About the Expat Directory
Savita Iyer-Ahrestani is a freelance journalist currently based in Arnhem. She writes a regular column on parenting for Business Week magazine online, where a version of this article originally appeared.
My children were born in New York but they left the US when they were very small. My daughter was barely 20 months old. She and her brother know they have American passports and they know they are supposed to come from the States. Every now and then, when he hears his classmates talking about returning to their countries, my son will tell me he wants to go back to New York. But I know it means little to him because for my children, America is just a vague notion, some place out there that’s supposedly home but really may not be.
My greatest fear for my children has always been that they, like me, would not know where they came from. I was born in India, held a Malaysian passport and was raised in Switzerland. I was a foreigner in all these places and in many other places that I have lived in. Even as I have taken a little bit of each place with me and the experience has imbued me with a chameleonic ability to understand the subtle nuances of different cultures, no single place ever felt like home. And anyway, those bits and pieces of cultural baggage that I was born with and then acquired along the way never really made sense as a whole — until I came to the US, and in particular to New York, a place so vibrant and so complete, that there was no cause to hanker for any other. Here was a place where I made sense. Here was a place I could truly be and feel a part of.
I chose therefore to become American because it made sense to me. Yet even though I have the blue passport, I still am made up of all those other bits that I acquired along the way, and now my children will also have in them nuggets of all the other places in which they have lived. These are parts of us we cannot ignore because they also define us.
The burden of coming from everywhere and nowhere is a tough one to bear. But there’s one man who has proven that it’s okay to be a global citizen. His name is Barack Obama and from him we can learn that identity is not exclusionary. That we can have all those bits and pieces of different places that we have lived in and that make us up, and still belong.
Obama is the son of a Kenyan immigrant and a White mother who grew up in Hawaii. He had an Indonesian stepfather, he has a half Indonesian stepsister and a Canadian born, Malaysian-Chinese brother-in-law. His middle name is Hussein. He has bits and pieces of all kinds of people and places in him.
This is someone I can really look toward and draw inspiration from for my family. No one has made me feel more proud of my family’s differences and my own than Barack Obama. More than his policies, perhaps even more than his intelligence, his intellect and his abilities to be a great president, it’s him – who he is, where he’s from and what he’s made up of – that gives me the greatest satisfaction and happiness for my globally American family and all other families like ours.
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