If you ever want to experience what it feels like to be a ghost, be an international student at college. You’d think it’d be very different; we are, after all, tangible material persons (hopefully), can’t pass through walls (unfortunately), and leave a physical impact on the world around us (maybe). But I write of ghosts this Halloween the same way I would write of waking up on the other side of the world, wondering which closet you stumbled into to end up here; the same way that I would write of walking past the doorway, still in shoes, and being temporarily confused, as if the world’s still resetting its parameters.
People speak of homesickness as a temporary, sharp pang; and maybe it is, for most people. But there’s another kind of homesickness; the startling, repeated realization that this isn’t home, that it recurs so much that you find yourself wondering at how you’re still wondering. While I was applying to college, I think I was bought over by all the various proclamations; that it’s a better experience, more enriching, so much more to learn, so much more interesting. And I know I would have still made the same choice to fly ten thousand miles (the number doesn’t get any less astonishing, at least in your first semester), but I really wish someone had sat me down and explained that college wasn’t going to be Home++, but more like a vastly different version of reality.
I know your instinctive reaction to “college isn’t going to be Home++” is going to be “pfft I already knew that who does he think he is”...mostly because that was me last year. So let me try to caveat this, and try not to sound like a trite cliched idiot: college isn’t Home++ not because it’s a different country, but because different countries are entirely different experiences, and there’s a very real difference between going on a holiday and waking up and thinking you still have 4 years of this. Let’s also start with this: I’m assuming a very specific sort of international student, one that has plans to return to wherever home is, and who has been born and raised in wherever home was. Life is rather different if you’re used to moving from country to country and place to place, and presumably if you’re aiming to become an American citizen eventually. So, with all of that in place, let’s talk about Home++, from the perspective of a 20 year old Singaporean freshman.
I’m not talking about how Boston, Massachusetts, is obviously different from the rest of the world; we all know that, we can all find photos of that, we can all get prepared for that. What I’m talking about is the way Boston, Massachusetts is not immediately different from the rest of the world; or perhaps, more importantly, how it’s different from what you never thought of as being different throughout the world. Let’s take toilets; I come from a country where every shopping mall has multiple toilets on every level, one in every subway station, toilets are basically right where you need them when you need to go. The most disoriented I’ve been in the States is not when I was lost in Brooklyn, but when I was trying to find the singular toilet in an outlet mall; and trust me, when you’ve never needed to search for a toilet, you start re-evaluating everything you thought you knew about human nature when mall developers force you to find a toilet.
Your bladder gets used to holding it in, to planning ahead and looking out for large Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts and other mystical, holy sites with free(ish) toilets; but the disorientation still stays. What I mean by Home++ is that it’s not just that there are obvious differences, but there are differences that no one mentions and which you can’t quite adequately translate. I can’t tell people there aren’t toilets because there are toilets, and simply saying that they’re harder to find doesn’t quite capture that same disorientation. These things are minor; these things shouldn’t be holding you back from applying, but they’re important things to consider as well, because they aren’t just present in banalities like toilet supply.
English is my first language (some of my teachers would argue that it’s also my only language) and yet there are conversations where you might as well not be speaking at all. Slang is obviously, blatantly different; but so are conversations. You will find more common ground with everyone who comes from home, not because of a united accent or appearance, but maybe simply because you speak the same way; your conversation patterns run in the same lines. Small talk from Singapore consists of asking people about their lives, what they’ve been up to, where they’re planning to go, all the parts that make up knowing a life; but small talk here is the weather, the food, the funny party story, the bits that don’t need you to know the dark interior spaces. Neither is better than the other; but all the same, it is different, and you will wonder at how it could all be so different.
And so, it comes to this: college overseas isn’t going to be Home++, with everything that you thought of as naturally occurring and what people have told you is different. On its own accord, college overseas can make you better; but it isn’t, as itself, better than anything else. It’s a different space, with different rules, a different life, and make of it what you will, but I know I feel interestingly displaced, forced to question everything I thought was inherent in how we structure the worlds we live in. Be proud of being international; I wear my accent as a skin, I still keep one hand on how I saw the world back home even as I reach with the other to learn new ways of seeing. Yet, know that being foreign means you are, precisely, foreign, and you will be diving into the US, eyes wide open, seeing things underwater for the first (and hopefully, not the last) time.