Repatriation

Life goes on. It’s easy and also difficult to live, because the change is complete, total. The feeling of mourning is heavy.

Azar Nafisi said in her book Reading Lolita in Tehran:

“You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place… like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again. ”

I think it’s the truth. We are all created by our relationships with others, by the culture and by society, and also by the realities of everyday life. We don’t live alone.

In the United States, I am different from what I am in Bhutan because I have to be different and because others understand me differently. I miss myself.

There is another problem with changing countries: the country left behind is always different from the one we return to. We left, but life continued to evolve while we were gone. We are different and the country is different too. It’s both: the expatriate and the country. There are two pains: loss of identity and loss of space.

I think I experienced both losses as a child. This is not my first experience with repatriation as an adult, but the home is the country of a child. It’s his whole world.

I lost my own family to abuse from my parents, and I returned home later. I lost my foster family and also the child who lived with them. When I returned to my parents, life had changed. I don’t know exactly what these changes were now. Maybe my toys were lost, maybe the cat was missing, or my blanket was new. These things are not small for a child who was less than five years old.

After I got home to my parents, I walked into the closet and looked for a belt to hang myself with. I understand my own pain now. The mourning was too heavy. I was a child and it was too difficult.