Being foreign for the first time

This year, I’m living in a place that’s not my home. On a sprawling campus in a country far from my own, I am patently foreign. My t-shirts and shorts are conspicuous (the locals all in puffer jackets) and my disorganised groceries amusing to the store clerk. My body is stockier and paler than most of the other young women in the swimming pool changing rooms, and I think it’s odd that people wear jeans more often than leggings to the gym. There is a lot I don’t understand. And for the first time, I’m seeing how confusing it is to exist within a culture distinct from your own.  

The differences are big and small. Of course, I still eat three meals a day, but the supermarket and school canteens stock none of my usual breakfast foods. There’s no cereal, no eggs on toast, only grey, gloopy noodle soup and youtiao, which are light sticks of fried dough. I’ve learnt that yogurt here is runny, drunk through a thin straw, and that a glass of lukewarm soy milk is commonplace at the breakfast table. At home, only children drink warm milk. I like youtiao, but I want an English breakfast, and I miss Lidl bakery. 

So, I had to learn to cook Chinese food. My regular student dinner is now a bowl of sloshy noodles, bathed in steaming hot soup and mounds of tofu, crunchy bok choy, and skinny enochi mushrooms. Amazingly, it works out cheaper than a bowl of pasta – my cheap UK staple. My flatmate was shocked when she found I’d cooked something edible for the first time, seven months in at the start of semester two. Previously, I’d felt overwhelmed and confused by the supermarket, bemused by the array of unfamiliar items. There’s no spinach, no potatoes, no courgettes, no carrots or onions. The fish and shrimp are all live, displayed in cramped tanks so that you can select which you’d like to have for dinner whilst they’re still swimming. There’s no jars of instant coffee, nor loaves of bread. For a long time, I didn’t know what to do. I had no idea how to cook with these new ingredients. I couldn’t even read the labels.  

In the school canteen, I’m still adjusting to the lack of queues. At lunchtimes, small crowds form around each counter, each person pushing ahead to yell their order at the tireless cooks, who acknowledge each new order with a curt nod, smashing numbers into the till and dropping beef slices into boiling hot pot at the same time. It isn’t rude to push; that’s just how it is. Getting on the bus or metro is the same, jostling scrums forming as the doors slide open and everyone tries to cram themselves in at once. Yet conversely, the wait for the bullet train is very orderly. Passengers wait in straight, neat lines at the spot on the platform where their carriage is due to stop. In the UK it’s the other way round – people queuing habitually to order food but spread out haphazardly along the train station platform.  

Distinctions like this are small on paper but feel much more significant in real life. Obviously, I knew that daily life here would be different, but it’s impossible to foresee where these differences might occur. How was I to know that peanut noodles are actually a side dish, so that I might have avoided confusing the waitress when I didn’t order anything to accompany them? How was I to know that the metro has airport-style security (complete with x-ray machines and bomb-disposal bins), and so I shouldn’t feel scared of the guards in their smart uniforms, batons dangling from their waists? The problem is that I can’t anticipate what I won’t know. And sometimes that’s exciting and I end up learning something new. But sometimes it’s intimidating and makes me afraid to do things I’m not yet used to doing.  

It's important to be kind to newcomers to your culture. I remember a friend of mine telling me about a flatmate she had in our first year of university who was an international student from China. He was an illusive creature. There were six of them in that flat, but they never saw him, save for when he emerged from his room each evening to fill a pot noodle with hot water. As she was telling me this, we both agreed it was strange. Why wouldn’t he cook himself a meal like the rest of them? Living off of only pot noodles couldn’t be very fulfilling. In my first few weeks here, I ate the same few meals religiously, sticking to the canteen where I knew how to order. I also often ate pot noodles alone in my room on days when I was feeling overwhelmed, either by the strain of speaking a foreign language or the thought of again not knowing what to ask for. I was the only person in the room who ever looked confused. 

Moving abroad is an adventure, but it’s also exhausting. Each day presents more unknowns, and though that’s exciting for someone like me who moved specifically to study a language and culture, it can be unnerving for people simply trying to exist in their chosen country. What if I had come here as a mother, and had to guide my children through a chaos I myself didn’t understand, juggling complicated visas and schooling and work all in my second language? Being a foreigner here has opened my eyes to something that had previously never crossed my mind – that my United Kingdom, homely and familiar as it appears to me, might appear very different from someone else’s perspective. 

I will come home with even more respect than I had before for our immigrant communities, as well as international students, those working abroad, and anyone who gets singled out for looking ‘foreign’ though they might be just as British as me. There are many factors to being foreign that can make life more difficult. I’ve felt conspicuous speaking my native language, making me shy to speak even in English. I’ve felt hurt when people have loudly assumed I can’t understand the national tongue, and when they’ve been impatient those times I couldn’t. I’m stared at because I look different. People tell me that they think I’m beautiful, that they think foreigners are beautiful, but it doesn’t feel like a complement. A promoter I know gets paid extra to bring foreigners to his club. A friend of mine sends me travel videos of Germany and says ‘I want to go to England!’ I have told her on a few occasions that they are not the same country.  

Becoming foreign for the first time has shown me the importance of being welcoming and understanding towards others. It’s shown me that life exists outside of my narrow world view, that entire cultures and peoples and beliefs prosper independently from what I know. But above all, it’s shown me the value of feeling at home, of having an inherent understanding of and connection to the world around you, without effort and without work. I will never take that sense of belonging for granted again.