Tag: United States

Waiting to Belong: Thoughts on the Immigrant Experience.

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“Citizenship to me is more than a piece of paper. Citizenship is also about character. I am an American. We’re just waiting for our country to recognize it.” – Jose Antonio Vargas

I have been a nomad since childhood. Thanks to my own privilege – dual citizenship at birth; international travel experience as a child; the ability to afford to study abroad – I lived on visas in five different countries. Even when I landed in Canada, where I am a citizen, it felt like a stopover, not a homecoming.

Unsurprisingly, in my early adult years I immediately identified with other “Third Culture Kids,” people like me who were raised in countries other than their our passport country. I also aspired to the nomadic life as documented in sites like the blog And Then We Moved To …, the hashtag movement #vanlife, and the memoir Mother Tongue: My Family’s Globe-Trotting Quest to Dream in Mandarin, Laugh in Arabic, and Sing in Spanish. But the last few years I’ve identified less with being a nomad, more with being an immigrant. Continue reading →

Traveling Without a Passport: The World in Our Backyard.

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I have been living in the United States for just over 10 years. That’s 10 consecutive years. In other words, I’ve now lived in the U.S. longer than I’ve lived in any other country (previous record: 8 years in Kenya). Though I happily anticipated my move to California in 2006 to begin my Master’s degree, I fashioned myself a world traveler and California felt stifling. International flights were much costlier than I had ever paid in my globetrotting adult life and road-tripping necessitated owning a car, an object I saw as an anchor. The happiest version of myself included perpetually living around the world with little to hold me or my bank account down.

Recently, I sold my car after putting in over 200,000 miles of fuel-efficient driving to 13 states – the entire West and Southwest – and two countries (Mexico and Canada). What I had seen as an anchor had freed me in a way no airplane ticket could have. There was so much to see that I realized I had been reductive in my earlier views on travel. The world had always been there, waiting for me in a supermarket, a language class, a house of worship, or on the road. All I had to do was look. Continue reading →