What Moving to a Different Country Taught Me About Belonging

The lovely thing about Disney’s animated movies is that there’s something in them for everyone—if my toddler erupts in giggles each time she sees Olaf the snowman doing something silly in the movie "Frozen," I end up finding so much meaning hidden beneath the layers of snow. Everything turns into a metaphor, and a drastically different one depending on whom you speak to. When one of the sisters in "Frozen," Elsa, flees to the North Mountain after unleashing the powers that are beyond her control, she finally realizes that she can let her powers go, and that gives her an immense sense of freedom. She sings in the song “Let It Go” :

It's funny how some distance makes everything seem small
And the fears that once controlled me can't get to me at all.

It has been nearly five years since I moved to the United States, and I think of these lines each time I board a flight to or from India, during take-off. As I see the houses getting tinier and tinier as I go higher and higher up, it never fails to make me philosophical. How small are we in the larger scheme of things, it makes me wonder.

If going farther away from the ground makes me ponder the inconsequential nature of being, living miles away from the country I grew up in gives me immense clarity. Our comfort zones are like wearing foggy eyeglasses. Move away from them, and the fog clears up to reveal the truth—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

View From the Outside

Conversely, observing a foreign nation from the outside can be a form of fogged-up eyeglasses in itself. What we see about a country from the outside is usually the stuff that qualifies as news. These extremely rare events can be mistaken to be the entire truth of a country. To the outsider, America is a country of gun violence and of deep divisions that are masked by a veneer of sophistication. While it is definitely all these things, it is also so much more, and you see that only when you live in the country for a while. You also realize something clichéd but incredibly profound—that human beings all over the world are more similar than they are different, and that the battles we all have to fight are strangely similar to each other.

Moving to a different country, for my husband and me, was more of an adventure than anything else. We’re young, we thought, so why not travel the world and see what life is like beyond these familiar shores? We’d visit family often—traveling between countries (at least in pre-pandemic times) for those who had the wherewithal to do so was as simple as boarding a flight at night and waking up on the other end of the world. There has also never been a better time to move to a new country—technology has made it incredibly easy to keep in touch with family and friends back home. With a smartphone and an Internet connection, there is practically no difference between two friends who live in two different cities in the same country and those who live several thousand miles apart. It has been a fascinating adventure, to say the least, filled with surprises and meaning at every turn.

I still recall the first time I set foot in the United States of America. My husband, who had just started his master's degree, picked me up from the airport, and we took an Uber to our apartment. I remember being somewhat awed by the size of the highways, the speed of the cars, and, of course, the size of the skyscrapers downtown. Never mind that I didn’t know the word "downtown" then, or that some highways here were called "freeways," and a number of other pop culture references that would dawn on me only with time, despite me having watched every episode of "Friends" back in India, and more than a few of "Grey’s Anatomy."

In her bestselling novel Americanah, author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes beautifully this feeling of not grasping references completely in a new country:

Ifemelu laughed, too, although she did not fully understand the joke. And she had the sudden sensation of fogginess, of a milky web through which she tried to claw. Her autumn of half blindness had begun, the autumn of puzzlements, of experiences she had knowing there were slippery layers of meaning that eluded her.

Manufactured Differences Between People

Moving to a different country has also made me an astute observer of the ways in which humans divide themselves up into neat groups. If in India caste and class are the primary drivers of such divisions, in the United States it seems to be race. Moving to a different country has given me a perspective on these manufactured differences between people, the dehumanization that people who are lower in the hierarchy are routinely subjected to still, and the way people from different groups interact with each other.

Moving to a different country has also made me reflect on the idea of home. What does it mean to belong to a place? Do I belong only if the majority in a country says I belong? I feel like I belong here; is that not enough? Do I have to change aspects of my identity? I do not have answers to any of these questions, but for now, I’m just glad to be here, immersing myself in a different culture while having an opportunity to stay in touch with family back in the country where I grew up.