Where Is 'Home' for an Expat?

Moving abroad from the familiarity of one's home country can be an exciting and terrifying experience at the same time. But what happens when you visit home after years of living abroad? Suddenly not feeling at home in your own country can take you by surprise. Where's your home now, expat?

Every migrant must have heard the classic, silently judgemental comment at some point of their foreign journey: "So... when will you stop this aimless wander and come back home?" It's a harmless wish expressed by someone who loves and misses you back in where everything is just like in the old days. Someone wants you back there so things could be like they used to - you could stroll around those same old streets, buy those good old local groceries and chit chat away in your native language. It's an invitation to that reassuring familiarity, suggesting that anything and everything you experienced since leaving your home country's soil was just a temporary displacement, like a journey made by Bilbo Baggings, and in the end you can always fly back home into the open arms of your welcoming native land. But does it really work like that?

If you were born and raised in a single country to parents with a single nationality, the case looks clear at first glance: you grew up in Finland to Finnish parents, what's the problem? Your home is in Finland. Stop acting like a special snowflake. However, this blog post is not written with the thought of contesting the idea of 'home country', despite the complexity of that very notion to those individuals who have migrated at very early age  - it's to contest the idea of 'home', and how our sense of home can shift as we ramble on around the world and plant seeds of ourselves in all its different soils.

The experience of migration inevitably involves the confrontation between 'home' and 'away' - to travel is to move, to estrange yourself from familiarity and inhabit an unfamiliar space. That unfamiliarity in a new space goes by the name 'culture shock': the habits we found comfortable, reassuring and deeply rooted in our spine are gone, and have been replaced by some sort of anomaly that only poorly replaces the things you hold dear. If you're from a northern nation like yours truly, entering a southern culture sphere with much less personal space and much more kisses on cheeks can be an absolute shock for someone like us who are used to silently staring at other people from a distance. The 'Away', the opposite of your home, is filled with these anomalies, unfamiliarities and wrong kind of bread. Everything back home was so comfortable.

But as time goes by, your survival instinct kicks in and you start inhabiting this unfamiliar space with more confidence. Kisses on cheeks? Bring it on, bro! Embrace me like the latino you are! A bottle of juice and a bag of crisps for lunch? Whatever you say Tesco, I'll take your meal deal, I'm too hungry to fight it. As the days, months and years pass by, these unfamiliarities turn into familiarities: your every morning starts with a bag of apple-cinnamon oatmeal and instant coffee, you surf the tube system eyes closed and speak the foreign language in your sleep. You're on track with everything going on in your host country, every local celebrity photographed drunk in a bar, every politician embarrassing themselves in public, every reform made to a healthcare policy.

Then you encounter that person. "When will you stop this aimless wander and come back home?" And as the plane lands and you enter that once familiar soil of your reassuringly familiar home country, you expect everything to have stayed exactly as they were since the day you left.

But it hasn't.

Why does rye bread make my tummy ache so bad? Why does Finnish coffee suddenly taste so bitter? What new transportation system? Wait, where did they put that new tramline? No sorry, I haven't really followed the news, don't know what's going on in the politics. Yeah.

The home your family talked about suddenly feels so alien. Why? What did you do wrong? This is your home country, you've missed salty liquorice since the day you left, and died to spend a day in the summery, sunny streets of Helsinki just like back in the days. Why does it feels so... not at all home?

Our understanding of 'home' comes from familiarity. What is familiar is what we feel comfortable with; we surround ourselves with things that make our everyday life run smoothly, simply. What is not often considered in the notion of migration, of estranging yourself from familiarity and your home country is that travelling doesn't only include a spatial dislocation, the act of leaving the familiar place, but a temporal dislocation. My Finland is the Finland of the past, the one I left three years ago: this 'past' is now associated with home that I can no longer return to, because it doesn't exist in the present. This is why 'home' is always a question of memory.

This 'home' we crave for becomes a mythic place of no return - the geographical location exists, Finland is always there if I wish to return to its familiar sounds and smells. But the time and place of the home country we knew has passed on, has morphed the way us emigrants have evolved and changed. The terrifying realisation of not knowing where you are while standing in the middle of that shopping centre you've spent time in since you were five years old - it was renovated while you were gone, and you're now completely at the mercy of your friend to lead you through corridors and shops you've never seen before. The corridors you knew are long since demolished.

What that person asking you to come home means with 'home' is that space you inhabited as the person you were years ago. But it ignores the pain of an emigrant who returns to this space and is put on the mercy of others' hospitality, of accommodating you on their sofas and futons, of letting you use their monthly bus card so you could stop spending your now foreign currency on single tickets. Home is not being on the mercy of public wi-fis as you no longer have a Finnish phone number.

You have become a visitor in your own home country.

The nostalgia of walking the streets once part of your everyday reality only carries you so far. Day by day you start missing your oatmeal-instant coffee breakfast (possibly because that once so familiar Finnish nutrition is now completely alien to your digestion system), your new vacuum cleaner you just bought back in Dublin, the smell of the Guinness factory roasting malt on weekends.

You wanted to return 'home' to your family and friends, to salty liquorice and sunny days in Helsinki, but those expectations you put into this experience inspired by your memories can't be dug up from your luggage you spread on your family home's floor. You're a stranger in your own Finnish skin, speaking your native language feels reassuring and alien at the same time. You accidentally answer to people in a wrong language and get judgemental looks from your friends as you try to explain you don't do it to seem special. It's just... what you're familiar with now.

Your family and friends were not there to see you change. They didn't sit on your back as you were lost in Montréal, they didn't hold your hand as you accidentally kissed someone on the lips while trying to go for the wrong cheek first. They weren't there as you shed your Finnish skin and started asking 'how are you?' from every person encountered, when you learned to chit chat about weather with the Irish. But the same way those people didn't see you change, you weren't there to see your home country change like they did.

The unexpected, unfamiliar space entering your bubble of familiarity in the form of a culture shock, requiring the shedding of your skin, an irritating itch (as put by Sarah Ahmed) moulds you little by little. Travelling is about the surprises in sensation: different smells, different sounds, different tastes and people. As time goes by, those surprises become more and more rare. The shedding. You've become a summary of all your lived experiences around the world and no longer fit into the old mould of that person you were when you first left.

This experience of leaving home and returning to an unfamiliar place is the failure of your memories to make sense of those changes: 'failure which is experienced in the discomfort of inhabiting a migrant body, a body which feels out of place, which feels uncomfortable in this place', as put by Ahmed. You can no longer inhabit this once familiar space in the way you thought would be familiar.

My parents divorced when I was very young, and none of us stayed in that home, in that city, after it was all over and life went on. Despite my dreams occasionally still taking me back to that apartment in Espoo, nudging me towards a place my subconscious still believes is my home, it's a place of no return, a space which no longer exists. I believe this experience has affected my abilities to adapt to change, to the feeling of displacement and making myself feel easily at home in an unfamiliar space. 

Exactly the same way I identified my 'home' as the place where (as tacky as it sounds) my heart was as a child - by my family, not in a certain geographical location - I now as an adult identify my home by my Canadian partner, Alex. He's my anchor, the familiarity I will carry with me wherever I go - the mixture of French and English, of chocolate spread on my toast and of rising intonation when asking questions (something I really had to practice so he'd understand I'm asking a question!). The memories created with him are my present, and the memories I have of Finland I will always associate with my 'home country', but no longer with my 'home'.

Home is where your heart is, right?

(This post was inspired by Sarah Ahmed's wonderful article Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement, and Avtar Brah's book Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities.)

 Where is your home? Have you felt like a tourist in your home country after moving abroad? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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WHY I MOVED ABROAD

"You're from Finland? But isn't that like one of the best countries in the world? Why on earth would you move somewhere else?" You can't imagine how often I've heard this. I'm so used to explaining my current whereabouts it has become like a mantra created solely to make people understand my motives for emigration. So what pushed me to leave Finland and seek life elsewhere?

  THE MYTH BUSTER

The most common misconception coming with the question posed in the first sentence of this post is that somehow moving away from a country has something to do with personal hatred, disappointment or even a feeling of not belonging. My emigration from Finland somehow resonates back to people as "Finland, you failed me and we're done". Of course this can be the case, and it should be perfectly acceptable in itself - there surely are places where the state can't possibly offer its citizens the safety and economic stability they would need to establish a life there. However, as a citizen of a western welfare state with free internationally praised education, free universal healthcare system and number 5 on The World Happiness Index 2016 I can't argue that, in my situation, the reason for my emigration lies somewhere in there.

In other words, the whole affair becomes personal really fast. The two countries - your place of origin and the country of immigration - become binary opposites and are put to a position of confrontation, against one another. It's like a competition of one being better than the other. Emigration is easily taken as criticism towards your home country, which is why some Finns might get insulted from the idea of one of their own abandoning the ship and hopping the border. At the same time some locals of your new home country might find it odd you've decided to leave a place with so many virtues. "Do you think it gets any better than that in here?"

Emigration isn't criticism, not always. My emigration isn't. It's not criticism towards Finnish culture, Finnish society or the geographical area called Finland. I have no problem with the darkness, long winters, the cold, the silence of people. I never left because Finland, as a nation and as a culture, somehow failed me or disappointed me. I didn't pack my bags in anger and turn my back to it, I didn't leave as a rebellious protest accompanied with a fanfare as I boarded the plane.

As a kid I thought I would. Because yes, even at the age of 19 I still thought Finland was boring and life would surely get so much better somewhere relevant, like London or Paris. I cared much more about other people's "Finland, where's that?" than I cared about things that actually matter: economics, healthcare, safety. I honestly loathed people who would move abroad and then turn into "little Finnish wussies" missing things back home and trying to tell me how moving away makes you appreciate things in Finland. I didn't want to see or hear any of that because they proved me wrong - that moving abroad isn't magic, and secretly I still loved Finland. I was disappointed how so many expat Finns were not at all like me, who "totally wouldn't ever miss anything and I wouldn't care if I never got to speak Finnish again". And let's face it: this is probably what you expected to read from this post, right?

I was naive, and this naivety is in the core of the question at the top of this post. "Did you move away because you hate Finland?"

  UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

I moved away because, guys, there are things we can't learn by staying. Living abroad is like a bootcamp to surviving life: the daily struggles you face while travelling the world or immigrating to a new country are like kicks to your crotch, and with every kick you become a little stronger and a little less wimpy. In order to grow as a person you need to take hits, you need to struggle, because at those moments of anger, desperation and hopelessness you may face while being lost in the Australian bush you're face to face with your strongest possible self because you have no other choice.

That strength is something I want to train. I grew up shy, scared and almost mute. I was afraid of everything: people, house plants, loud noises, being alone. Eventually, as an adult, my life reached a state where I couldn't possibly go on the way I had, and after three years of hitting the lowest I have ever been I became angry at myself. I promised I would never be afraid like that again: afraid of disappointment, loss and confusion. I wanted to know what it would feel to be normal, to be an extrovert who isn't afraid of taking the leap and sinking into the unknown.

So I moved to Leicester. By distancing myself from Finland and jumping into my first terra incognita, the land unknown, I gave myself a chance to explore my fears related to losing control - because let's face it, moving abroad can be a pain in the ass! As time went by and I kept facing one struggle after another (missing supporting documents, wrong forms, not knowing how to pay bills for god's sake) I became used to it, and I knew to expect it. Slow and steady I learned to handle disappointments and solve problems instead of sitting down and crying about it.

I moved abroad because I needed it - many of us do. I needed to face the people, speak foreign languages, fail and then try again. We all have our own life-changing moments, and one of mine is definitely that time I sat down to my seat on my British Airways flight with a one-way ticket to London, at 05.30am in the morning. I was heading to a life of uncertainty, unpredictability and discomfort. I had no idea what I was doing and that's exactly what I needed to do.

  CONCLUSION

Finland is ranked as one of the most equal countries (SOURCE) with one of the highest per capita incomes (SOURCE) in the world. Finland has incredible scores regarding freedom of speech and freedom of press (SOURCE). In this light, it might seem odd for foreigners that someone in the possession of a passport and citizenship to this Scandinavian shangri-la would voluntarily choose to move elsewhere and turn their back to all these international statistics.

I did because, despite Finland's many virtues, there's a whole world out there. There are places to be and people to meet, immigration forms to fill and trans-Siberian trains to catch. Emigration doesn't have to be criticism or trying to find greener grass from the other side of the fence: sometimes it's all about self exploration, leaping into the unknown and hunger for more life.

Will I ever move back? At this point in my life I have no clue. If I do, despite everything I've seen and done during the past three years, it will be the bravest thing I will ever have done.

Have you moved abroad? Why? Share your story in the comments below!

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She's From Québec

I'm standing in a queue to enter Vancouver Art Gallery, chatting with a friend, when suddenly the man standing in front of us turns around and strikes up a conversation:

"Do you mind me asking where you're from?"

"From Québec", my friend answers for us. "Québec City."

"Québec! How delightful! I've been there once, and I'm actually planning on returning later this year. Well, quebeckers, could you give me some tips? I'd like to visit some smaller cities on my next trip, but I don't really know the province..."

"Well, you could start by Sherbrooke I guess?", I suggest. "It's a little to the South from Québec. Or Lac Saint-Jean in the North."

"Or Trois-Rivières!", goes my friend, being a little patriotic about his hometown. "And there's Granby."

"How about the Gaspé region? It's by the Atlantic", I say.

"And well, there's always Montréal, not really small but..."

I give a little look at my friend and smile. "... Or Lévis."

We both laugh, and the man looks confused.

~ * ~

I first landed in Québec in June 2014, taking my first step to the continent of North America. I was a Finn in Québec, and to keep it simple, I hated it. I hated pretty much everything about Québec from the attitude quebeckers tend to give me when I couldn't speak French to the architecture and food. It was my first-ever culture shock. Needless to say, I was more than terrified a year later when I realised I had made the decision to immigrate into this anomaly.

Seven months later I'm paying my hot chocolate at Second Cup in Banff, Alberta. I'm slightly exhausted from all things English Canadian happening around me - but then I stick my debit card into the reader and see the machine automatically change the language into French. I smile, grab my cup and return to my table.

"Cette machine me parle en français!"
"Pour vrai?", goes my friend.
"Ooouuiiii!"

In seven months my hatred triggered by the fear of the unknown had turned into tender affection. Instead of pouting at home, I found myself seeking ways to adapt, learn and understand my new homeland. The uncomfortability (discussed more in THIS POST) had turned into unconditional curiosity. Thoughts like "Why is everyone always trying to talk to me in public places?" morphed into "So what if I sound like an idiot when I say the word 'la porte' - I want this door open!"

Seven months ago I never would have thought that there will be a day when a man from Vancouver addresses me as a quebecker, and that one tiny word, that absolutely irrelevant little term of a definition, warms up my cheeks and frees the butterflies in my stomach. Seven months ago navigating through a payment process in French was my absolute nightmare, but today it makes my heart long for my new home when I'm lost in the western prairies.

A Christmas gift from my spouse

To be called a quebecker doesn't make my heart skip a beat because it somehow erases my identity as a Finn. My identity as a Finn might take new forms in the upcoming years, but nothing will ever take away my childhood eating rye bread and feeling awkward about other people in the elevator. To be called a quebecker hits the right spot because it means I belong - that after months and months of struggling, fighting, tears and frustration I have reached such a peace of mind with my new home that being addressed as one of its residents feels right.

A Local is something that every immigrant seeks to become. A traveller, however, voyages on in the crowd, bumping into people she will never meet again, sitting in cafes observing passersby going about their lives - and in the end, catches the train and leaves forever as all the locals go on with their routines, never having known about the girl who was there for that blink of an eye. I was sitting with my backpack in that Starbucks in Vancouver, watching those people desperately trying to catch the bus, being an outsider from somewhere else. Their routines were my adventures.

To become a local asks for more than catching that same bus with everyone else: it asks you to want to belong. Becoming a local means you have to stop observing things by asking what is different, and instead address things with the question of why does it even matter. The showers are really different in Québec compared to Finland - but so what, since I can very successfully wash myself in both? Door knobs might be a bit confusing for someone who has turned handles all their lives, but so far I have been able to enter and exit every room I wanted. Quebeckers wash their dishes with sponges, and so will I.

Seven months ago I was a Finn in Québec, comparing my every step to all the steps I had taken in Finland. As months passed, that hunch of bitterness and sickening I felt for my home country slowly turned into nostalgic memories and distant contacts as I dove into the mystery called French-speaking Canada. After the first shock passed I proceeded to explore my new home with a never ending hunger, to a point where my colleague once told everyone that "Mel probably knows this city far better than any of us, so if you need directions, ask her".

Rue du Petit Champlain, Québec City

Then I made a trip to British Columbia, to the shores of the Pacific Ocean - to the very other side of the world from Finland. At that moment, as Finland is so very far away, Québec is my home. I experienced the same distance I took to Finland by moving to Québec by travelling across the whole country to Vancouver, and it made me realise exactly how much I have fallen in love with Québec. I now sweep its streets with routine and breath in its damp winter air every morning as the snow keeps on falling, and it feels like with every inhale I absorb a little piece of this land within me.

~ * ~

I sit at my desk at work, Facebook open, when my friend sends me a message. It's a link to THIS YOUTUBE VIDEO about people answering to the question "What is it to be a quebecker". I watch it, little teary-eyed, and then proceed to ask him if he thinks I will one day become a quebecker.

"But Mel", he says. "I think you already are."

Of Diaspora and Me

Québec City seen from Île d'Orléans

I'm sitting in a bus with someone I vaguely know, having a chit-chatty conversation in English. After a moment of silence this person starts speaking again, this time in French:

"You know Melissa, you really have to start speaking French. You're in Québec now, in here we speak French. It's not any harder than Spanish, Italian, German or any of those languages. You just have to start talking."

"All diasporas are unhappy, but every diaspora is unhappy in its own way", as my favourite literary theorist Vijay Mishra puts it by mimicking the famous opening sentence of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Anyone who has been even vaguely around me during the past spring semester is aware that my Bachelor's Thesis was about this very topic - not due to any selfhelp-therapy-reasons, but out of pure academic interest. However, now that I find myself more or less dislocated, it feels natural to return to the topic from a more personal point of view (by ruthlessly quoting myself from aforementioned thesis).

Diaspora - a sense of existent or imaginary cultural dislocation - is a phenomenon which applies to masses and individuals on the moment of migration: cultural clashes create readjusted and redefined cultural identities as solid habits, traditions and values are getting inevitably questioned. To live in diaspora is to live displaced. The people of diaspora are more or less migrants, drifters, travellers and people with a problematic understanding of ”homeland” and ”belonging”. Whether the dislocation is an existent state or an imaginary displacement, ”a sense of self-imposed exile” (thnx Mishra), it affects an individual's positioning within their own culture as well as their perspective of the postmodern, globalized world.

Diaspora is to leave your homecountry to escape the terrors of war to an unknown land, as much as it is to sit next to a local and get lectured about my imagined reluctance to integrate into their culture. It's the clash that happens when the culture you're living in is no longer your own, it's the hunch of discomfort and fear in your stomach as you're willingly or unwillingly stepping out of your comfort zone. It's the opposite of filtered Instagram-pictures and #wanderlust hashtag - it's what they don't tell you about migration.

Canada is my Terra Incognita, the Land Unknown - for a Syrian refugee it's something else. Every diasporic experience is different, but the very fundamental feature of all these experiences is the sudden lack of contextual knowledge and understanding of cultural resonances needed to fully adapt to the new environment. Here, have an example:

This is a picture of me lying in a pile of corn leaves. Corn tastes good. However, I must've made an amazing impression on my mother-in-law when she handed me a corn and I proceeded to ask "So uhh.... How does this work?"

Never before had I thought about it, but now that I encountered such a situation, I found out I have no idea how to handle corn.

I ask a lot of questions. Questions that make my quebecois partner look at me with a weird face and go "...huh?". So far I can remember asking the following huh?-questions:

1. "But how does the state know you've moved if you don't send an announcement about your new address to the postal office of Canada?"
2. "Can't you just go and vote anywhere in the city during the pre-election dates?"
3. "But how on earth are you supposed to wash your windows if you can't OPEN THEM?"
4. "How can you ever receive mail that's in an A4-sized envelope if your mailbox can only fit postal card-sized mail?"
5. "... You don't lock your front door for the night?!"
6. "How come you can only make a new rental agreement once a year in July??"
7. "You don't get money from returning old glass bottles?"
8. "......... You don't use a knife?"

I have no idea how this society works. In Finland I return my old wine bottles and get 20 cents in return, keep my front door locked at all times and happily open my double-glazed windows so I can wipe them. I stand silently in an elevator and seek for the last empty seat in a bus to avoid sitting next to a stranger. I forget to say "please" and ask "Ça va?". I use a knife. I eat a salty breakfast. I fucking love my salty breakfast.

Diaspora is not about going for an exchange semester in Leicester to rave in The Revolution on New Walk every Friday. It's about the helplessness you feel when you face the everyday reality of a society that isn't yours, and suddenly you feel like a second-class citizen. You're excluded. Diaspora is about getting dislocated, literally and figuratively. A semester in England with all its International Offices, tutors and mandatory orientation soirees could never have prepared me for the solitary life of an immigrant, who tries to ramble on with her life even when she's standing in front of her bank's office with an actual 90's-style cheque from her employer in her hand. Seriously Canada, cheques?

There is nothing to hang on to. The cities look different, the culture is different, you're afraid to open your mouth in the fear of saying something inappropriate (to this day I'm still not sure if I should in any circumstances refer to Quebeckers as Canadians). No matter how much you enjoy adventuring, exploring and get positively surprised when people start chatting with you in an elevator or when suddenly no one owns Marimekko, at times you get this little feeling of helplessness.

A very English cityscape from Shakespeare's hometown, Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK.

Good news: it won't last forever. One's cultural identity is an ever changing pallet of evolving, transformation and crises. We indeed have a shared history, a past, with a certain community and this history can hide in the core of our very (Finnish) cultural identity, but the relationship we have with this history can be redifined, questioned and even denied. The approach we have to our own communal culture can be readjusted by the way we position ourselves in relation to this history. I develop my identity by questioning, redefining and rejecting the images I have of my own individual or collective cultural identity as a part of the Finnish society. I see, I compare, I realise the differences and assimilate new habits in relation to my new cultural environment.

A migrant's cultural identity becomes a hybridized mosaic of fragments, a mosaic where I might forget to say please, but still frequently exclaim "cheers" as a remnant from my times in Leicester - and who knows, maybe after a year in Québec I've gotten hooked to my overly sugared breakfast cereals and caramel paste. This is hybridity: it's what happens when we start to assimilate features from the culture we have migrated into, blending these features with the ones we already hold.

One day I might hold a different citizenship. On that day I might look at myself from the mirror and see all the rambling, the diaspora and the past dislocation, but I will no longer forget to say my "please".