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The Girl with the Airplane Hat
When I returned to the United States after spending my childhood abroad, I did everything I could to appear like other children attending the class of my grade school in Oklahoma City. I wore paisley skirts that didn’t reach my knees. I begged my parents for white gogo boots. I made myself and my father wide paisley neckties from the scraps left over from my skirts. I wore orange and lime green and had a mouse pin made from real fur. My geography teacher or my regular teacher during the geography study time, it is all a blur, destroyed my plans for fitting in by her questions: “Has anyone ever been to: Austria, Libya, India, Pakistan, Venezuela, Barbados or Greece?” To be honest, up went my hand. Each time, the students around me looked back or around or sideways, whispered to each other, were curious at first but after a whole year of hand-raising, branded me an outsider. No matter how carefully I copied their hairstyles and made a perfect flip, I was the girl who had traveled the world or was lying, their mothers said. Seeing this as the only way ahead, I decided to embrace being an outsider and made a pretend life out of what used to be real and when I walked down the corridor and out the door at the end of the school day, I muttered to myself, “I must get to the airport and catch my flight to Chicago.” From Chicago, I knew, I could go anywhere. I marked the years of my life backwards to the last time I was in a foreign country. Three years after leaving Libya, we drove from Wisconsin to Mexico for the summer. I did everything I could to keep the number of years low that separated me from sojourn in another country. When I was in the United States, I was just passing through. I studied Spanish in junior high school and intensively in Mexico in the summer. In high school, I added French. The summer after two years of high school, I went to university for eight weeks of intensive German. These hours connected with the happy years I had spent attending a German nursery school in Venezuela. Instead of returning to high school, I went straight into university, signing up for Latin American studies, advanced Spanish, Portuguese, German and then soon, a semester of French. Juggling all of them, I added Norwegian, went to Denmark for six months where I worked for Chileans who had escaped to Copenhagen. And on a cheap trip to Mallorca, with one semester of French, I interpreted for a French woman who needed help with Spanish. Returning to university, I shifted to French, quickly advancing and then by my last semester, I was asked to teach beginning French for the Paris Study Abroad program. That led to graduate studies in medieval French. In my mid-twenties, my airplane hat took to the East and we landed in Japan where we lived for twenty-four years. I dove into Japanese language and culture until I could translate and when my face was not seen as on the telephone or in a dark taxi, I was thought to be Japanese. To prepare for travels, I studied Turkish, Greek, Italian, and Thai and in the midst of all the foreign words and places, I fell in love with my mother tongue.
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