The following is a journal entry from about 2 weeks ago.
I have been thinking a lot about this trip back to Westtown for a long time. Should I go? Will it be emotional for me? Will I be able to put all the anger and bitterness behind me? Will it stir up more stuff I will have to deal with?
In the fall of 1996 I was a 15 year old, and for 14 of those 15 years I had lived in a small tight knit community in Saudi Arabia. I remember a few weeks before coming to Westtown my mom sat me down. Being a psychologist and already having had 1 child struggle with the transitions I was about to make, she had some very real concerns. She wanted me to know that even though I had been raised all my life knowing that I was American, this fact always evident to me because of my passport, my accent, that I was about to find out that I really wasn’t. She told me I was going to be different from the other American kids. She kept using this term, she kept calling me a third culture kid. I kept telling her, in my infinite wisdom as a 15 year old that she was wrong. Oh how I wished I had listened.
I arrived at school early for preseason soccer. I had played soccer all my life and I was excited to get to school early and meet some of the other students. On the second or third day some sirens went off. I would later learn that they were the call sirens for the volunteer fire department or something like that. The problem for me was that they were the same cadence and tone as the air raid sirens in my home town. Those sirens meant 1 thing to me a disaster has happened, or there is a missile attack coming. They were tested every Saturday at lunch time, other than that, those sirens going off was not good. All my life those sirens had meant that. So here I am on the soccer field, everybody is still practicing, and inside I am in panic mode. That was the beginning of my struggle with my identity as a third culture kid.
While most teenagers are struggling with questions like who am I, and what will I do when I grow up? I was struggling with all those normal questions. I was also struggling with questions like where is home? Is it in the United States or Saudi Arabia or neither? Who is my family, is it my biological extended family that I barely know, or is it my family of fake aunts and uncles back in Saudi?
I would like to say that Westtown made it easier, gave me a safe place to wrestle with those questions, gave me freedom to be myself. That is so far from the truth that it is astounding.
I will never forget the week, sometime during my first trimester at Westtown, when an entire class of peace and justice students kept stopping me in the hall, on dorm, everywhere. They had been told by their teacher to interview me about the deplorable conditions that women in Saudi Arabia faced, still face today. The questions were all sandwiched in “is it true that” and “that is horrible.”
This is my country. I grew up watching the sunrise over the Arabian Gulf, you would call it the Persian gulf. I grew up always eating in the family section, because that is the only part of restaurants that females can eat in and yes haagen das does not have a family section, so they don’t serve women. Yes it is true that women cannot drive, yet. And yes I would give anything to eat a shawarma, or some hummus, not the nasty Americanized kind, or shop in the gold souks, or visit the camel markets again.
And here where hordes of people telling me that all I’d ever known was horrible.
It was during that week that I learned that absolutely I could not ever be truthful about who I was, and what I believed and thought. I signed petitions because everyone else was, I never talked about my deep evangelical Christian faith, born out of the underground churches I was raised in.
I would occasionally snap. Like the time that Bush Sr was about to invade Iraq. A television was set up in the South room and while I was in the kitchen washing dishes, some kid was running around joyously screaming “We are going to war, we are going to war.” I remember having a melt down. The largest installation of US troops at that time in the Middle East was 45 minutes from my house. My dad was the maker of all the maps of the Saudi coastline. Our town is in the middle of the largest oil refinery operation in the world. There is a reason I grew up with air raid sirens and gas masks.
My mom says it was at Westtown that I learned what racism is. She tells a story about a Sunday trip to church. Too many people had signed up for the van space available and the other teachers on duty didn’t want to have to go and drive, it was a mess. I told my mom about it later on the phone and the story puzzled her. I had left out 1 important detail. A few weeks later she received a perplexing letter in the mail apologizing for the event. The next time she talked to me on the phone she asked “Cate, what kind of church was it?” I told her “it was a fun one with a very loud and rowdy congregation.” I told her that I didn’t know what denomination it was, that whole denomination thing still confuses me. She said “Yes Cate, but what did the people look like?” I said “Mom what are you trying to ask?” She said “Cate, where they white, black, Asian, Arab?” I had to think about it for a second and then I told her “they were mostly black.” It had never occurred to me that it even mattered.
My friend Arnab is an Indian, like from the country of India. He is a comedian in London now and I was watching one of his shows on youtube the other day. He was telling a joke based in reality. He was talking about the school plays we used to do growing up, he said, “we looked more like a UNICEF appeal than a family.”
But it was at Westtown that I was accused by a white teacher of being racist simply because I was not friends with a black student.
For 3 years I lived a lie in this place because when we talked about tolerance, we only meant it if you were just like everyone else, thought like everyone else. I was not used to that, I grew up as part of the network of largest expatriate communities in the world. By that I mean that the community I grew up in had people from all over the world, being different was the only thing that was normal. The only time I ever came even remotely close to being honest with this community was in the spring of my senior year, when I wrote my final paper for Eric Mayer’s religion class. When I left this place on the day of graduation I swore I would never come back.
It was only after leaving Westtown that I found communities that gave me the freedom to wrestle with it all. I had friends in college who didn’t understand me but loved me enough to let me be me. My friend Ian (not my brother) was also there, I have known him my whole life, he grew up across the street from me, so when I needed someone who did truly understand, I could stop by or meet him for lunch. Though I didn't hang out all the time, just knowing he was there and occassionally running into him on campus was extremly comforting to me. We also had several mutual friends, which made where we grew up not weird to them.
On December 30, 2002 my parents moved back to the United States and so in the summer of 2003 I moved in with them as I started graduate school. Though it was an extremely hard decision, it was the best decision I have ever made and the place where healing from the wounds and struggles from my time in high school could finally begin. My mom forced me to tell her the truth about my struggles. We did research together about third culture kids. My mom, my dad, and I cried a lot. My parents had had no idea there were things I wasn’t telling them, like I felt completely alone, like that I was afraid to let people see who I really was, because based on their initial responses, that wouldn’t be good. Like that I really struggled making friends because my class was incredibly rebellious and I grew up in a system of corporal punishment and was raised by a community. Normal American peer pressure was overwhelming to me, at home having an alcoholic drink would cause either deportation, jail time, or the loss of a limb. And not only that, I grew up in a community where if Susie’s mom saw me doing things I wasn’t suppose to, she was calling my mom. This whole idea that you wouldn’t get caught was completely foreign to me.
Now I live 14 hours from my parents, it’s a far cry from the 8 time zones it used to be. With modern communication like facebook, I am in constant contact with all the friends I grew up with even though they are scattered all over the globe. I haven’t had a $600 phone bill in a really long time, though at times it has been the norm in my family. I have a community of friends and coworkers who know me, who I really am. Who aren’t surprised when I say things like, “I don’t know what you are talking about, I never watched that show as a kid.” Or “I hate pork products, they are too salty and growing up they were illegal.” I have learned that telling the truth is important to me, even though sometimes it’s painful. Secrets are part of my past, they won’t be part of my future.
I am working on finding peace with my time at Westtown, it’s why I decided to come back for alumni day this year. I don’t say these things because I feel like a victim. I wasn’t a victim in 1990 when Saddam invaded Kuwait and my town was evacuated and my mom, brothers, and I couldn’t go home for a year. I wasn’t a victim in September of 1999 when my dear friend Kim was shot while attending her church in Dallas, Texas. I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. All that I really want is for what happened to me here to not happen to others. And I’m praying that the next time a third culture kid steps onto this campus, the will have freedom. Freedom to struggle, freedom to be real. And not only that, I pray that they will have the courage that I didn’t back then to do that.
