Culture in the Blender

I’m back in Hotelland. I’m at a conference and staying at the conference hotel, the San Fransisco Marriott. (In line with being a typical TCK, I am becoming highly educated by getting a PhD in materials science and engineering.) Last night, I sat in the bar on the top floor looking out at the San Fransisco skyline almost like I’ve looked out from my room in 重庆 (Chóngqìng), or from the 重庆 (Chóngqìng) Marriott top-floor steak restaurant, for that matter. I could have been there, looking out over the river. What was visible of the Bay from the bar could have been a river, and the Oakland bridge that I was looking at could have been one of the bridges over the 长江 (Cháng Jiāng). I feel like I know San Fransisco already. I just need to be in it a while to make the feeling true, and I will have settled in in a new city of mine.

In Hotelland, I am everywhere and nowhere, exactly where I’m from. It’s tremendously comforting to belong somewhere. I belong at the Marriott more than all these people around me, who are just visiting from Localland. Who don’t see that the head chef isn’t doing a good job. Who miss local things. I can see why lots of TCKs end up in hospitality management. This is probably what Saskia Sassen is talking about in her essay “Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims”. I feel at home in the San Fransisco Marriott because I’ve already felt at home in Marriotts elsewhere. Hotelland comes with me, and to some extent I do want Hotelland to push Localland aside. Although I hate touristy areas of any town because they’re inauthentic, authenticity doens’t bother me much when it comes to Hotelland. It’s what I’ve got, in terms of not constantly having to work to understand everyone in Localland worldwide, whereas no one even considers that they need to understand me too. And because of that, I wish Hotelland were bigger. The locals have so much space, they can afford to give some of it to us, the global nomads. The entire world is theirs! They have roots everywhere. The only roots I have are in the air – is it too much to ask for some space for them, too? They tend to get squished in the scramble for space in Localland.

Anyway, returning to the original topic, from Hotelland I know how to make anywhere a new home. While sipping my Cosmopolitan (no pun intended) , I started thinking about a word I saw on TCKID: xenofilia. The word stuck with me, because it was a bit of a surprise. Logically, it’s the obvious opposite to xenophobia, but somehow it never occurred to me that there was a direct logical opposite – I always thought of the opposite of xenophobia as comopolitanisms. The poster who used it implied briefly that TCKs were xenophiles. In a sense, maybe that’s true. As much as I complain about being poorly understood myself despite having to understand all the locals, I do enjoy getting to know new cultures, things, thoughts and foods. However, I don’t think of them as xeno – as alien or Other – simply things that exist that I don’t know yet.

There are two cultural phenomena I can think of that makes me relate in an alienated way. One is widespread sexism, like in the Middle East. Being a woman whose parents are feminists from some of the most egalitarian countries in the world and having spend ten years in the most egalitarian country on earth as a child, I feel like someone’s trying to cut off my arms sometimes when men from very sexist countries start opening their big mouths. Sexist men from less sexist countries tend to get a hammer in the head from someone in their own culture – often another man – that makes it a cultural deviation, not a rule I’d have to abide by when I interact with them. Locals throwing hammers at sexists gives me permission, too.

The second is hyperlocalism. People who are from a small town somewhere in the world and have never left scare me, because my repatriation went very poorly at the hands of such people. People with strong regional accents make me a bit uncomfortable, as if one moment they will be smiling at me and then biting me in the neck the next, after screaming OUTSIDER!!!. Small towns can be cute, but to me they’re a bit scary. I don’t want to stay long, and I don’t want to step out of the “I’m just passing by” role. There is no Hotelland in those places, they are too small. Our kind does not go there enough. I was ostracized by people who look just like me and where I didn’t speak the language with even a hint of an accent. If real xenophobia can come out even when there is no tangible difference to seize on, what will happen when there is? When my parents briefly moved to 合肥 (Héféi), I could feel the localism coming at me immediately. I don’t even know exactly what I picked up on. Something about how people looked at me that I recognized from Sweden, even though they were looking a lot more because I looked foreign. Something about how they talk to each other. I’m not sure. But it was scary. I felt like I was back in the small Swedish town where I lived during my repatriation and I almost had a panic attack.

That’s why Hotelland is such a pleasure to be in. If I don’t open my mouth, I could be from anywhere. I am from anywhere. I could have arrived from anywhere in the world. I could fly to anywhere when I leave. I both belong and am free.

References

Sassen, S. (2000). Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims. In F. J. Lechner and J. Boli (Eds.), The Globalization Reader (pp. 70-76). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.