My Life as an Immigrant- A Brief Introduction
The first time I left Turkey to live abroad was for college. It was 2004. Since that time, I have lived in the United States, Spain, and the United Kingdom, where I continue to reside.
Back then, when I was first leaving home and embarking on a journey to live abroad, I didn’t think of myself strictly as an immigrant. That came later. This was mainly because I did not have the conceptual tools or frames of reference to define my way of being in the world in that particular way at the time. I did, however, inevitably experience the feeling of “being a foreigner,” mostly in positive but at times negative ways, living in places far away from where I grew up, both geographically and culturally.
This piece, then, is a brief introduction to my attempts to look back on my life as an immigrant and make sense of my experience by re-narrating it from my particular perspective. Before I go any further, I should say that I realize that I come from a privileged socio-economic background and that my experiences cannot in any way be generalized. Each immigrant experience is unique, and I am simply trying to articulate my own personal story here.
Although I left home permanently in 2004, I have “lived” abroad by myself before, albeit for relatively short periods of time. In the summers of 2002 and 2003, I visited Germany and Spain, respectively, for intensive language courses that each lasted two months. Even though I mostly look back on those times with fondness, one particularly negative experience has been etched in my mind, a memory that I now see as one of the first moments that I became truly conscious of my “otherness” in a foreign context.
One day, in August 2003, I was walking down the famous La Rambla street in Barcelona with a friend of mine when we decided to stop and refresh ourselves at a little fountain that was found just off the street. After I had washed my face, I took a pack of tissues from my backpack to dry it off. As I was putting the pack back in my bag, I made eye contact with a police officer. It was for a brief moment, and I obviously didn’t think anything of it. The police officer, however, came towards me and asked me, in Spanish, what my business was in Barcelona. My Spanish was not very great at the time, but I managed to tell her that I was a student in a Spanish language course and asked her if I had done something wrong. She demanded to see my passport, which I was fortunate to have with me. I gave it to her, asking again, this time in English, if there was anything wrong. She didn’t say anything but looked at my passport and took out her walkie-talkie to talk with someone, presumably giving them my details so they could check them. After a short while, she gave me my passport back and told me I could go.
The whole thing lasted only a couple of minutes, but it shook me. I felt ashamed of being questioned by the police in the middle of a busy street, ashamed of my friend, who could not really understand what was going on, and ashamed of being treated like a criminal. The whole thing just made me feel guilty to my very core although I haven’t done anything wrong. Looking back, I can see that it was the first time that I truly, deeply felt that I had been marked out for my “otherness,” symbolized by how I looked, and I (unfortunately) carry it to this day.
These brief spells abroad, however, were only a prelude to my leaving home in earnest and going to live in the United States. The moment I got accepted to Robert College, a prestigious American high school in Turkey, I told myself (and anyone who cared to listen, including my parents) that I was going to go to the U.S for college. So, when I was accepted to a number of different schools in my senior year, I finally had the opportunity to make my goal a reality. It was not as simple as packing my bags and leaving, though. Before everything else, I had to apply for a student visa, which, I now see, was the first moment I truly became an immigrant.
To tell the truth, the process itself was not as dramatic as I may have just made it sound. It was actually pretty straightforward for me and my classmates, who were also going to study at different universities in the U.S. When the time came to apply for our visas, we were taken to the American consulate in Istanbul as a group, with documents in hand, as if we were going on a damn school trip, and the whole thing was over in a couple of hours. While I didn’t quite realize how lucky we were back then, over the years, I came to appreciate how privileged we were and how the fact that we were students at that particular American high school made the whole visa process so much easier than it could have been if we were “regular” Turkish high school graduates trying to obtain a visa to go to the U.S.
Ironically, “privileged” is usually not a word that you would use to describe someone who is an immigrant, especially if they are coming from a “developing country” as I am. On the contrary, it is a concept that is generally reserved for members of the nations that occupy the top echelons of the invisible hierarchy that continues to exist and shape the world. Even more ironic is the fact that the privileged few are not even aware of the privileges they habitually enjoy.
I was recently listening to a podcast with Derek Sivers, a former musician and entrepreneur. At one point, Sivers started talking about how he had renounced his U.S citizenship. It turned out that after a while, he needed to go back to the U.S for one reason or another, so he went to the U.S consulate that was located where he was living at the time and casually applied for a visa, which, to his great surprise, was summarily rejected. He was flabbergasted. His tone of voice while telling this story showed how incomprehensible it was for him to be denied entry into the country of which he had been a citizen until a short time ago. He simply could not believe it. And it was a Bangladeshi friend of his who had to wake him up from his dream and tell him what he needed to do, the documents he had to collect, and the steps he needed to take to be able to apply for a visa properly.
Listening to Sivers’ story, I went through mixed emotions. I felt anger and probably a little bit of envy at his sense of entitlement and the fact that he did have to face, even once in his life, anything remotely close to what is the regular experience of millions of immigrants all over the world.
Because an immigrant, myself included, cannot even dream of casually walking into a consulate and applying for a visa. We know (because we have learned over the years) that the whole process requires careful planning, the collection of a huge number of documents, and a lot of hope that your application will not be rejected. Unfortunately, it is simply a fact of the immigrant’s reality, which they just have to accept and which is so different from the reality of the privileged few that they find it difficult to comprehend. If I had a dollar (or maybe I should say pound now) for every time I had to explain to or remind a friend why I could not simply join them on a trip to one place or another because I needed a visa, I would not exactly be a millionaire, but I sure as hell would be richer than I am right now.
I planned on talking about my early experiences in the U.S but I figured that this little rant would be a good place to end this piece. I’ll continue with my story in a future post.
Until next time!