Identity verification crisis

Before relinquishing my brother's Aeroplan miles, the slow woman at the call centre had to ask me security questions. His home phone number (but I only use his cell number!), his email address (but I only write him over Facebook!), and his mailing address (who even receives mail anymore?). I had no choice but to hang up and text Steven for the information. The results:

his home phone: my cell phone

his email address: my mother's email address

his mailing address: Jan's house

This Frankenstein hodgepodge of contact information isn't even strange. It's familiar. It's part of the confusion that comes with being transient. I still don't know my own Canadian postal code. For a long time, I couldn't remember if I should check Visitor or Resident upon arrival in the Vancouver airport. I couldn't use my library card to log on to a library computer, because they told me my password was my phone number, and I kept plugging in the Saudi one. Come to think of it, it's sad that I'll never use all those old numbers.

The phone: 9 011 966 3 878 0189

The P.O. box: 9687

The postal code: 31311

The numbers that fix you in place somehow.

Autobiography Chapters

1: Vancouver. Tearing worms and linking paper hoops.

2: Indonesia. Smacked my head on a tile floor, they tell me.

3: Saudi Arabia. Soccer, small town life, shawarmas.

4: California. Boarding school as you imagine, minus uniforms and lesbian encounters, plus conservatives and rock climbing.

5: University of British Columbia. Cherry blossoms, War Lit, Kath and Pearl.

6: Montreal. Hello, bohemia.

7. Saudi Arabia. "Holy crap! I love teaching!" 

8: Turkey. Wander a thousand miles on buses with flash cards and a smile. No theft, no harm, nothing but kindness and enough white bread to give me diabetes.

9: Vancouver. Culture shock, medicated with biking.

10: Galapagos. Long days, all the better for watching baby sea lions.

Who am I?

My Chinese-but-not-really friend Pearl sent me to an online mag called Denizen. It's about Third Culture Kids, of which I'm one; i.e. my Canadian parents raised me in Saudi Arabia, so culturally I'm not Canadian (toque? what?), but I'm certainly not Saudi (hello, male friends). I don't say "eh" but I don't speak Arabic (all those years, such an opportunity, I know).

Like most Third Culture Kids, I thank my parents for showing me the world and forgive them for denying me an identity bathed in nationality. Screw nationality. Screw nationalism. I'm a denizen, citizen of the world. Which brings me back to the magazine, just in its infancy. If it works out, it's because we expatriates love to talk about ourselves (see blog title). No one else cares that we that we know flight routes better than highway routes, international dialing codes better than national holidays (I still don't know Canada Day). In some ways, this internationalism is as bad as any nationalism. We wave no flag, but we still do us-them. For example, if you say "What the hell is sangria doing at a Turkish restaurant? Where's the ayran?" then I will say, "I know you. We have more to talk about than Arrested Development." Order the sangria and be judged.

Third Culture Kids are both enlightened and screwed. Enlightened because history chose us to inherit all the benefits of an increasingly globalized world, and we know it--we know how to move for work, how to adapt to the new grocery store and the new dress code, how to book flights on points before KLM changes the policy and tries to fuck us yet again, how to learn just enough of the local language to feel "in" and buy pirated DVDs, how to make alcohol if necessary, how to stand in all kinds of lines (straight, mob, elbows-up, etc.). We had Skype first. We have friends in all the right places (Beirut, Istanbul, London, LA, Dubai...)--

And screwed because we're nomadic parasites. I mean, if I actually had to live in Saudi--as in, live in a high-walled home with two sullen Indonesian maids, cover my head, and spend weekends with crusty in-laws--I would kill myself. The country on the passport's no better. I tried Canada, gave it a shot, and left within 6 months. Taxes? Commuting? Cold? $4 loaves of bread? No thanks.

So we live abroad without immersing ourselves, submitting our thoughts to places like Denizen. Or blogging. Apologies for the self-consciousness. Last night I finished A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Dave Eggers is still with me.

Faces vs. races

There was an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times yesterday about how racist white people are and how scared we are that black people know. That made me laugh a little. The silver lining on the cloud of prejudice was this finding: when people practice distinguishing faces from a group, like a group of black people, their biases against the group deteriorate. 

"I already knew that!" I wanted to shout.

Seriously, though, teaching is one psych experiment after another. A group of 14-18 year old Saudi boys looked like carbon copies until the second week they were in my class, when my vision magically changed. Their faces turned one-of-a-kind and I never confused Mohammed with Tariq again. The byproduct of this sight shift was that I saw the distances between their personalities. There was as much variability among the Saudi boys as between the Saudi boys and their American counterparts.

Conclusion: seeing individuals is the antidote to racism. And language teaching is good for humanity.

Cheers!

Congratulations to Kai, who won the second name-that-movie contest (see comments for the answer). I wanted to send him a beer from Saudi Arabia, but the country had me stumped, booze-free as it is (if only in decree). But then it hit me: near beer! The skinny, jeans-sagging, Airwalks-rocking seventh grade boys of my youth came back to me in all their glory, sipping warm cans of non-alcoholic beverage at the Third Street snack bar. The things we do to look cool. Here's to sobriety!

Kingdoms and towns

Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, the main town of San Cristobal

Tengo gripe (I have a cold), so I'm hiding out with pirated movies until the phlegm clears. I just watched The Kingdom for the first time, which has the Spanish title La Sombra del Miedo. 

It's based on a terrorist attack on an American compound in Saudi, like the one I grew up in, and opens with a softball game. Dads pitching, moms sitting it the bleachers, everyone sweating--indeed, this was my childhood! The movie wasn't great, but I liked the scattering of Arabic that I knew. Shouf (look), halas (enough), habibe (friend).

"Don't worry, we'll kill them all," said the FBI agent and the little Saudi boy at the end. It resonated unhappily, as intended, and I realize that violence has wandered far from my mind since my arrival on San Cristobal, population six thousand. There's corruption, sure, but no violence. Twice I've walked home at 3:30 in the morning and when people approached me in the dark, it was just to offer rum and coke and homegrown weed.

Funnily enough, this brings me back to Saudi, where I roamed the street day and night and felt perfectly safe, too. The difference is that the safety there was manufactured by walls and security guards that insulated us from the rest of the Kingdom, whereas here people are safe because the whole community is connected--everyone knows everything about everyone.