«Where
do you come from? It's
such a simple question, but
these days, of course, simple questions bring
ever more complicated answers.
People
are always asking me where I come from, and
they're expecting me to say India,and
they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of
my blood and ancestry does come from India. Except,
I've never lived one day of my life there. I
can't speak even one word of
its more than 22,000 dialects. So
I don't think I've really earned the right to
call myself an Indian. And
if "Where do you come from?" means
"Where were you born and raised and educated?" then
I'm entirely of that funny little country known
as England, except
I left England as soon as I completed my
undergraduate education, and
all the time I was growing up, I
was the only kid in all my classes who
didn't begin to look like the classic English heroes represented
in our textbooks. And
if "Where do you come from?" means
"Where do you pay your taxes? Where
do you see your doctor and your dentist?" then
I'm very much of the United States, and
I have been for 48 years now, since
I was a really small child. Except,
for many of those years, I've
had to carry around this funny little pink cardwith
green lines running through my face identifying
me as a permanent alien. I
do actually feel more alien the longer I live there. And
if "Where do you come from?" means
"Which place goes deepest inside you and
where do you try to spend most of your time?" then
I'm Japanese, because
I've been living as much as I can for
the last 25 years in Japan. Except,
all of those years I've been there on a tourist visa, and
I'm fairly sure not many Japanese would
want to consider me one of them.
(...) when I go to Hong Kong or Sydney or Vancouver, most
of the kids I meet are
much more international and multi-cultured than I am. And
they have one home associated with their parents, but
another associated with their partners, a
third connected maybe with the place where they happen to be, a
fourth connected with the place they dream of being, and
many more besides. And
their whole life will be spent taking pieces of
many different places and putting them together into
a stained glass whole. Home
for them is really a work in progress. It's
like a project on which they're constantly adding upgrades
and improvements and corrections.
And
for more and more of us, home
has really less to do with a piece of soil than,
you could say, with a piece of soul. (...) My
home would have to be whatever I carried around inside me. And
in so many ways, I think this is a terrific liberation. Because
when my grandparents were born, they
pretty much had their sense of home, their
sense of community, even their sense of enmity, assigned
to them at birth, and
didn't have much chance of stepping outside of that. And
nowadays, at least some of us can choose our sense of home, create
our sense of community, fashion
our sense of self, and in so doing maybe
step a little beyond some
of the black and white divisions of
our grandparents' age. (...)
The
number of people living in countries not their own now
comes to 220 million, and
that's an almost unimaginable number, but
it means that if you took the whole population of Canada and
the whole population of Australia and
then the whole population of Australia again and
the whole population of Canada again and
doubled that number, you
would still have fewer people than belong to
this great floating tribe. And
the number of us who live outside the
old nation-state categories is increasing so quickly, by
64 million just in the last 12 years, that
soon there will be more of us than there are Americans. Already,
we represent the fifth-largest nation on Earth. And
in fact, in Canada's largest city, Toronto, the
average resident today is what used to be called a
foreigner, somebody born in a very different country.
And
I've always felt that the beauty of being surrounded by the
foreign is
that it slaps you awake. You
can't take anything for granted. Travel,
for me, is a little bit like being in love, because
suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked "on." Suddenly
you're alert to the secret patterns of the world. The
real voyage of discovery, as Marcel Proust famously said, consists
not in seeing new sights, but
in looking with new eyes. And
of course, once you have new eyes, even
the old sights, even your home become
something different.
Many
of the people living in countries not their own are
refugees who never wanted to leave home and
ache to go back home. But
for the fortunate among us, I
think the age of movement brings exhilarating new
possibilities. Certainly
when I'm traveling, especially
to the major cities of the world, the
typical person I meet today will
be, let's say, a half-Korean, half-German young woman living
in Paris. And
as soon as she meets a half-Thai, half-Canadian
young guy from Edinburgh, she
recognizes him as kin. She
realizes that she probably has much more in common with him than
with anybody entirely of Korea or entirely of Germany. So
they become friends. They fall in love. They
move to New York City. Or
Edinburgh. And
the little girl who arises out of their union will
of course be not Korean or German or
French or Thai or Scotch or Canadian or
even American, but a wonderful and
constantly evolving mix of all those places. And
potentially, everything about the way that
young woman dreams about the world, writes
about the world, thinks about the world, could
be something different, because
it comes out of this almost unprecedented blend
of cultures.
Where
you come from now is much less important than
where you're going. More
and more of us are rooted in the future or
the present tense as much as in the past. And
home, we know, is not just the place where
you happen to be born. It's
the place where you become yourself.
(...)
(...). But
I do think it's only by stopping movement that
you can see where to go. And
it's only by stepping out of your life and the world that
you can see what you most deeply care about and
find a home. Movement
is a fantastic privilege, and
it allows us to do so much that our grandparents could
never have dreamed of doing. But
movement, ultimately, only
has a meaning if you have a home to go back to. And
home, in the end, is of course not
just the place where you sleep. It's
the place where you stand.»