A Home In Between
On the last night of a week-long convening on social cohesion and identity in Dortmund, Germany, a group of us went to a jazz club called domicil, a volunteer-run space in an old UFA cinema that once screened experimental and art house films. I’d lightly resisted when Jörg, who’d co-founded the club, started recruiting people to go there after dinner. Even though tickets were sold out for the show that night, he said we could support the club by buying drinks. I was exhausted from an intense week of meetings and presentations and I wanted to get some sleep before boarding a 5:49 AM train to Paris the next morning, but who was I to not support the arts wherever I go.
“One drink,” I promised myself.
We’d been immersed in a schedule packed with meetings with the Mayor’s office and various service organizations, and with sessions on the economic transformation of the Ruhr Valley from coal and steel industries to high tech and education. We’d shared many light moments, too, and I genuinely liked this group of brainy, curious Germans and Americans interested in bettering society. The extrovert in me could not resist socializing with my new friends one last time.
Hours later, I was still at the bar.
At some point in the evening, after a round of tequila shots in which I reminded everyone when to lick the salt and when to suck the lime, I was debating someone about something when my new German friend Barış chuckled as he tilted his head and placed his fists on his hips in a faux indignant manner, mirroring my body language. He claimed that my gestural repertoire contained three distinct and comical moves, which he demonstrated for the group’s amusement. Indignant hands on hips, astonished hands thrust up and outward at chest level, and index finger poking the air to make a point. You may recognize some of these motions if you’ve spent any amount of time with me. Barış was a sociologist trained to observe human behavior so I couldn’t be mad at him for doing his job.
Barış and I had bonded over our shared identity as cultural hybrids in homogenous societies. He was half-Armenian and half Iraqi. His father had immigrated to Germany from Turkey after World War 2 when Germany faced a labor shortage and accepted guest workers under a temporary residency program to fill blue-collar jobs. Many of those workers never learned German and often lived in enclaves apart from German mainstream society. Sixty years laters, many of those workers remained “guests” in Germany, with no path to citizenship, even though they’d raised children and grandchildren in Germany and had worked there for decades.
Where was home for them after so many years? Where did they belong in a society that did not claim them as one of its own? I’ve been grappling with similar questions around my own hybrid identity for a long time as I wondered what it meant to be American for someone who had an Asian face and a cloudy origin story.
Many of the conversations during the convening had been about the role of immigrants in Germany, which saw an influx of migrants in 2015 when Chancellor Merkel agreed to accept one million refugees, mostly fleeing the Syrian Civil War. I happened to have been in Germany in 2015 and I remember the hand wringing over whether Germany could afford to accept so many refugees. They would take away jobs from Germans. They would commit crimes against Germans. They would sap the social infrastructure. Today, it’s mostly, though not exclusively, the far right that continues to question whether Germany should have accepted Syrian refugees. No one questions whether Germany should give safe haven to Ukrainian refugees as they flood across the borders of Europe today, rightfully so.
Barış and I will be writing an essay together on all of that soon.
The next morning, I walked to the train station in the dark, dragging my luggage over cobbled sidewalks through a light mist. Dortmund hadn’t been one of those charming German cities with a medieval wall and a castle on the hill. Even in the city center, most of the architecture had been modern, at least early 20th century. I was grateful, though, to have been given a much different perspective on German culture and society than the romanticized one I’d been used to experiencing. Even the Germans in the group who’d come from other parts of the country said they’d gained a new perspective. I admired the pride Dortmunders showed for their resilient little city.
When I arrived in Brussels to change trains for Paris, I saw a thin young man with brown skin and bushy eyebrows, wearing a neon yellow vest, standing on the platform holding a homemade flag of Ukraine over his head. A short, heavyset woman with big, bleach blond hair and two pale, bewildered boys carrying plastic bags stuffed with clothes stood nearby next to bulging luggage. I looked back at them as I descended the escalator and saw more bedraggled looking people joining their group. Inside the station, I sat in a coffee shop and watched another young, brown-skinned man holding a Ukrainian flag over his head leading a trail of folks, presumably refugees, through the station.
The scene made me tear up a little and I had to take a couple deep breaths to keep from crying. Maybe a lack of sleep had released a pent up well of emotions. Maybe seeing folks displaced by a senseless and brutal war triggered the tears. Maybe they reminded me of my own family’s displacement. My family never got to go back home and I wondered if these folks would ever see their homes again or would they have to learn a new language and integrate into a strange new culture with strange new customs.
Like Merkel in 2015, President Ford had had to fight for the United States to accept 125,000 Vietnamese refugees who’d faced certain persecution and possible death if they’d stayed in Vietnam at the end of that brutal war in 1975. My family arrived amidst a wave of anti-Vietnamese sentiment. I was happy that the Ukrainian people would not face that animosity, but maybe I, too, felt a little resentful at the welcoming they received.
