This week’s essay describes airports as places of “in-between.” Jodie shares this experience of a place where everyone is on equal ground and no one really cares about the country you are from, the one you came from, or the one you are going to. A place that may feel more like home to many ATCKs.
I can’t recall the number of times I’ve stood, teetering on my tiptoes, trying to peer above the high counter at the airport as an officer flipped through pages in my passport and asked me, “Where are you going?”
Just like the time-old, feared question, “Where are you from?”, the question made my heart race and hands feel clammy. I never knew what to say. My mind always blanked. Think. Think. Think. It couldn’t be that hard to answer, surely.
But where was I going? Was I supposed to answer Doha, where I’d spend 24 hours on a layover? Or Albania, where I’d stop to visit family for a week? Or Washington, D.C., where I’d land to enter the States for a summer trip, visiting churches and family friends in over 10 states? Or California, where I would settle for a semester of college, before returning to my family in Pakistan for Christmas break?
This constant movement and change in a TCK’s life require us to adeptly navigate adaptation before we even learn the alphabet in all the languages we speak. Instead of trophies lining our walls, we have drawers full of expired passports filled with stamps that reveal many of us have traveled to more countries by the age of 18 than the average person will ever visit in their whole life.
The in-betweens become our home. After all, we spend most of our time in those in-betweens, don’t we?
We belong nowhere; yet we also belong everywhere. Our hearts are always leaving something behind, even while we are moving toward something else. With parts of our lives scattered across the globe, we have no choice but to feel like there is part of us missing when we are in one spot. The in-betweens capture a part of our heart and soul that no one place can. In-betweens become the heartbeat of life, the freedom to be who we truly are.
But after moving to the States, I quickly discovered that this wasn’t true for everyone. Confused, I realized that many people viewed transitions as an interruption or a means to an end. People talked of red-eye flights and long layovers as something to be avoided. They spoke of the in-betweens as threatening and uncomfortable. I didn’t understand.
Because for me, once I’m past the initial stress of answering the airport official’s questions, my soul sings as I wander the airport before my flight takes off. Olive-skinned women wearing hijabs walk past me while boisterously chatting in German. I nearly bump into a small, bent-over man, dressed in the tell-tale orange robes of a Buddhist monk, as he’s scanning the bookshelf at Hudson News. I find an open seat in the waiting area next to a man with dreadlocks and bright headphones, humming to himself and rhythmically tapping his foot to the tune.
Finally, it doesn’t matter who I am or where I am from. It doesn’t matter if I’m dressed in Pakistani shalwar kamiz but speak with an American accent. It doesn’t matter if I have multiple currency exchange rates memorized and don’t need to Google how much the 20 AED coffee costs in USD. It doesn’t matter if I’ve just come from visiting my friends in Korea and keep accidentally bowing to others rather than shaking their hands. It doesn’t matter if the love of my life is staging a Bollywood flashmob to propose to me while tired travelers wander past to collect their checked bags.
At the airport, anything flies. Country lines blur and cultures converge. The unspoken rules of localized communities that I can never seem to get quite right—and that remind me every day that I don’t truly belong in any one spot—don’t exist in the airport.
Here, I don’t have to create an illusion of fitting in. I am in between cultures, just as my whole life has been in between worlds. Here, everybody is going somewhere.
In a funny sense, I have already arrived. I belong. I am home.
Jodie Stock-Meier is an American-adopted Chinese who spent the first 18 years of her life in rural Pakistan. In the 7 years since, she’s lived between Pakistan and America, but her heart never left Asia. She and her husband currently live in Pennsylvania, though they plan on moving to Asia soon.
