I was born in Cape Town, South Africa, but I’ve spent almost my whole life on the East Coast of the United States. While I only became an official citizen last summer, I have always considered myself American. I don’t have a cool foreign accent, all of my memories of Cape Town are from vacations, and it’s hard for me to imagine growing up anywhere else. However, these superficial reasons don't negate where I am from, and as the years have gone by, I’ve come to appreciate what it means to have an international family.
By “international family,” I don’t necessarily mean the family I have back in South Africa, although I do love them very much and definitely don’t see them often enough. Instead, I’m talking about the many friends my family has made since coming to the U.S. My parents, as I think many immigrants do, found comfort in becoming part of a community of immigrants who were going through similar experiences. Most of this community was South African, but through time, it has expanded in its reach.
I was recently at a dinner with a few of these family friends, and hearing the conversations they had, the conversations that I grew up listening to, was just one way to see how truly special my extended family is.
When talking about unusual foods they ate growing up, their examples ranged from tripe and trotters (pig stomach and feet, respectively) to oxtail and, of course, my mom’s scarring story of the time she opened a pot to see an entire cow tongue in the stew. My parents and everyone their age grew up during Apartheid, and the stories I’ve heard about what they had to go through and what they did to fight back always leave me in awe. When they ask me how I’m enjoying Northwestern, I know my answers mean something different to them, because they went to school during a time when they needed special permission to attend the white college and never felt welcome in their schools.
Sometimes, I feel a little out of place in my international family. Despite the fact that I have a South African birth certificate, I definitely don’t have the same shared experience of growing up there. Whenever the conversation gets a bit rowdy, all of a sudden, their phrases will turn from English to Afrikaans. If I ask what they said, they’ll usually struggle to translate it, because you can never get quite the same impact in English. When political discussions shift from American to South African governments, I’m completely lost, and can’t even begin to try to participate in the conversation.
Most of their children are like me; either they were born in or spent the majority of their life in the U.S. I wonder if they ever feel the kind of inner conflict I have at times, being not quite American and not quite South African. I think our place in this international family is important, though. Many of them moved to the U.S. because they believed it would be a better place to raise their children, and many stayed because their children call America home.
We may not have shared experiences, but we definitely have shared goals; to have the best life for our families, to learn and to teach and to grow together. As confusing as this part of my identity can be, being around this family that formed throughout our years in the U.S. constantly challenges and teaches me, and that is something I am extremely thankful for.
