Last night I had occassion to remember again how significant "place" is in building a life -- as a couple, as a family, for a child. It was a long time ago now, but I do remember, way back when, the very clear sense that living in Mohan's context -- in Malaysia -- was absolutely crucial to us staying together as a couple. It may well be that many couples that are international or intercultural don't feel so strongly about this, about living in the other person's culture, but it was really important for us. Partly, it was because of our own priorities and personalities. However, it was also because there was a whole bigger dimension of the questions "Who is this person and why don't I understand them???" than just the Mars and Venus dynamic. Anyway, it's true that, after nearly five years in Malaysia, I did understand Mohan much better because I had daily, first-hand experience of the people and places that had shaped him. I'm so thankful for that knowledge and also for the myriad ways it also made, and makes, me the person that I am now.
It's easy to forget, though, how much we live an "American" life now. I should be specific. It's easy for ME to forget. I think it's impossible for Mohan. There is the familiarity that is forever familiar because it's what I knew first in my life and it is therefore still familiar to me. And also, there is a lot of value in living and investing in wherever you are now. But when that here and now is largely oblivious to and ignorant of the place that is correspondingly familiar to my partner, it ups the ante for me to take on more personal responsibility. I don't know if that's the way to put it -- it sounds like Ronald Reagan is talking to me. So, axe that personal responsibility crap.
I guess I was remembering what it's like to walk the streets in Kuala Lumpur -- in Brickfields, in SS3, in Federal Hill. None of those places have references for most of you, I know -- you'd have more of something to imagine if I said Buenos Aires or the French Quarter or the mountains of Tibet. I was thinking about how I could describe the way the streets in Brickfields smell and, well, it just seemed so stilted and impossible. Half the things that I could identify -- cooking oil, chicken curry, jasmine flowers, turmeric, diesel fumes, teh tarik, holy ash, rice, sambal belacan -- are just a very small part of what makes the experience of walking down the street. Even the sunshine and the drains and the trash and the blooming trees have their own smells. And the memory of those streets are as strong and as easy as if I could walk there right now, as close as my own apartment is to me now. But when I think that Mallika has never been there to see or hear or smell that experience or any other one at all in Malaysia, my chest siezes and I get panicky. If I don't take her NOW, she will grow into one of those horrible, irritating American kids who thinks their dad's home country is dirty, stupid, and backward. Yes, I do worry about that. But more immediatley, it's also that I want her to know and love that place too, so that it is as familiar to her in the rest of life as Shoal Creek and tortillas and pecan trees are to her now. Every day that we're here, we are not there. Most days, that's just fine, just a fact of life. But sometimes it breaks my heart.
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