Arrival and Everything In-between

In German, there's a word for the feeling of being well-situated in your environment: #Ankunft [arrival]. Of course, this word can also be used in the literal sense. It's plastered across the halls of airports in the German-speaking world. When I get in at the train station in a different city, I might call a friend and say, "Ich bin gerade in *** #angekommen." ["I've just arrived in ***"]. But in popular public discourse, the concept of arrival (or having arrived) is something different entirely. I could also just as soon say: “Ich wohne schon seit einem Jahr in Deutschland und bin immer noch nicht wirklich angekommen” [I’ve been living in Germany for a year, but I still haven’t really arrived]. Arrival has something to do with perception (both self-perception and the way one is perceived), something to do with presentation (how new environments are presented and how you present yourself in your new environs), and everything to do with agency and well-being. Because if you have not arrived yet, how can you expect to do much of anything else?

As a contribution to conversations on #migration or #diversity, I like this distinction on the surface. I prefer arrived to terms like integrated, assimilated, model, good, or bad. It doesn’t assume profound change or camouflage. I need not graft my true self onto others (or vice-versa) through integration or assimilation—the concept of one foreign body [parasitically or symbiotically] entwined with another always somehow feels artificial or delayed. With arrival there is no immediate assumption of a fundamental transformation: I merely need to change my setting, pause, take a few breaths. Adjust. Arrive. It seems more natural. While there are certainly dimensions to arrival and varying shades of permanence, arrival also implies some continuity: redefining your own comfort zone in a new place. A state of situatedness.

The trouble with arrival these days in #Germany is that it has increasingly little or nothing to do with actual motion. Even in its metaphorical use, it assumes what Germans might deem a “Migrationshintergrund” [migration background] because it assumes one has arrived from someplace else. Of course, this also isn’t necessarily conceptualized in the literal sense of the word (someone who came from somewhere on the ‘outside’), at least not in the sense that it must imply foreign origin on the international scale. I could move from Southern Germany to the North, country to city, West to East and still talk about my state of having arrived. I could do the same with a new apartment, a new job. I have or have not yet arrived is something like I feel or don’t feel comfortable. In this context—in the sense of vocalizing and negotiating one’s own agency, one’s own self-assurance, one’s own comfort zone—I find the idea empowering.

But arrival (more specifically, non-arrival) can become a state of suspended animation, too. For members of what is optimistically referred to in German as the #postmigrant generation(s) [that is the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren of migrant progenitors], arrival is a promised inheritance and not a birthright. While it may also be the name of a convenient app produced by German immigration services (that's right, they actually try to educate tech-savvy immigrants, rather than burying them in bureaucracy and legal fees), for more recent migrants the feeling of arrival may still seem light years away.

That's because a big part of arrival extends beyond how you think you feel. It's just as much about how others feel about you. The perceived proximity of one’s migration background can make or break arrival in a culture, no matter how distant its reality. Lest we forget, ethnic minorities in Germany [and elsewhere] have historically been excluded from participation in civil society (or persecuted, enslaved, expelled, murdered en masse) due to the incongruity of perceived migration backgrounds with various conceptions of belonging to the [German] nation-state. Thus a perceived (or conceived) otherness in Jewish-Germans (many of whose ancestors had been living in Central Europe for more than a millennium) allowed them to still somehow be conceived of as foreign invaders in a newly-defined Nazi Germany. In pre-Nazi Weimar Germany, any number of those same citizens might have thought they, too, had finally arrived.

If this all seems too abstract, too specific, too German to matter for an English-speaking audience, consider the Three-Fifths Compromise, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the not-just Chinese Asian Exclusion Act of 1924, Japanese internment by executive order in the 1940s (my Korean grandma got to wear a stay-out-of-jail-free pin), DACA, families torn apart at borders, or current questions of birthright citizenship, etc. all of which institutionalize heritage-based exclusion in the American Promised Land. But of course that's no concern to you. Your ancestors immigrated the 'right' way. The 'legal' way. As did mine.

And therein lies the rub. Prussian Jews immigrated legally to Berlin in the 18th and 19th centuries, too, but it didn't stop their persecution. Their legal status (their invitation) didn't prevent mass deportation or murder a short century later. My Korean ancestors arrived in Oakland and San Francisco just a few short years before the gate slammed shut behind them, permanently sealing off any hope of ever reuniting with the families they'd left behind. And yet, even today, somehow they're still conceived of as less American than my Italian ancestors who arrived decades in their wake. During WW2, Americans of Japanese ancestry, even those with hyphenated last names, were rounded up and shipped off to forced labor camps by Executive Order 9066. Changing ideology can place you on the other side of the wall from one day to the next.

I have pretty thick skin. But in the same way that I still prickle in the States when someone compliments my English or asks me where I come from [fourth generation Californian] (no, but, you know [wink-wink], where do you REALLY come from?), there are certain assumptions made in Germany about the state of one's Ankunft before a single word is spoken. And far more after one opens one’s mouth.

Call it serendipity, poetic justice, but such encounters often happen to me on both sides of the Atlantic immediately before I reach the hallowed arrivals hall in ports of entry. My accent, appearance, self-presentation is complimented or derided (or not commented on at all) with varying degrees of surprise, annoyance, appreciation, or condescension from hardworking border guards across the world. Living (or commuting), as I have, for the past decade between two more-or-less static configurations of homeland and traveling between dozens of other destinations in between has given me a certain sensitivity to the state of arrival (and its discontents).

It isn't all bad. By no means. I can still remember the first time I crossed the proverbial Pond in the ‘wrong’ direction and still felt like I was coming home. Maybe it was the familiar faces, the familiar colors, tastes, and smells (familiarity being the key word here). A smiling partner waiting at the airport with flowers certainly helped. And yet, conditioned as we are to think in national identities, to conceptualize and categorize the world along national languages, borders, histories, it was a disorienting experience of familiarity to realize I’d left my home and flown across the world to arrive… back… home. To open my mouth and speak a language I’d first learned in my twenties, and feel… at home.

It wasn’t like I’d lost my accent. It wasn’t like I’d suddenly stopped fiending for masa, sunshine, or fresh avocados. It wasn't like the German Polizei updated their policy of stopping and frisking me in public from one day to the next. The smell of many-colored leaves still hasn’t replaced the smell of sea for me. If anything, my realization of these ‘foreign’ elements becomes more acute each time. If anything, it was the growing feeling of defamiliarization on the other side ['back' home] that gave me a subtle inkling of arrival that spring in Germany.

Maybe this is a unique experience on my part. But I doubt it. Growing up multiculturally, multi-ethnically, there was always a fundamental question of origin at stake in any first encounter. It isn’t always obvious. It isn’t easy to know who I am at first sight—to arrange me into a neat little box on a census sheet, and this lack of familiarity unsettles folks. It might irritate me that officers assume I am the immigrant at my German wife's meetings with USCIS. But I know the kind of affronts these questions engender can also come from genuine, legitimate curiosity, and that "unintentional" exclusion, objectification, exoticization, racism [... the list goes on] are all just unintended side-effects of the Enlightenment and European tradition's unceasing desire to place and label everything neatly in a sanitary (and impermeable) little box. I also know this isn't just a color question: The subcategories of inclusion and exclusion on the European front never cease to amaze me (I didn't learn in public school art class that there were so many shades of white).

Where there's a will there is supposed to be a way. Who knew arriving could be so hard?

Perhaps it’s because there’s always been some kind of footnote question of affinity in most first impressions that I’ve been particularly well-conditioned to move beyond first offense. Perhaps it’s the relative state of affluence—at least the building blocks of a good education and family—that helps me steer my course. I’ve also had the luck of always living long enough in any given place to start feeling a genuine sense of connection, to foster and develop a social network, a sphere, a tiny world. But maybe I’m also over-friendly. Overly forgiving. I still talk to strangers. Even in Germany.

But there's also more to it than that. Increasingly, I've come to think about arrival no matter where I go. When you've lived long enough between different countries, languages, climates, cultures, worlds, it isn’t just that you grow increasingly familiar with one. You start to question your assumptions about previous experiences, as well. You develop the ability to view multiple locations from both insider and outsider perspectives: defamiliarizing one homeland as you familiarize yourself with another. The more mobile you remain, the more sincerely you drop anchor in this nexus of departure and arrival, the more glaring the disruptions become: yo-yoing back and forth along a continuum of familiarity where nothing remains entirely unchanged.

I recently read another statistic about how the average American moves 11.7 times over the course of a lifetime. I've already moved 15 times. It hasn't always been easy and certainly hasn't always been desired. It's only been in the last few years that I've begun to think of all this circular motion as routine. But for every time I've set down roots only to dig them up again, it's never occurred to me to think: next time I won't give a shit. Next time will only be on my terms. The world is no one's oyster. The privilege to ignore our intrinsic desire for what sociologist Avtar Brah calls “homing” instinct is a form of affluenza: a blight upon the millennial generation. The callousness with which we deracinate the fine tendrils which still sprawl out from our globally mobile lifestyles flies in the face of the unsubtle millions who travel by necessity and not boredom, fascination, addiction, vanity. Finding a new home, settling in (no matter how temporary the stay), arriving, isn't something to do alone. Money can isolate your experience of transit, sure. But you can only buy so many copycat experiences, so many like-minded friends. You can't settle in if your arrival and departure transpire in loading zones.

It occurs to me that anyone who's ever been uprooted by obligation or necessity should understand the tremendous difficulties of the next first experience of arrival someplace new. Understand that no matter how hard you try, a lot of things still remain beyond your control. Understand that you're going to have a lot of really bad days. Learn to value those limited experiences of kindness, generosity, that Willkommenskultur [welcoming culture] the Germans were so proud to extend to the first groups of refugees arriving back in 2015. Because when you're desperate, when you're truly down and out, it's the littlest things, the most insignificant acts, that make all the difference.

When I bury my bare feet back in the windblown sands of California, it’s not always a completely different feeling than I experience when I put on my coat and feel the crunch of frosty leaves beneath my boot heels in Berlin. Sure the experience itself is different. But there's something in the feeling that's the same. The sound of familiar voices around me. The smells of city, country, food. Memories of other beaches, other leaves, different times and different tragedies or joys that come together, weaving the disparate associative fabrics of my life together in this transatlantic tapestry. It is precisely the different network of associations that engenders the same feeling of home across two different lives—the participation in two very different worlds. It is precisely the development of that fine web of microtransformations which makes arrival so important to our concept of home(land)s. These variations of experience allow for our security, community, despite or perhaps because of their incongruities.

For those of us who've had the good (or ill) fortune to spend many years in the same place, it may in fact be impossible to ever re-create THAT experience of home. We're all creatures of habit, after all, in our own ways. But an affinity to something new is not surrender. To be content with the absence of affinity is to revel in a disconnect from social responsibility. Even the most nomadic of analogue nomads still oscillates between specificities (and generally for good reason, too). Not everyone has been (un)lucky enough to have a home(land), but everyone still yearns to feel at home. To let one’s guard down. To settle in. Adjust. Arrive. The differences in how we come to define experiences of arrival doesn't have to be defined by where we're coming from. But it has everything to do with our next departure into something new.