20 years. 20 years! 20 years....TWENTY YEARS.
20 years ago today, I came to the USA for the first time.
I was 16 and all I knew about America was from movies and pop culture. I had pictured my exchange year driving through palm tree-lined boulevards in sunny California or exploring the streets of New York City - those were the only mental images of America I had. Instead I found myself on a plane to a small town in South Dakota.
I had never been on a plane by myself and I had never left Europe. I didn’t know the place I was going or anyone there. I was nervous but so excited. Somehow I knew that this trip would be life changing. And it was. A feeling of in-between has been a constant ever since.
Today, I’ve spent more of my life here than my home country. I forget sometimes that I’m a first generation immigrant. Although there are many parts of my identity that feel rooted in german-ness, equal parts of me feel kinship and connection to American culture and society. While my family and friends all remained in Germany, I built a new life, in a foreign culture, speaking a different language. And while most of my mental models and thinking styles as an adult (since I was 16!) have been shaped by American culture, values and language, my foundations, my deeper sense of self, of family life, of personal decisions, of culture and community, were built on yet another set of values and thinking styles and in another language.
I call out the language piece because it has always been a core factor of my experience of in-between. I got Ds in english in high school. For context, in Germany, we start english as a second language in 5th grade and its a core part of our curriculum through Graduation in 13th grade. I know now, that I wasn't bad at English though, I was bad at English as it was being taught in school.
One Aha-moment from my experience as an exchange student was a personal realization on the value of "in context learning." The night I arrived in the US, after traveling for 24+ hours, on 3+ flights, lots of nerves and uncertainty and one mean thunderstorm on my last flight from Minneapolis to Sioux Falls, South Dakota in a tiny 2 row airplane, my host family picked me up and we drove along the incredibly straight and long highway for 1+ hours until we arrived in White, SD - a town of 500 (!) people.
Photo by Christian Begeman via southdakotamagazine.com
When we arrived home around 2am, I went straight to the bathroom to take a shower. I remember getting out of the shower in the downstairs bathroom, habitually reaching to the right (based on where I was used to finding towels) and finding...nothing. I started looking around, getting more and more panicked as I realized there weren't any towels in the bathroom (as I learned later, they were in the hallway closet just outside my door). I was tired, wet and in a totally foreign place with strangers and the worst part I could not for the life of me remember the word for "towel".
So, I summed my courage, cracked the door open and peeked my head out into the hallway, a little puddle forming where I was standing - I started shouting random words like "wet" "water" "dry" in hopes that my host mom would hear me. And she did. And she understood immediately, opening the hallway closet to grab me a towel. She looked at me and said "towel" as she handed it to me. Instant relief. And instant understanding and internalization.
Since that experience, I would never ever forget the word towel again - it was seared in my brain for good. I know I had "learned" the word in class at some point. Surely, in preparation for one of many vocabulary tests, I read it on the page, in a sea of 30-40 other terms. Sitting there, in plain ink: das *Handtuch - the towel...*but it didn't stick as it didn't matter to me, it was removed from any context and urgency.
The first couple of weeks, I remember not saying much. First of all, my head was swimming with new impressions, tastes, smells, behaviors, streets, people....but second of all, I didnt know how. So I listened. I picked up a word or two during conversations and nodded and pointed my way through the days. I also watched TV, I listened to the radio and I read the newspaper, after my host father had finished his sections.
Right around the two week mark, I woke up with english thoughts in my mind - I had dreamed in english. My brain quickly switched back to german, retrieving back to what was comfortable and easy as I tried to process and make sense of the dream - but I knew that the dream itself was in english. My subconscious had started to adapt and internalize before my conscious mind could. Another couple weeks and I started thinking in english, at first it was for small parts of conversations, eventually it felt more natural. Although, I have many memories of standing by the phone in the hallway to call my dad back in Germany (these were pre-skype days and so I would have to go to the local drugstore to buy a prepaid phone card for these kinds of long distance calls). And sometimes, while I was speaking to him in german, thinking in german, someone in the background would say something in english and my brain would flip the switch causing me to respond to my dad in some hybrid, jibberish Denglish. Eventually, I was able to flip a switch in my mind with purpose and ease, going back and forth and feeling confident and comfortable with both.