May 24, 2004
Foreigners
Last night, I received a letter from a friend of mine. She and I live remarkably similar lives, only reversed : she is an American, living in the States, married to a Dutch fellow. They speak Dutch in their home, so that their two children will be able to communicate with the Dutch part of the family. We speak English in ours, so that our children can chat with my family.
We meet ( or- more often than not- just miss each other) during the summer months, when they come to the Netherlands to spend the holidays with the Dutch Grandparents, or when I'm in the States with our children for the holidays, staying with the American Grandparents.
They have always said that some day they would like to move to the Netherlands and now that day has come. They have sold their house in Georgia, packed up all of their belongings and in a few weeks will be living but 15 minutes away from me.
She wrote to me that as she sat on her Mother's stoop, watching her children playing together in the early morning, she realised that ... my children are going to be foreigners, are they not? ....it seems rather odd somehow. .
I knew exactly what she meant.
Posted by sue at May 24, 2004 08:26 AMsue- i've been looking at this since you posted it, and as i have a novel to say on the subject i've been quiet.
but yeah, bicultural kids will be 50% home and 50% foreign no matter which of "their" countries they are in.
on a good day, i feel like it's one of the best things i've given my son without even trying: this double view, this introduction to feeling and thinking and speaking two different "ways".
on a bad day... well, i'm working on it.
What Anne said. I tell my kids they're not half anything, they're double; not sure if they buy that or not.
Posted by: mig at May 27, 2004 09:22 PMOops- sorry to take so long to answer- obviously , my old- and now defunct- email address is receiving the reports of comments.
I told her they would be foreign because it was the easy answer. But as I thought about it, my children don't feel like foreigners when they are in America. Rather than judging - at this point- children they meet by what country they are from, they seem to shuffle them about according to what languages they speak. But don't see anything really different between kids from Alabama and kids from the boonies of the Netherlands-.
They are aware that they are Dutch, but that only seems to mean ( to them) that they have the ability to speak Dutch. So far.
Posted by: sue at June 1, 2004 07:14 PMmig, i love your comment - i agree it's a gain, not a loss. i think we're quite lucky here in london as being a foreigner hasn't got the nasty after taste it would have back in austria. everything is so international here, especially where i live, that in some environments (eg at work) it's the british who are the minority. my daughter has never felt as a foreigner (not that i know of anyway), but she sure did struggle with the fact that the german kids at school would laugh at her austrian accent... i don't think discrimination gets any more stupid than that!
I love the fact that i will be forever moving (so far covering austria, france, mexico, uk) and i tend to think that i adopt the things that i like and ignore the things i don't like. but multilingualism apart, the question is whether we feel we belong and whether we convey enough of both culture for our children to perceive it to be a bonus, rather than a curse...