“When you learn a second language, you gain a second soul” says an old proverb. I suggest that when you live extensively in a second country you gain a second soul, whether you conquer the language or not. Re-entry to my own native country is never easy, though deeply appreciated.
I am certainly not alone in bi-country living. There are people all over the globe who do it and do it well. Doing it, though, I would posit, is never seamless.
My first days back my mind races, slows, and races again. In the market the only people who look “normal” are Asian. I find myself searching their faces for recognition. Life in recent weeks has been such a routine of meeting familiar faces on the street to and from places, in the stores, stopping to chat and catch up. I am at a loss because these faces look “right” but none of them are people I know. Where did my neighborhood go?
Snatches of Chinese stick to my brain. I go so say something and the words come out wrong. It’s not because I speak good Chinese, but because terminology for life changes when one changes countries, and the Chinese term for what is in front of me has moved to the front of the brain, pushing the English to the back.
When I lay down to sleep, my mind goes into overdrive. I’m walking the streets of the city I have left behind with friends I will not see again for months and months. I can’t quite catch the conversations, but the places are real and I am visually and mentally 12 hours and thousands of miles away – until I wake and find myself at home.
My granddaughter, the Bear, now a very articulate five, tells me, “You were gone to that China place a very long time.”
“Yes, Bear, I was.”
I am glad to be home, no mistake about that. This is space, comfort, familiar. But that also became space, comfort, and familiar. A different normal. A different familiar. A second soul.
I have said before and will say again: part of me never comes back. Part of me is still tasting a new tea with my tea expert buddy, striding the hot streets to the subway with a fellow teammate, listening to the heart of a university teacher who struggles with the restrictions they face in their work world, laughing at situations that simply don’t translate to funny back here.
Bear realizes that I will disappear at times to that China place, or other equally distant places. She’s old enough now to know that her grandparents, both sides, live in several worlds, but continue to return to hers. Some day, I suspect, she too will take off and explore other worlds and gain other souls.
That’s the heritage I’d like to leave behind. This world is not my home, nor is that other one, but only the eventual, eternal home. I want to see the next generation be world citizens too because in so doing, they will understand that people are more the same than different, and that their God is not a western God nor their faith tied to their culture.
