Street smarts

This is the first in a series of stories that take stock of my return to America nearly eight years after I left for Southeast Asia. I intend it as nothing more than documentation of what it's like to come back to a country in turmoil, a country that has gone through a tremendous transition in the time I've been away. "Reverse culture shock" feels like a cliche, but it's real, people say, and compounded all the more perhaps by the global shifts currently underway.

In America, cars stop for pedestrians. One week back from Indonesia and this is a thing I keep forgetting. So I stand at crosswalks set off by signals and watch, dumbfounded, as cars slow for me.

Most of the time I walk around wide-eyed and confused. When you don't need to watch for holes in the street or dodge obstacles like concrete planters or open drainage ditches you can look up at buildings, make eye contact with passersby -- think. In New Haven, where I'm attending a short course at Yale, street etiquette is coming back to me. Today's lesson took the form of an elderly black woman walking at a 45-degree angle. “Morning baby," she hollered from the opposite side of the road. "Have a blessed day."

“Good morning.” I smiled. 

There is a more complex story on Elm Street, a thoroughfare that passes through Yale's campus with its Hogwart's style buildings and is bookmarked by homes where yards are overgrown, sidewalks are broken and bars cover convenience store widows.

On the same street a man in want of front teeth stopped me later with a plea: “Miss, Miss,” he said, mumbling the rest of his sentence beyond comprehension. Then he stretched out a few fingers, rough as tree bark, and began apologizing. I handed him a dollar and felt embarrassed. 

I don’t know if these are feelings I can admit to having, let alone put into writing. Me, the middle-class white girl from Ohio, attending classes at Yale. Trying to reintegrate into my own country, to show compassion for those who are struggling, who are foreigners, after years trying to fit into one where I was an immigrant.

Judgement is sure to follow. But for now I’m seeing things differently than I might have had I not spent the past eight years in Asia, and I want to use that perspective to walk streets like these, to tap into those feelings of shame, of sorrow, and of knowing what it’s like to be an outsider.