I was working on another piece for this issue when our editor phoned. Among other things, she related a certain comment that was made about me, by someone who has only read me, and it made me realize that instruction is sorely needed on the differences between tourists and expatriate foreigners. The still in-progress column will be finished presently and will appear in the December issue. Instead, I’m going to write about the condition of being an expatriate foreigner.
A proper tourist (perhaps especially an American tourist [1] ) is a person who has a good job “back home” (or is retired from one) and comes here for a week to ten days with lots of credit cards and travelers’ checks. (I’m not talking about the Sultanahmet backpacking crowd or the types who “drop in” for a month or two, teach a little English to get by, get as much sex as they can, and then leave to see what “fun” can be milked out of yet another under-developed country. They’re another story.) The proper tourist is usually incredibly excited about the prospect of actually visiting someplace as exotic as Istanbul and has sufficient disposable income to do just that. He/she may check in to one of the really gorgeous hotels – Çirağan Palace or Swissotel. He/she has vivid fantasies about seeing the Blue Mosque, the Bosphorous, belly dancers, and the covered bazaar. (Not necesssarily in that order.) He/she is also keen to sample Turkish food, especially “authentic” şiş kebab. “Turkish Delight” also figures high on the list of must-eats. In addition, a tourist is nearly always obsessed with the idea of buying a “real Turkish carpet” dirt-cheap. Now, one thing about tourists is that their observations and experiences are necessarily superficial. This is not to say that tourists are superficial themselves. Many are, but many are not. My point is only that the nature of the tourist experience is such that a tourist has no chance to get underneath the surface to anything that means something. For the most part, they deal only with what is presented to them, what’s on show, whether it’s the mezze tray at a restaurant or the canned English of a Bosphorus tour. Proper tourists come here, soak up the sights, and then go “back home” to regale their friends with tales of the adventures they had in exotic Istanbul. That’s another thing about tourists, you see. Tourists don’t stay. Tourists go away
An expatriate foreigner is quite, quite different. Expatriate foreigners stay. They become part of the place. They find themselves here for one or another reason and decide (or life decides for them) not to return. Take me, for example. It took some doing (I don’t work for the CIA and I don’t have a rich uncle) but I finally got myself pretty much established. I’ve been living in the same place for several years now. It’s furnished with a combination of old and new things. People say it’s quite lovely, in fact. All the appliances are new (and paid for). I’ve finally found a pretty good job where I feel like what I’m doing means something. (The pay is still something-to-be-pazarlıked-about, but hey, we have time.) I’ve learned to direct taxi drivers to take shortcuts to get where I need to go. I know the bus routes. I know where to shop and have actually built up a small network of shopkeepers who know me, know what I like, and treat me like a real hanım effendi – no small thing for a yabancı woman. I buy toilet paper, washing detergent, light bulbs, paper towels, aluminum foil and olive oil on sale and in quantity now. I have my various phone lists, just as I used to in my former “real” life back in California. I’ve developed routines – for example, I plant bulbs in the fall and thoroughly wash all my carpets in the spring, outside, and in late spring the garden walls get a fresh coat of toprak boyası. I’ve even been invited to, and attended, my neighborhood association meetings. Just last week, an older, Turkish male acquaintance got up to give me his seat when he saw me by chance on the tram. All this means something. But I want to emphasize the fact that it cost a lot to get where I am now. I don’t mean only money, although the money I began earning after I weaned myself away from teaching at language schools certainly helped. No, the cost I’m talking about was an emotional, psychological and spiritual cost. There are certain agonies one must go through (they cannot be gone around) in order to put down roots in a new place. I think that the depth of the agonies are somehow related to how removed the new place is from the old place. In my case, moving to Istanbul after having lived in northern California and then in France meant I had to suffer quite a lot of agony.
Like the Turks who came to Istanbul from villages to try and find their fortunes (an arguable folly that may well be the subject of a future column) we expatriate foreigners left family, friends, and most of all, our place to be in this world. What we encountered was a situation, really, many situations, where people didn’t understand us. Now, I don’t just mean people didn’t understand our language well – of course, they didn’t understand our language at all. (You non-Istanbul Turks must realize that having no Turkish is far more of a handicap than having merely differently accented Turkish.) I mean that people didn’t understand us.
Here are a couple of examples: One year it was time to renew my American passport. The passport renewal part was easy. I simply went down to the American Embassy, paid a fee, and got a new passport. The problem came a little later when I was leaving the country to go to Romania. The border police were absolutely sure that I had a forged passport. They had never heard of, nor, apparently, could not imagine, that a U.S. citizen might get their passport renewed in Istanbul. It took a couple of hours (yes, hours) to get that straightened out. The other example happened just two days ago. At the wonderful school where I work now, they’re very keen to take care of me and get me all the correct papers, including a new ikamet (residence permit). On one of the forms they gave me there’s a space where you’re supposed to write your “Home Address.” I wrote my Istanbul address. The next day, the woman who’s in charge of getting my papers together and applying for the thing called up the teachers’ room and asked for me. When I got on the phone she explained that I’d filled out the form wrong. She said I had to write my home address. “That was my home address,” I told her. She said, “No, no. I need your home address – in America.” I told her I didn’t have one. “OK, then. Give me your mother’s address.” When I explained that I didn’t have a mother either, she became really exasperated and asked to speak to my head of English. So, the head of English got on the phone and explained that no, I did not have a mother – “Her mother is dead,” I heard her say. “Wait a minute,” she said, turning to me. “What about your father?” “He’s dead too,” I told her. She spoke into the phone again: “No, she doesn’t have a father, either. Her father is dead, too.” Finally, she repeated once more that no, I really didn’t have any other address except my address here in Istanbul. The lady on the other end of the phone took it all in, but before she hung up my head told me she said she was afraid that the police would have a “real problem with this.” Sounds rather comic, now that I’ve written it all out, but it wasn’t comic at all. In fact, I found myself in the restroom a bit later, crying because, well, why was I crying? I have to say I’m not really sure. All I know is that the only home I have in this world is here. Why can’t people get that? Why must it continue to be so strange for them? For that matter, why must I always be so strange for them? (I suppose it’s no accident that the Turkish word for foreigner also means ‘stranger,’ ‘alien.’)
I guess what I want to say is just this: My home is here, in Istanbul, Turkey. That means I’m part of this place and this place is part of me. That means I care about stuff that happens here. I worry about it. It matters to me. Moreover, I have the right to worry, to care, and not only that: I have the right to comment about what I care about. It also means that nobody can call me a tourist. I’m not a tourist. Not any more. I live here. I’m home.
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Readers can write Karen-Claire Voss at karenclaire3@yahoo.com
[1] I’m American so I guess I can say this about Americans if I want to.