Won't You Be My Neighbor?

No, this is not a post about Mr. Rogers, though I could write one. It's about Mr. Li or Ms. Pushkin or Dr. Garcia any other of many possible last names that don't belong in American English. Do you live near a university or college? Do you live near a place where people from different countries come to work? I do.

Actually, I live near two major universities and a huge research area, and I am surrounded by people who speak different languages, eat different foods, wear different clothes, and just do things differently. I have a lot of interesting neighbors, figuratively and literally. In fact, the folks just next door, whose children my boys play with, are from Ecuador.

Have you ever thought about what it is like to move into a new culture, to leave behind everything that is familiar to you, to have no idea how to navigate the grocery store or the doctor's office or public transportation, to be unable to understand the bank teller or the person running the checkout line? Imagine getting your PhD in a foreign language setting or taking a job where everyone speaks too quickly for you to understand. Imagine how isolated you would feel.

Imagine what it would feel like to be invited into someone's home in that culture, to have someone take the time to speak a bit more slowly and to ask about your culture and what you have left behind. Imagine how it would feel to have the hand of friendship extended to you, even if awkwardly, to be invited into someone's life and family and to go from isolated outsider to friend and neighbor.

My husband and I just finished hosting dinner for some Chinese friends of ours who used to live here but have moved to another state, a place where they are the only Chinese people. It is a small town, and he is teaching at a small college. For most of us, that would make finding friends easy, but for them, it is incredibly difficult and lonely. I know people aren't trying to isolate them or to be rude. Most people are just afraid, afraid of making cultural mistakes, afraid of not knowing what to say or how to welcome.

The truth is, hosting cross-culturally will mean mistakes. It often means making a fool of oneself. In fact, we still make mistakes with our Chinese friends, who have been to our house many times. But do you know what? People are very forgiving. They are used to living in another culture, and they expect for things to be strange and for their hosts to make cultural mistakes. They are happy to be there, in a home, being loved in a messy, awkward, wonderful way. It doesn't take a degree in InterCultural Communication to befriend a person from another culture. It just takes a willingness to look foolish, to welcome kindly, to share stories and food and warmth.

There are a lot of isolated people out there, especially new immigrants and international students. If there are some in your neck of the woods, why don't you take the chance and invite them in?

And if you happen to live in a small college town in Idaho that has only one Chinese couple, would you please have them over for dinner? No rice required. They love lasagna.

File Under "Lost in Translation"

I've been busy and dealing with a lot around here lately, so the blog posts are scarce. It seems like I almost always say that these days.

Living with little people who are learning a first language (and in our case, one who is also learning a second) leads to all sorts of funny linguistic errors. Hobbes has been pretty slow to speak compared to his brother, who was speaking in full, complex sentences by 14 months, but his speech has taken off in the past few months. Unfortunately, all of that practice has not improved his pronunciation. I'm not sure if he just refuses to believe in consonants other than D, B, and M or if he just can't use them yet. Either way, it makes for some funny moments. He also has a funny habit of saying "my" for "I'm." I wrote earlier of his antics in trying to get out of bed at night. We have chosen to ignore him when he stands and screams, at the top of his lungs, that he is crying and we had better come get him. With his inability to use the consonant C, and his two-year-old drama, it sounds quite dire:

"My dying! My dying! Mommy! My dying!"

Who knew sleep could be so deadly?

In another funny language moment, Calvin was looking through a Chinese to English board book of colors the other day. It is one of those books that has a different color and objects of that color on each page. He loved those books when he was building his English vocabulary of essential words, like "dog," "cup," "apple," and the like. What a great way for him to build his essential Chinese vocabulary! So we read "lily," "orange," "bear," "gun." Yep. That's an important one for toddlers to know.

Living Across Cultures

InterCultural Studies is a subject dear to me heart and one I have not written much about on this blog. I studied it, along with TESOL, in my Master's program, and I was a student of other cultures long before I entered grad school. Since my husband and I are preparing to move overseas, I love reading blogs of folks who live in cultures not their own. I especially love reading blogs of moms raising children in other cultures. A friend of a friend wrote an amazing post about living cross-culturally and trying to embrace a new culture without losing one's own. It is a difficult balance, not without sacrifices and misunderstandings from both cultures.

On the same topic, I highly recommend the movie The Namesake. My husband and I just watched it the other night. The book, by Jhumpa Lahiri, had been sitting in my pile of books to read, and I finally got tired of looking at it and loaned it to my mother-in-law. I might have to get it back now. The story follows the life of Gogol Ganguli, an Indian-American born to first-generation immigrant parents. It is a fascinating exploration of what it means to grow up between two cultures, but it also has wonderful insights into parent-child relationships and the source of one's sense of identity. I admit that the movie lacked something. I think it had to be cut and edited too much to fit into a decent time frame. But that just made me all the more eager to read the book!

My favorite part of the film is at the beginning, when the young married couple first arrives in the US. The husband had been studying there and came home to get a wife. Having left her home and family, her entire support system, to live in a strange country with a man she is just getting to know, the wife experiences great loneliness and isolation. I love this part of the film because we non-immigrants don't often think about this. What would it be like to leave everything you know and move into another culture with no friends and no support structure? This is especially hard for international students and their wives. My husband and I have enjoyed befriending international students, having them in our home, learning about their culture, and helping them to find friendship in what could be a very isolating environment.

So if you want to learn more about living across cultures, read the post, watch the film, and befriend an international student. You have no idea how much it would mean to them to be invited into an American home, to have someone take the time to show them the ropes, to listen to their fears and loneliness. And you will find so much blessing in return. You don't have to live in India to learn to navigate the cross-cultural waters.