A Bigger Doorstep: The Importance of Living Abroad

I participated in Model United Nations all through high school. I was one of the more active delegates in our program, never missing a conference if I could help it. Over those four years, I accumulated binders and binders of research on the topics I found myself debating most frequently. I could tell you the details of conflicts going on all over the world. But I never felt like I was connected to them. I was far enough away to be objective, and as tragic as all of it was, it wasn't happening on my doorstep.

The past few months, I've been realizing that my doorstep is a whole lot bigger than it used to be, and for a pretty simple reason: I spent a year studying in another country, and I made friends with people who had done the same.

When the earthquake hit Japan, one of my friends had just returned from a month spent traveling there. Another friend had previously lived there for six months through a study abroad program.

When terrorism hit Oslo, my Norwegian friend -- whom I met while she was studying abroad for a semester in Berkeley -- had just left Norway to spend another semester abroad, this time in Australia.

And when north London broke out in riots, I heard about it on Twitter and Facebook before it was on the news, because I studied there for a year and most of my friends live in the areas most heavily affected.

When I searched Twitter looking for news of any disturbances in Mile End, the London neighborhood where I used to live, I found this picture of the Budgens grocery store where I shopped when I was too lazy to make the walk down to the Sainsbury's in Whitechapel. I found that the houseboats that usually moor along one side of Regent's Canal switched over to the other side as a way of avoiding riot damage because, to access that side from the street, you need to get past the security guards sitting behind the gate into the campus of Queen Mary University of London. That campus is where I lived and studied. This is my doorstep.

A lot of adults (and a lot of college students, too) seem to think that the point of taking a semester or a year abroad is to goof off in a foreign country where the academic expectations are low and the drinking age is lower, where any misbehavior can be excused by saying, "I'm an American!" This isn't why I decided to live in London for a year. But even those who sign up for study abroad programs with the expectation that it will be one big party have the chance to stumble across the lessons I've learned from it. No matter your intention, if you spend enough time somewhere else, you'll find yourself connecting with people in a way that animates the places they live, the struggles they witness, and the hardships they suffer.

It's one thing to talk about globalization and large-scale human interdependence -- it's another thing entirely to feel it within the network of your friends, spread out across the globe. The earthquake in Japan becomes something that could have happened to Kat or Natasha; the bombing in Oslo is something Sidsel just missed; and the London riots are going on walking distance from where Cara and Kaite and Alastair and Abbi and so many other friends live. It hurts, sometimes -- but that's because I'm connected, and because I care. And I'll take that over the world-weary "more bad news as usual" any day.

Perspective

Recently, Time Magazine released color photos of London in the aftermath of the Blitz. It's amazing to see the kind of devastation that London and its people managed to withstand, but the picture that strikes me the hardest is of a small church standing undisturbed on a block where most of the other buildings have been bombed to rubble. Because I know that church. I visited it last year, when I was living in London. It's not very large, and not very famous, but it's where John Milton -- author of Paradise Lost -- is buried, and where his father was buried before him, and so I went to pay my respects. Three hundred and thirty-six years after his death, I'm sure a lot has changed, but the place still stands. On the outside, at least, it looks just like it did fifty years ago, enough so that I could recognize it in an old photo having only been there once. Some form of church has stood at the site of the present St. Giles' Cripplegate since 1090.

To a girl who grew up in a city that was only incorporated a year before she was born, the sense of depth to human history embodied in this single space is awe-inspiring. When Michel de Certeau says that haunted places are the only ones people can live in, I think this is what he means. I'm sure not everyone would agree with him -- I know plenty of people who live just fine without the past ghosting about their everyday routines -- but I do believe there's something about these "haunted places" that makes them paradoxically more alive, and more worthy of being enriched with a portion of my life, than any corner of Outer Suburbia ever could be.

The Gravity of Haunted Places

When I was studying in London, doing my reading for a course about the representation of London in the eighteenth century, I came across a quote that so perfectly summed up the reason I felt (and continue to feel) drawn to that great city:

There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can "invoke" or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in…

--Michel de Certeau

It became apparent to me in the moment of reading this that it was exactly my sense of London as a place "haunted" by its social, political, and literary history that made me want to be a part of it. Before I had ever even visited, I had expectations about London gleaned from the pages of the books I'd read and loved -- everything from William Blake to Neil Gaiman -- and rather than being disappointed upon arrival that the London I actually saw was none of the Londons I'd read about, I felt even more at home there. It wasn't any of them, so it could be all of them, from Blake's grave at Bunhill Fields to all the names of tube stations cleverly reworked in Gaiman's Neverwhere. I didn't even have to go out of my way to find these associations; I was so steeped in the books that it just happened, I saw them everywhere (perhaps even where they weren't), and they made me feel like I belonged.

At the end of my year there, a friend and I ended up doing one of our projects about how our experience of "texts" -- defined loosely to include books, movies, television shows, songs, works of art, you name it -- had shaped our experience of London. It was a fascinating experience, deconstructing our own expectations and trying to trace them back to the source (my friend, for example, is pretty sure that his love of London began with movies like The Great Mouse Detective and Peter Pan; I, in a slightly more chagrined way, can probably attribute mine to my first encounter with Harry Potter).

It's almost a year since we finished that project -- almost a year since I left London -- and now that I'm leaving Berkeley, I'm beginning to realize that even though I never read anything significant involving Berkeley, the city was haunted for me in a different way. My father came to college here, and while I spent the better part of eighteen years being sure I didn't want to come to college here (long story short: I was stupid), I grew up with his stories about the place, and I always loved the way that they made me feel like I knew it. In the three years I've lived here, I've created a Berkeley of my own, separate from my father's, but still connected. Whenever I study in the North Reading Room of Doe Library, shifting in the the wooden chairs, I think of how he used to sit and study here. The other week, I celebrated the end of classes by getting lunch at the pizza place which used to be my dad's college hangout and which has survived the intervening years in style.

In the past few months, I've been thinking more about this concept of "haunting" in the face of my impending relocation to New York. I had a sense, before I ever visited, that New York would be like the London of the US -- not because it's a big city, or a central one, but because such a wealth of text surrounds it, and was bound to weigh upon my experience of it.

I've only spent five days there, but I'm inclined to think I was right. London and the British Isles still figure more prominently in my reading, but around the same time I ran into Harry Potter and kicked off that particular fascination, I discovered some other young wizards who began to haunt my idea of New York. Diane Duane's Young Wizards series -- beginning with So You Want to Be a Wizard -- follows a couple of teenage wizards living in the New York suburbs, making occasional trips into the city and usually getting caught up in some kind of adventure when they do. I had never been to New York City before March, but at that point Nita and Kit's New York had been a part of my imagination for about ten years, and at times I found their world suddenly superimposed over the one I saw before me: Grand Central played host to intergalactic travel, magical creatures lived in abandoned subway tunnels, and the statues in Central Park could be awakened to aid the virtuous in their time of need.

It's not quite the New York I'm moving to. But it's a pretty fabulous one in its own right -- and if it makes me feel somehow like I belong in this one, I can't complain.