Multiculturalism: Internal Combustion or Coexistence?

Yesterday evening, I gave a presentation at the “University of San Francisco Center for Global Education (www.usfca.edu/acadserv/academic/services/abroad/index.html) about my books, Travel Happy, Budget Low (www.kaleidomundi.com/travel-happy-budget-low) and Language is Music: (www.kaleidomundi.com/language-is-music).

After spending months writing the books, working with the graphic designer to get them printed and strategizing on marketing, it was invigorating to make my first presentation about the books and discuss the issues of global citizenship, foreign language learning and the importance of budget travel. The students were engaged in the conversation and curious about how to manage learning several languages simultaneously and seeing the world without going broke.

One of the students, a Vietnamese-Cantonese student from Georgia, who makes his way around the world as a professional yo-yo player, asked me how I live with my various cultures and languages at once. He wondered how I explain my globetrotter lifestyle to my Old World parents and how I manage to navigate through conflicting cultures. He wrestles with these cultural boundaries as his parents don’t comprehend why he wants to see the world. I knew this problem quite well as seven years ago, my parents were dumbstruck when I was working in post-war Bosnia and my sister in post-hurricane Honduras. They wondered why they bothered leaving the Soviet Union if my sister and gravitated towards the godforsaken ends of the earth.

I was so glad the yo-yo player asked me this question because it is precisely this cultural navigation that provoked me to write my autobiography, “One Eyed Princess”:www.kaleidomundi.com/one-eyed-princess-in-babel. (To be published in Fall 2009.)

When I was looking for an agent to take on my first book, I had trouble convincing agents and publishers that people still have internal conflicts when they come from immigrant backgrounds. One former publisher told me that, “people either assimilate or stay in their ethnic enclave. They don’t have internal culture clashes.” Ha ha! What planet is he orbiting? His own, white-bred Silicon Valley suburban culture. He didn’t come from a multilingual or multiracial family.

Almost 20% of the US population speaks a language other than English at home. I know for a fact that I am not the only one who deals with issues of conflicting cultures and language systems that make me think in different ways and see the world differently. Some of us feel like internal combustion while going from one culture or language into another on a daily basis. Parents say do one thing. Friends say do another.

How do I reconcile this?

I looked for other people like me. Of the other Russian-Jewish-Americans who came from the former USSR as young children, I didn’t find others who shared a deep passion for foreign languages and living abroad like I did. I wanted to speak in my seven languages at the same time, seamlessly flowing from one language to another in the same conversation. But I could not find other people who had my same language background. I could not live my linguistic rainbow at once. So, I realized that I would have to have a somewhat fragmented life and have people with whom I could practice my various languages and participate in cultural activities that I enjoyed.

My way to reconcile is to have all my linguistic and cultural worlds coexist by my weaving in and out of them on a daily basis. Sometimes I can combine them by going out to Vietnamese food with a Russian friend who also speaks Spanish and loves Latin American culture. So far, I have yet to find people who love opera, can make Bosnian burek, are passionate about Latin American and Spanish literature, love to philosophize in French, can sing in Portuguese, chat in Italian, listen to Spanish language radio stations, eat Russian sweet cheese pies and want to learn how to make sushi while speaking in Serbo-Croatian:)

I am sure that I have a future speaking about how to be a global citizen because already 20% of our population walks the zig zag lines of our myriad realities.

New York literary agents and publishers: you made a mistake by not taking me on as a client. Get out of your skyscraper buildings/prison blocks. Notice that one-fifth of us are not like you. We live and breathe global air every day!