Where she came from everyone lived high up, where gravity had the least pull on the ambitions of men and the skins of women. Everyone got used to seeing things from a great height and everything looked tiny and ant like. Everything was scaled down to dots and resembled pixels in a low grade image on the computer. Nothing was very threatening when everything was so small. But back then she was never afraid of the view outside her window on the 42nd floor. She could see all the way to the sea and moving dots of lights like some high-tech impressionist painting. That is how Harry Potter's world would look like if it had been modernized. And she could almost believe she was floating in a the air while she peeked at her neighbors at their dinner table. The space which divides one family from the next is an arm length fall of 42 floors. The curtains could never shut out the sound of conversations at their dinner tables and her family had to make sure they speak loud enough to cover up the intruding voices of the neighbors. Elevators were always a chore. Jam-packed with people in suits and briefcases every morning. It is the one time everyone from all those different units meet reluctantly for that three minutes of unwanted physical closeness. Being in elevators everyone held their breaths and if they spoke spoke in whispers. An anxious experience with a horrible mixture of colognes and perfumes and trances of breakfasts. She had always thought everyone and everything seemed especially grey and silent, Even though television sets were constantly left blaring on purpose to keep silence at bay.
Now she lives unbelievably close to the ground. Her concept of space seemed to have lost a whole dimension. Everything is larger-than-life. The people on the bus were especially loud, colorful and real. The grey muffled skin around her world has been rudely stripped away. She now saw stretches of sky uninterrupted. She missed the sky back home--always incomplete and cut off at an angle and she had always felt so much closer to the stars even though the glare of the city lights blocked out all views of them. Now she was so ground bound. She always had to look up because there was not much to discover looking down. It is just the ground beneath her feet. Colors are so solid and full here, it lacked that indistinct in-betweenness back home, it is as if her grey filter has been removed. The noise saturated silence is replaced by genuine sounds of people's ceaseless bubbly chattering. The full bodied stimulants of the new place seemed jarring to her senses in a way that was not totally unpleasant.
People always like to ask her, what does she miss back home? Her friends perhaps? Speaking her own language without the intrusion of a funny accent that people will detect as foreign and place her as an outsider. She never quite know what to answer. How can she tell them that she has lost a whole way of looking at things. A whole spatial dimension is missing and her color palette has been meddled with so that a certain indistinct misty grey has gone missing replaced by assertive colors more certain of themselves.
She was not unhappy. But neither can she remember the last time she was happy. Happiness seemed to have a double shadow now, she found herself trying to pin the tricky bastard down, fix him to make him stay. She had the same voice, the same laughter, the same sense of humor, but yet somehow something has changed. The worst thing about the change is she don't know what is different, so she can't remedy it.
She hated the words migrant and immigrant and still does. Such an ugly sounding words. Pronouncing them, one had to use an extra effort at the "grunt!" part of the words. It is strenuous and forced like the smile she pastes on herself at Chinese New Year. How she could never speak to her relatives for fear that her smile would fall apart and she would have to spend time putting the crumbles together back into its monstrous form. So she stuffed herself with food. As long as one's mouth is full, no one blames them for their silence. So it is the silence she relishes. The silence of being a third-party, an outsider. She talks to her friends from home and suddenly this silence catches up when the unindentifable change rears its ugly head. It is also the silence which falls quite suddenly like a blade when she converses with someone and her alienness makes everything awkward.
People congratulate her on being bilingual. Excitable Aunts explain the opportunities this special skill can offer. And everyone nod their heads in agreement that knowing English prior to her move here is an advantage. "See how fast she has adapted here?" What they cannot see is that it is so terrible to be in between. Neither here nor there. She felt sea-sick all the time. She feels like a fish out of water, struggling to breathe, all the while feeling her distance from the sea. She also feels like a freak. An amphibian of sorts--expected to straddle the two land, but finding that she now belonged in neither.
Now she lives unbelievably close to the ground. Her concept of space seemed to have lost a whole dimension. Everything is larger-than-life. The people on the bus were especially loud, colorful and real. The grey muffled skin around her world has been rudely stripped away. She now saw stretches of sky uninterrupted. She missed the sky back home--always incomplete and cut off at an angle and she had always felt so much closer to the stars even though the glare of the city lights blocked out all views of them. Now she was so ground bound. She always had to look up because there was not much to discover looking down. It is just the ground beneath her feet. Colors are so solid and full here, it lacked that indistinct in-betweenness back home, it is as if her grey filter has been removed. The noise saturated silence is replaced by genuine sounds of people's ceaseless bubbly chattering. The full bodied stimulants of the new place seemed jarring to her senses in a way that was not totally unpleasant.
People always like to ask her, what does she miss back home? Her friends perhaps? Speaking her own language without the intrusion of a funny accent that people will detect as foreign and place her as an outsider. She never quite know what to answer. How can she tell them that she has lost a whole way of looking at things. A whole spatial dimension is missing and her color palette has been meddled with so that a certain indistinct misty grey has gone missing replaced by assertive colors more certain of themselves.
She was not unhappy. But neither can she remember the last time she was happy. Happiness seemed to have a double shadow now, she found herself trying to pin the tricky bastard down, fix him to make him stay. She had the same voice, the same laughter, the same sense of humor, but yet somehow something has changed. The worst thing about the change is she don't know what is different, so she can't remedy it.
She hated the words migrant and immigrant and still does. Such an ugly sounding words. Pronouncing them, one had to use an extra effort at the "grunt!" part of the words. It is strenuous and forced like the smile she pastes on herself at Chinese New Year. How she could never speak to her relatives for fear that her smile would fall apart and she would have to spend time putting the crumbles together back into its monstrous form. So she stuffed herself with food. As long as one's mouth is full, no one blames them for their silence. So it is the silence she relishes. The silence of being a third-party, an outsider. She talks to her friends from home and suddenly this silence catches up when the unindentifable change rears its ugly head. It is also the silence which falls quite suddenly like a blade when she converses with someone and her alienness makes everything awkward.
People congratulate her on being bilingual. Excitable Aunts explain the opportunities this special skill can offer. And everyone nod their heads in agreement that knowing English prior to her move here is an advantage. "See how fast she has adapted here?" What they cannot see is that it is so terrible to be in between. Neither here nor there. She felt sea-sick all the time. She feels like a fish out of water, struggling to breathe, all the while feeling her distance from the sea. She also feels like a freak. An amphibian of sorts--expected to straddle the two land, but finding that she now belonged in neither.
posted by Nippy at 6:18 PM
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