fact- bytes, like an anti-sleep. I anti-sleep across America, Europe, and Asia.
I am listening to Joni Mitchell singing “Both Sides Now”. In 1969 she sang it to the plucking of an acoustic guitar. But now, in the year 2000, her voice is different. If the song were a texture it would be velvet. If it were a colour it would be maroon. Some of the lyrics stick in my brain: clouds got in my way. I lean against the airplane window and close my eyes. I am flying to Mumbai, India and I am thinking of Paris; eating warm crêpes from vendors on the street; gazing into the speckled mirrors of the Café de Flore. Everything in the techno-beat Le Paradis du Fruit is fluorescent in the evening. I remember a bathroom with a toilet that won’t flush, dew dripping down French windows, and grey waves on the banks of the Seine. But I am getting ahead of myself. I am flying to Mumbai and I am not in Paris, even though that is where this story starts, almost a decade ago.
Rakhi chose our apartment because of the view. I opened the windows of the French balcony.
Power lines criss-crossed the sky: black, white. In the night it was possible to see the electronic sign on the Eiffel Tower, counting down the days to the new millennium. By morning the Tower was obscured by clouds and the city was shrouded in winter grey.
Rakhi was making toast and ginger tea. She gathered our street maps. We drank the tea, put on our coats, and left our apartment on the Rue de Charonne. Soon we were walking through the streets, elbow-to-elbow with the morning rush.
Francis was waiting for us on a bridge over the Seine. He was an American student in our class at the Spéos Photographic Institute. We stood on the bridge and watched the morning tour boats pass below. In the afternoon we explored the museums and gardens. In the evening back on the bridge, watching shadows creep into corners as lights went out, I wished that I could freeze the moment. I wanted to watch the boats and banks of the Seine forever.
50 But it was getting colder. I turned to ask Rakhi the time and was surprised to see her kissing
Francis. The breeze unfurled his scarlet curls into her bushy sea-green hair – wild from home- dye kits. When they stepped back, I could see his moonlike face dancing on the surfaces of her dark irises.
We took a taxi partway home. The Middle Eastern driver caught Rakhi’s face in the rear view mirror and thinking she was an compatriot, asked her, “D'où venez-vous?” She was going to answer the question. But we were already getting close to the Rue de Charonne. We paid the driver, merci, bonsoir, got out of the taxi and started walking.
“Where are you from, anyway?” I asked Rakhi. I’d never thought about asking the question before. She was just Rakhi. Nothing else was important. “It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“India,” said Rakhi.
“Are you ever going home?” asked Francis.
“I am home,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. We were home wherever we were. Weren’t we?
“But are you ever going to repatriate?” asked Francis.
“Why would anyone want to do that?” said Rakhi.
We walked up the street to our apartment and Francis stopped to take our photograph.
He set his Olympus SLR on a stand and pressed the timer. Francis stood between us on the wet street, smelling thickly of rose incense. When we got back to the apartment, we made pancakes. Then Rakhi and I showed Francis the photo album we made in Hong Kong where we went to high school together. We showed him images of things we thought we would never forget: street lamps sprouting from pavements like weeds, at night the city glowing in phosphorescent outlines. In Hong Kong, Rakhi and I leaned over the balcony of her parents’ twenty-eight-floor apartment and watched planes take off between the high-rise buildings. We felt as if our lives would soar in the same way, that one day we would do amazing things.
51 When I felt the plane touch down in Mumbai, I was still remembering Paris. There were no announcements, just a soft bump and a glide across the tarmac. I expected moving escalators and the refrigerated air of airports the world over but it was breezy and quiet, except for leather sandals shuffling dust across the marble floor and stamps slapping the Immigration desk. I felt a sudden panic as I tried to reorient myself. I was in India because Rakhi was going to marry Siddhartra Rai. The words were without meaning for me: Siddhartra Rai. I didn’t even know what he looked like.
On the telephone Rakhi said that she had met him twice, she was going to marry him and I must come to the wedding by any means, at any cost. She thought I would like him because he spoke his mind without a care for controversy. “Like you,” she added. She meant this as a kindness, but disconnected phrases from previous conversations overcame me. I said that the groom was faulty… didn’t she once say that he only bathed once a week?
She shouted down the line: “I am almost twenty-eight years old! I want to get married!” What did that have to do with anything? It was time? Was that it? I could hear her exasperated voice through the receiver, “When are you going to grow up?” What if I’d said that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle? Did Gloria Stienem say that? We had both been fond of quoting feminists when we were younger.
I was still thinking of fish and bicycles when I realised I had made my way from the airport to the front door of Rakhi’s family home. The female servant who had fetched me from the airport was unfamiliar. But otherwise it seemed like nothing had changed even though I had not seen Rakhi’s family for eight years. In every corner of the family home was a familiar assortment of souvenirs from around the globe: jade and silk screens from the markets on the outskirts of Hong Kong, stone statuettes from Nepal, geometric tapestries from Bahrain.
When I saw the familiar miniature Swarovski animals on the chessboard, I felt as if I were back in Hong Kong. I could almost the smell sulphur dioxide so characteristic of Hong Kong
52 harbour. On closer inspection, some of the menagerie had been decapitated by the Mumbai sea air. Their heads balanced precariously on their necks.
Rakhi was out – shopping or something – and I sat with her parents, Ashok and Rina, while two female servants brought tureens of stewed vegetables and cardamom rice from the kitchen for lunch. Rina insisted that I not go out alone because, she said, foreigners quickly become disoriented by the crowds of untouchables. I asked what time Rakhi would be home. I listened to Ashok and Rina talk. I was surrounded by endless chatter like the continuous honking from the traffic outside.
“I have decided – after much deliberation –”
“Ashok,” said Rina interrupting the leggy, pot-bellied man sitting on the opposite sofa.
“I have decided that it will be the best course of action, for the father of the bride, which is me,” Ashok paused dramatically, “to go out and buy many alarm clocks, you know, the annoying cheap ones.” He grinned at us and started to imitate the sound of an alarm clock.
“Yes. We know what they sound like,” said Rina.
“Shush!” said Ashok, and he snapped his fingers. By this one of the servants understood that he wanted biscuits and tea and she started clearing the table. Ashok, who was energetically massaging his teeth with his tongue, continued. “It will be the best course of action – listen – that we should take these alarm clocks and set the alarms so that one should ring at one o’clock, one should ring at two o’clock, one should ring at three, and so on and so forth, and the last clock will be set at six o’clock ante meridiem, and then – listen to me – we sneak into their room on the wedding night and hide the clocks in various places, and at one o’clock, the first clock will go beep-beep-beep-beep-beep, and at two o’clock, the second clock will go beep-beep-beep-beep-beep, and so on and so forth.”
“Of course, they will be sleeping on their wedding night,” said Rina.
“Ah-ha! I was telling the Rai’s – ”
“Oh my God!” Rina rolled her eyes.
53 “I said to them, we should get some of those miniature video cameras and hide them around the room –”
“Can you believe that he told the in-laws his idea about the video cameras?” Rina said, jumping up from her seat. “I was so humiliated! I almost had a heart-attack!” She sat down and her pink and yellow sari, which was like a gauzy magic-eye puzzle, deflated around her birdlike frame.
“Rakhi!” Ashok was the first to see the front door open, because he had been watching it during his monologue. “Why is your hair brown? I am not giving away a brown- haired daughter, I refuse!” Rakhi entered the room with her shopping bags. It was clear that she had gone to the hairdresser to dye her hair, which was now the shade of maple syrup and as limp as string. I almost didn’t recognise her. She sank into the sofa next to me and gave me a quick hug. She was wearing a cloyingly sweet rose perfume.
“Where is it?” Rina said, rummaging through Rakhi’s shopping bags. “I told the seamstress that the sari must come today. I don’t understand what could be so difficult. You don’t need to say anything! They will hear from me directly! They will send it directly or –”
“Do whatever!” said Rakhi, exhausted, frustrated, exasperated. She spoke sharply. I had never heard her talk to her parents like that before. Her parents looked shocked. But the moment passed as the servant came out of the kitchen with sugar biscuits and tea.
“Come, baby. Eat. Biscuit?” said Rina, offering Rakhi the biscuit plate. Rakhi took the biscuit plate away from her mother. She looked forlornly at the plate and then put it down.
Suddenly many hands were passing the biscuits and the chai and many hands were stroking her hair, with voluptuous fingers. I was witnessing some sort of body-speak. I wish I knew what was going on. I felt as if I had unintentionally seen the family with no clothes on.
And that was how it was. Every time I tried to get out of the way of a seemingly private moment, someone would make me stay to help move champagne flutes, silverware, lingerie, necklaces, or earrings. The dowry itself was enough for the rest of Rakhi’s life. So there were saris in every colour were draped over every surface – like the tears of rainbows.
54 She bought enough saris for every event of the next week, which is how long the wedding ceremonies would take. And then there were saris that had come as gifts.
“Where on earth will you wear a sari again?” I said. I didn’t remember ever having seen her in one before. We were moving stacks of saris from the floor to a table.
“I always wear saris,” she said, defensively.
I thought of the newlyweds outside, sleeping at the intersections of congested roads, living in shacks with walls made of plastic garbage bags, and the tuk-tuks and taxis and trucks with ‘horn-ok-please’ painted on them drove past and sometimes through these fragile homes.
I saw a man washing his face in the gutter. His mother-in-law rinses half a cup of rice in it.
His niece squats into it, making the water yellow. His son is sewing a kurta, pumping the motor of an antique sewing machine with black, bare feet. He will sell that kurta so that his family can continue to sleep in their shack of garbage bags, as they had been doing for generations.
We saw these things as we drove from the apartment to a café where we were served raspberry cheesecake. On the way, shoeless children tapped our windscreens with fingers that left thick white trails, offering to sell us their magazines. We locked our doors against them. I cleaned my feet when we got home. I scrubbed my feet with a cheese grater, scrubbing layers of dirt off dirt.
India, in a constant breeze of earth as fine as flour, flew into the apartment. From the fifteenth floor I felt as if I were standing on the peak of a mountain. I looked down and I could smell the odorous streets while over my head the fans continued to spin the warm air.
While pieces of India flew off their blades, settling into my hair, my ears, my mouth.
I anti-slept through my nights in Mumbai, watching the digital clock on the DVD player, watching late-night television, and falling asleep at dawn. In my dreams, flashes of the day would reappear. The mendhi-wala would say are you getting an arranged marriage? And
Rakhi would say yes. And the mendhi-wala would say do you want to get married? And
Rakhi would say it’s too late to think about that now, it’s too late too late too late too late, the
55 words breaking up and repeating until I dreamt only in sounds. I have a recurring dream: I dream that I am asleep and the floor is a chessboard, and the kings and queens are being decapitated by a salty breeze, and I am a knight but I cannot save them. I cannot even save myself.
Five o’clock, the eve before the wedding. I was lying on Rakhi’s bedroom floor watching the ceiling fan slice through the unyielding air. Rakhi came in and lay down next to me, sighing heavily, closing her eyes. I wanted to speak to her, to say something to bridge the gap of so many years. “Rakhi,” I said, “do you remember Francis?”
“No,” she said.
“You were in love,” I insisted because sometimes I am thick.
We were silent for a minute. Then she got up and shouted at me, “You don’t know anything!” She stormed out of the room… to find her mother… to try on a sari… or to do something else.
I was alone on the floor and could smell someone frying fish. I went to shut the door but the smell of fish was impossible to shut out. I walked around the boxes, which were everywhere. Rakhi had packed and left only a few things she wouldn’t need for her new life.
On the bottom shelf of her bookcase were the things she would forget: some used wrapping paper smoothed and folded into an untidy square, two rubber bands, and the photo album of
Hong Kong. I took it in my hands and carefully opened it. On the inside cover was the black and white photograph that Francis had taken: the three of us are on a street in Paris. Behind us there is a bureau de tabac, a métro entrance, and a yard of glossy wet pavement that stops in the far distance, fading to grey. I remembered that in Paris, I saw a man with no trousers walking the streets drinking cheap wine and looking for Jim Morrison’s grave. Or maybe that was in Hong Kong, although Jim Morrison’s grave isn’t in Hong Kong. I sat on the floor staring at the photograph and wondered what I knew.
56 The first ceremony was beginning. It was one of many ceremonies in a sleepless week of eating and waiting. I felt light. If I dared to look down I might have seen myself disappearing
– first my toenails, my toes, my ankles, and then everything else. It was time to bless the bride and relatives were walking around the living room in seemingly choreographed movements. I didn’t know what to do with my body. I was outside myself, deaf, unable to decipher the language of their private mime.
Knight to which square? Where do I go? Where is my body? Who am I supposed to be? Rakhi, give me a sign that you are here too. Give me a sign.
But it was as if Rakhi had become someone or something else, she had become a She- thing – but who was this She, in the scarlet sari? Who was this She, who knelt before the eggplant dinner, unseeing, eyes bent to the silver dishes, while the others moved around the room significantly, speaking significantly, looking at the She-thing with great significance.
Where do I go?
Stand over there.
What do I do?
Take the grain. And this. Take the grass. Touch the bride. No. Take this. Stand there – no – over there. You do not belong here.
Someone blows on a conch shell. Between each long blow there is not a single blink and for the first time in a long time this week there is a silence so thick it is like being underwater – or under blood – and I bit hard on the inside of my cheek but feel nothing.
Outside the sea rises out of the harbour and the waves swallow me: I am trying to keep afloat, a primitive creature with only sensitive protuberances for eyes and ears. I hear the splash of water. I smell salt. I hear the mother of the bride wailing endlessly, as if for death or the pains of childbirth. I look out the window. I see a plane taking off between the high-rise buildings.
57 I am on an airplane wearing earphones. I press my face against the window. India disappears behind pillowy clouds. I close my eyes against the warmth of the sun. It disappears too. As the airplane rises into the night, I am back in our apartment on the Rue de Charonne in Paris.
The Eiffel Tower is counting down the days to the new millennium. Rakhi, Francis and I are looking through the photo album of Hong Kong. Rakhi goes to the stove to re-heat the tea from our breakfast. She fills our mugs and a sweet steam wafts around the room, momentarily dispelling the stench of toy dog excrement coming from the courtyard.
“Remember Times Square?” I say, looking at a photograph taken in Hong Kong. We are fifteen or sixteen and standing in a crowd of shoppers in front of an enormous Christmas tree. We are turned towards each other and laughing. And just because it occurs to me, I say,
“Hong Kong, The City of Lights.”
“Isn’t Paris ‘The City of Lights’?” Francis asks. But it doesn’t matter. It is all the same. We drink ginger tea together. We make pancakes. We go over street maps. With indelible pens we map out our journey and we dream of doing amazing things.
58 Appendix
1. Third Culture Kids often go to International Schools, which are private schools that
cater to children of foreign nationals. International Schools differ from regular
schools because they offer curricula based on either the American, British, or French
systems – although other curricula also exist – and they offer the International
Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme25, which is a university entrance course.
Global Nomads are as much a product of this type of schooling as they are a product
of their Second Cultures (Pollock and Reken 2001: 45-47).
a. “For many TCKs […] what and how things are taught at school may be
vastly different as they shift from school to school while moving from one
place to another. In addition, in an international community the individual
teachers themselves often come from any different cultures” (Pollock and
Reken 2001: 46).
b. Furthermore, Global Nomads are often bilingual or bi-racial. “In 1960 one-
quarter of American children living overseas had parents from two cultures,
according to Ruth Hill Useem. In 1995 Helen Fail found that 42 percent of
her ATCK survey respondents had grown up in bicultural families.” (Pollock
and Reken 2001: 44).
2. Although there are many types of stateless people, this thesis will only explore the
Third Culture experience as I have already described it in the Introduction. Excluded
from my description of stateless people are Parachute Kids26, immigrants, refugees,
and Indigenous peoples such as Australian Aboriginals and the Stolen Generation27.
Parachute Kids are students and not necessarily from an expatriate lifestyle and the
25
59 Global Nomad experience is not comparable to the indigenous experience, which can
be much more complicated as indigenous people are often disenfranchised. It should
be noted that these are not the only categories of stateless people that I am excluding
from this discussion. I do not claim that statelessness is unique to the Third Culture
experience, only that the Third Culture Kid childhood is unique because it is the
experience of a Third Culture Kid.
3. In Nations Without Nationalism Julia Kristeva says that when confronted with
personal and social identity struggles we tend to retreat into our “shield of origins”
(Kristeva 1993: 1-2). Because Global Nomads do not have the same kind of “shield”
in which to retreat, their “origin” is their identification with otherness and this
otherness is the base upon which their identity is formed. Research by sociologists
Ann Baker Cottrell and Ruth Hill Useem seems to indicate that Global Nomads are
comfortable with their otherness: “92 percent have at least yearly contact with people
from other countries. Nearly a quarter associate with Internationals at least once a
month, some daily.”28
4. Allende’s subsequent novels are also family romances although, in my opinion, they
are not as skilfully rendered because they have veered away from Magic Realism. For
example, in Portrait in Sepia the first half of the story is set in California and only the
second half is in Chile, but the magic in the story seems split between Chile and
California – there seems to be an attempt to make Chile more realistic, and many
details from The House of the Spirits (such as character types and themes) are
repeated in Portrait in Sepia. For example, Allende writes:
If it weren’t for my grandmother Eliza, who came from far away to light the dark corner of my past, and for the thousands of photographs that have collected in my house, how would I tell this story? I would have to create it from my imagination, with no material but the elusive threads of the lives of many others and a few illusory recollections. Memory is fiction. Through
28
60 photography and the written word I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evanesce, to untangle the confusion of my past (Allende 2001:303).
This parallels to what Alba says about writing her family history in order to “reclaim the past and overcome terrors” (Allende 1985: 368). It is almost as if Allende were making facsimile copies of the same picture and in subsequent pictures and image of the original loses some of its intensity. Allende may be obsessed with the home that only exists in her memory, but by attempting to make her novels realistic and removing the magic, she removes the uncanny from her narrative and dilutes the impact of her work: it is less “believable” because “life is stranger than fiction”, especially in the Global Nomad experience, a TCK can experience numerous living situations in one lifetime.
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66
Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne
Author/s: Liew, Eunice
Title: "I lost the world where I belonged. Now I don't belong anywhere": writing Third Culture experiences
Date: 2007
Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/227782
File Description: Final thesis file
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