Culture Club

During the school year I tutored a girl from Sri Lanka. Her life fascinates me. At home, Ayisha lives in the world of Sri Lanka, where Tamal is spoken at the dinner table and her mother dresses in beautiful saris and the house smells of incense. At school she lives in the good old USofA where English is spoken in such rapid fire that it sometimes leaves her feeling dizzy. Ayisha doesn't speak the native tongue of her parents; she wasn't born in Sri Lanka. However, Ayisha doesn't speak English fluently, either. She stumbles on pronouns and mixes her tenses in ways that remind me of a typical ESL student. Sometimes I worry about her. She seems lost in the culture of America, yet equally lost in the culture of Sri Lanka.

After three weeks in Utah, I surprised myself more than once by feeling confused, discombobulated, and even out of place here. Now wait just one darn second, I've said to myself. I was born and raised here. This is my home. This is who I am. Or is it?

As I was walking through the gorgeous green hillsides of the Utah State University Campus, pondering this cognitive dissonance (I think that's the phrase I'm looking for to describe how I'm feeling), I had a moment where I felt a sense of perfect empathy for Ayisha, the girl trapped in between two cultures who, as a result, isn't quite sure who she is right now.

Who Am I? New York Liz? Utah Liz? They feel like two different people. I've been particularly confused as I've sat for hours in classes on multiculturalism and diversity (this semester's course topic). I've been startled at how different I feel from my classmates, how out of place I feel, how different my opinions are from theirs. Is this what 2 years in New York will do to a person? I've wondered. I'm still wondering that.

For a couple of days I tried on Utah Liz again, assimilating in as best I could, pretending that my experience and my opinions were those of the majority of my classmates. But they were not. And the pretending was making me miserable. I turned to Trent (of course I did). We hammered it out in long drawn out phone conversations. At one point he said, (in so many words), "If New York Liz were to talk to Utah Liz, what would she say to her?"

Ah, a profound question, indeed. New York Liz would tell her Utah counterpart to stop pretending and to be herself.

I spent the last several days of class doing just that. I smiled through the raised eyebrows of one sweet sister from Brigham City who I'm sure didn't have the foggiest idea what I was talking about. I jumped in with both feet during a class role play where I assumed the role of Maya, a Muslim girl from Pakistan, who I had taught. I laughed merrily at the guy who told me he was "sorry" to hear I was orginally from Provo and said, "I actually feel sorry for you if you hate Provo. You don't know what you're missing" (and I hope it came out less condescending than it appears right now).

In short, I tried to be me, even though I'm still not sure how much of me is New York and how much of me is Utah. Maybe I'm just a little bit of both. Utah is where I'm from, and for right now, New York is home.