Outsider

What lies under,
what lies beneath,
is the love wrapped in fear,
we do bequeath...

            When I was 22 years old, my father said something to me that I will never forget.  “Tina, you can’t change things as an outsider.”  At that moment we were having a heated debate about the newly elected president of Colombia.  I had just come back from my year there, revved, up, ready to take on the world.  I would be home for a month, barely recharging from a year in Colombia before I would soon pack my things again and be off to grad school in Cambridge where I would finally be with the policy makers and have the power to change the world.  (Oh, how little did I know of what was really in store for me there!)    

            “Tina, you can’t change things at an outsider.” 

            This threw me off a bit.  What do you mean dad?  If you can’t change things as an outsider, then how is anything supposed to get done?  Okay, that is totally imperialistic, but these countries need outsiders to come in and point out the problems, donate funds, regulate their elections, their peace commissions, run their NGOs.  What exactly are you talking about, dad? 

            It was difficult for me to accept what he was saying, it didn’t make sense.  Most of this was due to sheer selfishness seeing as I had spent most of my adult life (and I’m realizing more and more now, my whole life) as an outsider.  I had spent most of my 20s living outside of my comfort zone, four times in foreign countries and one time in a city that sometimes seemed more foreign than any of the other countries I had ever lived in; Miami.  Everywhere I went there was some “problem” that needed to be fixed, some suffering that needed to be addressed, and the implications of what he had said were far reaching, (meaning, that they wholly impacted me), and meant that there was nothing I could do about any of it. 

            Okay, so I’ll admit, a lot of this is perspective and my totally arrogant and privileged, first-world, bleeding-heart naïveté.  Something I became attuned to early on in my adult experience.  On the day of my 21^st birthday I took myself to a fisherman’s beach in old Cartagena, Colombia to catch some rays.  I was alone and before I knew it, I was approached by two young street children who had spotted a random Asian girl on the sand as swiftly as they would have a beached whale.  It was a boy and a girl and the girl, quite confident, began, somewhat in awe, “Are you from China?”  I laughed as this was not an uncommon ice breaker for me in Latin America.  Through it, I got to spend the afternoon with them on that beach and learn their stories.  I don’t remember the girl’s name.  But I remember that she was 12 years old and very talkative.  I highly doubted that this was the first stranger that she had ever verbally ambushed.  (We probably sensed each other and secretly bonded over that camaraderie.)  She kept telling me stories about herself and the boy she was with, William, who was ten and kept riding his bike in circles around me and would on occasion, look up at me and smile. 

            “Yes Tina, we are not from here.  William is from Antioquia.  It’s about ten hours from here.  He lives here alone.”

            “Really?” I said, “How did he get here?” 

            “He took a truck Tina.  He jumped on the back of a truck and got here.”

            “He has no parents?” 

            “No Tina.  Can you believe that yesterday, William spent the whole day working as a mime and made $14,000 pesos and the older boys stole it from him for drugs?”  I looked at William and he just nodded at me and continued circling me with his bike.  Cartagena is full of street kids like William, kids with painted faces, miming for change from the rich tourists.  From there, my little friend went on and on in her matter-of-fact way and slightly indignant tone about yes Tina, can you believe it, these older street boys, they are so bad, most of them drugged all the time.  They do such bad things. 

            “So where are you from?”  I asked her. 

            “I am from the Valle.  I live with my dad in the streets.”

            The Valle is probably about 15 hours from there by land or truck or however they reached Cartagena.  I did everything possible to hide my privileged shock and be cool.  Just be cool, Tina.  “Oh really?  How do you survive?”  Okay, not so cool, but I was curious. 

            Unperturbed, she answered.  “Oh, we get by.” 

            And of course I persisted, doing my best not to react.  “Well, why are you guys here?

             “Porque los paracos joden mucho.”  Roughly translated, this means:  because the paramilitaries probably committed some heinous atrocity in her village which was enough to drive her father to take his daughter by any means necessary to a city where living in the streets amongst rampant poverty and delinquency would be the safer option.  

            I was paralyzed but still trying and failing miserably to be cool.  “Wait,” I began, without thinking, “Don’t you ever get sad?” 

            Perplexed, she looked at me.  “No Tina, what is there to be sad about?” 

            Instantly, I realized that it was time for me to shut the fuck up.  “You’re right,” I said, "let’s go swimming."  And the rest of the afternoon went swimmingly as I swam in the ocean with my little friends and we helped a fisherman’s boat that pulled up, reel in their net.  Afterwards, when the beach began gleaming with the smaller fish that were left behind and still alive, I made it a game to see who could throw as many of them back into the ocean.  (Just like in the starfish story!)  When it was time for me to go and catch my plane, the little girl gave me a shell from the beach and said, “Here you go, this way you will remember us.”  I had brought nothing to the beach with me that day.  The only thing I had was the sarong I had wrapped around my bikini bottom to walk to the beach from my hostel.  I gave it to her and we said our good-byes.  It was a glorious birthday but of course, that night when I returned home to Bogotá, I called my mother and I cried.  I cried and cried and cried because yes, this world was completely unfair. 

            Funny because even though I know what the lesson is, I have never really learned it properly.  The lesson that my young little 12 year old friend I made on my 21^st birthday already knew at 12.  The: yes Tina, this is life, so just accept it.  The: don’t make us sad over what we cannot change.  The: unless you plan to stay here forever and help us Tina, you can’t change our lives as an outsider. 

And yet, I keep trying because some part of me wants to keep believing that it can get better, that it will get better.  It must get better.  I insist, even when I know I shouldn’t, and that inevitably, it will be me that is hurt in the end. 

And now, before you judge me as silly and unwise, I must say, that sometimes I feel like, I honestly, can’t help it.   Last summer I spent three months in Taiwan, studying Mandarin and one day I came home crying from a day of visiting my aunt and my little cousins.  When I got back to my apartment, I was so sad inside and it was seemingly over nothing.  My German roommate Nadine listened patiently as I told her what was wrong with me.  “It’s just that, Nadine, my aunties, they have no choices.”  My aunt is a housewife with the two most beautiful children.  She takes care of them all day long.  She loves her family so much and is so beautiful, open and happy.  I love her so much.  But after a day with them, I was still sad.  Her and my baby cousins’ lives were completely at the mercy of one man.  “She told me today, ‘Tina, my plan is my husband’s plan.’  And Nadine, this made me so sad.  I don’t know why.  But it made me so sad.  I mean, yes, she’s happy, but her sister [my other aunt] is so miserable and resents me for all that I was able to do.  I don’t know why Nadi, but this all makes me so sad and it’s none of my business and she is happy and I hate that I am this upset about this.”  Tears streamed down my face as the self-loathing began to creep in.  The:  Tina, really?  This is what you’re crying about?  No one else seems to see it this way so stop it you freak.  STOP. 

Nadine nodded, added her quick German two cents about how the whole “housewife” situation was a little crazy but nodded in comprehension.  Even after a short time of knowing me, she understood my hurt and said to me, “that’s just because Tina, you want to change things.”  And she’s right, and there’s so many things I cannot change.  No matter what. 

I used to think that relationships were enough, that love was incentive enough but my parents continue to teach me otherwise.  Even though they raised my sister and I here, they are confined to their traditions and are still bounded by what their community thinks, sometimes even at the cost of their loved ones.  My sister is happily pregnant with a man who she currently cohabitates with, but my parents cannot even stand up to their closest Taiwanese friends to let them know that their unmarried daughter is about to bear their first grandson.

“We don’t want to celebrate a mistake, Tina.”  It took me hours of literally screaming until I was hoarse for them to finally admit to me, “Tina, we’re ashamed.”

“How can you be?  With your own friends?  Your closest friends?  The people you have helped so much in these past few years and have given so much to???  The people with their own fucked up marriages and relationship problems??  You’re afraid of them judging you?  How dare they!  Dad, you are a Sociologist, you know better.  You know what feeding into those types of social stigmas mean for young women and single moms in your country.  Total and unnecessary social ostracism and exclusion.  How can you sacrifice your own daughter for them?!?!?” I lost my voice that evening from all the screaming, pleading and crying.  But even this too, was to of no avail. 

My father couldn’t take it, he screamed at me, he told me to respect their customs or leave.  I began hatching my escape plan.  The next day however, my father recanted and said, “Tina, we must do it my way.  My friends cannot celebrate an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, but how can they deny life?  They will find out when the baby is here and then if they don’t like it, they know where the door is.”  No matter how ridiculous I think this notion is, the spontaneous, “Oh, who’s that random Blasian baby walking around your house?”  “Oh, he’s my grandson.  Didn’t you know?”  I want to believe my dad.  I want to believe that he’s willing to stand up, even if it is just when he has most of his cards lined up to the point where he won’t be slaughtered.  I want to believe that he isn’t just falling into the human strain of tribalism that keeps most of us from standing up when strangers or people that we love are being sacrificed by it.  I want to believe him.  I must.  

So here I am, the perpetual outsider, going through life with an innate need to change.  What does this mean for me?  A lifetime of blogs full of tears?  Because the only obvious answer would be unimaginable.  And that would be to stop caring, and not just to any functional level, but to really conform, to the point where I forget everything I am, everything I know, everything I have learned and just change myself completely in order to accept, accept, accept.  Do as the Romans do, even if this means gender- or genocide.  I may be part of the problem but at least I will have a lot less conflicts and be at peace, no matter how much this leaves my soul unease. 

But luckily, there is a middle ground, there is an answer, there is hope.  And hope literally has a name and that name is:  Chelsea Wagner.  You have to be more like Chelsea Wagner.  Be like Chelsea Wagner.  Yes Tina, Chelsea Wagner.  Chelsea Wagner is a medical caseworker that I met while I was interning at a non-profit organization for refugee resettlement in Buffalo, NY.  Gorgeous white girl with endless tattoos and a nose ring, whose “About Me” on Facebook is: “I came here to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I’m all out of bubble gum” and another amazing introduction that begins with “I refuse to apologize for who I am…”  (sorry to stalk, Chelsea ;)  Chelsea speaks fluent Spanish because she had lived abroad in Panama for some time and one day I asked her, “Chelsea, how did you deal with living in such a conservative society where women don’t have as many rights as we do?”  I asked because in my experience working with a womens’ NGO in Colombia, a lot of time I was surrounded by staunch feminists who didn’t have any problem just confronting the system and their culture head on.  I wondered if Chelsea had had the same experience? 

           

Without flinching she gave my question some thought, as if it were kind of dumb actually, and then just began to nod.  “Hmmmm Tina.  Well, one thing I noticed all the time where I was in Panama was that the women were always pregnant.  They were always pregnant because they didn’t have full autonomy over their bodies because it was a social taboo to openly buy birth control.  So, I just went to the pharmacy and cleared out all the condoms they had at the store and told them that if they ever wanted any, they could come to me and I would give it to them secretly.” 

           

Chelsea Wagner!

Do you see why this woman is my hero?  One day I can only imagine to be as cool as Chelsea Wagner, the great U.S.-Panamanean condom dealer.  Chelsea had finessed the balance, between rebel and respectful visitor, who never criticized or lost hope with the people that she worked with, and the only way she could do this was because she had so much love, so much compassion, so much security and confidence in herself, that she knew innately how to achieve what she wanted without getting hurt, alienated or hurting anyone in the process.  In my lifetime, I can only dream of achieving even a fraction of this wisdom and contentment in my soul.  Incredible!  No tears, just sheer effectiveness. 

            So in the end, it really is about us and starts with us.  We first work on ourselves before we even begin worrying about helping others.  Actually, most people, such as myself, should not even be in the helping people department, seeing as there are so many things that I need to help myself with.  So therefore, self, I would like to be more compassionate and have a better, functional relationship with my ego.  Self, I strive to be like Chelsea Wagner where I act and do not judge.  But self, that does not mean that I can never ever speak up or be sarcastic, it just means that if I’m going to rail on everyone, I must begin with railing on myself first and make jokes with a good heart and know who will know what my intentions are.  And self, we will try to always have better intentions full of love and fun spirit and not just meanness and insecurity.  Also self, this is very important:  let’s try to accept people and ourselves for what we are and try to work with what we have, instead of what I wish we had all been given.  Got it self?

So dad says we can’t change things as an outsider? Well self, perhaps it is time to really step inside.