Everyday Treasures

Disclaimer:  I might not mean all of this tomorrow...but it's how I feel today.

One aspect of my job here involves mentoring new arrivals to Turkey during their season of cultural adaptation.  This sometimes involves formal teachings on “getting yourself from culture shock to cultural fluency” as well as a whole lot of informal conversations full of “Why do they do it that way?”s and  “How am I ever going to survive here?”s

This week, as I looked over something I’d written for a past teaching, I had to laugh at myself.  I sound like some amazingly well-adjusted, bi-cultural hero.  But today, that feels like the farthest thing from the truth.  

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Here’s the excerpt:

I think of myself as a half-Turk, half-Canadian.  This is my home and my life is here.  In a lot of ways, I am much more a part of this society than the one at home.  I have Grocery store discount cards, bus pass, bank account, a “greens guy” at the pazar, a “usual” gözleme that the waiter automatically brings me at the waterfall, and a tab at the photo place.  I have three Turkish women who claim me as their adopted daughter and in whose houses I am the one who serves the tea because I am “the kız.”  I do my devotions in Turkish.  I can make some amazing dolma - stuffed peppers.  Some of my favourite music and TV shows are Turkish.  I have an ever-increasing collection of glittery shoes and billowy village pants and sweater vests that I never would have worn back home but have come to totally love now.  When I am in Canada, I have a habit of headscarf stalking, chasing down people who may or may not be Turks in shopping malls.  I have pictures of Atatürk up in my room, and it’s not uncommon for me to tear up when I sing the Turkish national anthem.  

I also still prefer a latte to Turkish coffee (though not by much), would rather read a book alone on my day off instead of hanging out with a big crowd of everyone and their relative, keep a stockpile of Thai sweet chili sauce and curry packets in my stash cupboard, prefer watching hockey to futbol, and get super excited when I get off the plane in Vancouver and see the Canadian flag.

But getting to this place of being comfortable with “the Turkish me” has been a long process - one I am still in, really.  It started off with a sense of novelty and fascination with this culture, followed shortly by a season of “how will I ever live in this culture” to “being as Turkish as possible and getting frustrated that people still saw me as a foreigner” to “accepting the fact that I am part Turk, part Canadian, and I will always live in this tension” and getting comfy in this spot that is uniquely mine.

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But you want a little honesty?  In the end, much as I love these people and this culture, I still ultimately want it on my own terms.  I love going to a neighbour’s and eating stuffed peppers on the floor, taking pictures of the colourful patterns I spot in the pazar, and writing cute stories about unique cultural phenomena.  But I like it best when I still have a bedroom door to close on it at night.  I like it best from the outside.  

When Turkey’s charming “togetherness” and its whimsical “spontaneity” encroach on my alone time, my writing time, or my productive time, I get a little grouchy.  When being “on the inside” involves too much cigarette smoke, having to give up “my” bed for a surprise guest, or a “ten minute errand” that turns into hours of shopping, I just want to crawl into a hole and hide.  I thrive on “plans” and “predictability” and “to do lists”, and life here lately seems to enjoy throwing all that back in my face and laughing at me.

I’m having one of those weeks where I feel about 80% Canadian and 20% Turkish.  And that 80% wants the 20% to just go away.  I’ve been staying with my Istanbul family for two weeks while I attend a language course and work on material for my book.  I adore them and am loving the quality time I’m getting with them, especially in this unique season leading up to my little sister’s wedding next month.  But I think the combo of me having a lot of work I need to be accomplishing, and the fact that Ramazan and wedding-related things make for lots of extra social events has got me feeling quite at odds with the world in which I’m currently attempting to live.  

Often, in prep for these “cultural acquisition lessons” I’ll scour my old journals for examples of my own adjustment process.  The earliest pages - the ones from when I lived with my host family - are filled with tearful frustration and the cries of a suffocating introvert.  Sometimes when I look at entries from that first year, I think, “Was it really that hard?” But then I have weeks like this one, where I am more or less fluent and have a “good grasp of the culture” and yet still struggle so much, and I wonder how I ever survived four months of “non-stop Turkishness” without having a breakdown...

A few days before I came back to Turkey, Mom and I went to Pajo’s at Garry Point to celebrate my birthday.  As we sat there enjoying the best fish n’ chips in the city (#3 in Canada, I might add), we were trying to guess the story on the big group having a potluck at the picnic tables nearest us.  The chopsticks were flying, with noodles and rice dominating the spread.  At first glance, I would’ve told you it was a Chinese extended-family picnic, but there were a couple of Middle Eastern looking men and a few Koreans thrown into the mix.  Guys that married in, perhaps?

On a napkin-and-ketchup run, I tried to get the scoop from a young Asian woman sitting off to the side with her little boy.  

“You all look like you’re having a lot of fun.  Is this a family picnic?”

She looked like she was struggling to put a sentence together.  “Family...no.”

I looked over to where the group had gathered for announcements of some sort.  “Is it for school, for a class?”  

Her eyes brightened.  “School!  Yes!”

Later as Mom and I went to make a pit-stop at the washroom, we passed by close enough to the group to hear a Caucasian guy who appeared to be the leader asking trivia questions like, “Who is the mayor of Richmond?” and “Who was the first Prime Minister of Canada?” 

“Ah,” we thought.  “An ESL class, most likely.  Or maybe something for new immigrants looking towards becoming citizens.”

As we got ready to head over to the beach side to walk along the Dyke, the leader handed out sheets of paper to the thirty or so members of the group, and began to lead them in a rather halting, uncertain rendition of “O Canada.”  Some used their fingers to follow along with the words; others, like one particularly boisterous Asian man, had clearly practiced the anthem and belted it out with operatic gusto.

Now, if you know my Mom and I at all, you know we are suckers for “foreigners” and “patriotic sappiness”, so it will come as no surprise that we marched right on over and joined in.  Several people looked up from their lyric sheets and, stumbling over the words, returned our encouraging smiles before finding their places again.  The addition of these two “enthused locals” to the group seemed to bolster their courage - hesitant voices getting louder as we moved past “with glowing hearts” towards “the true north, strong and free.”    And by the time we got to, “God keep our land,” I’d gotten all choked up and had to mouth a few lines before we all proclaimed in unison, “We stand on guard for thee!”  

I don’t know what it is about national anthems, but they get me every time.  Nary a Çocuk Bayramı (Children’s and National Sovereignty Day) goes by that I don’t have tears in my eyes as I sing along to Turkey’s (painstakingly memorized) İstiklal Marşı at the opening of the neighbourhood school’s celebration.  Once when I was teaching English in China, we were doing a lesson on American culture and when my Yankee teaching partner couldn’t remember all the words to the Star Spangled Banner (for shame...) I had to jump in and finish it for her.  And wouldn’t you know, somewhere around “the rocket’s red glare” I got all emotional....and it’s not even my anthem!

“O Canada”, of course, is in a class all its own when it comes to the waterworks - all the more so when I’ve been away for awhile.  I remember so clearly the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics - standing alone in my living room in Turkey, thousands of miles from my hometown host city, hand on my heart, tears of pride flowing freely as I sang along with my countrymen via Eurosport.  So I guess it’s no wonder I got all misty-eyed as I stood there, four days from my departure to my “other-home”, watching all those immigrants so intentionally make the home I’ve left their own.

A half hour or so after we’d left the group, Mom and I were sitting on a log on the beach when an older couple walked past, the woman leaning heavily on a cane.

“See the way her headscarf is tied?”  I said, indicating the way it was tucked into the neck of her long coat .  “I’d bet anything she’s a Turk.”

Mom, always up for meeting some new friends, said, “Let’s go stalk them and find out!”

So, off we went, following far enough behind so as not to be creepy, but close enough to hear what language they were speaking.  And, sure enough, it was Turkish.

“Hello!” Mom called out as we caught up with them.

When they looked our way, I followed in Turkish with, “Excuse me, are you Turkish, I wonder?”  Their eyes lit up as they answered in the affirmative, and a swirl of conversation about how we’d “chased them down” ensued.  They kindly switched to English for Mom’s benefit  - his accent flawless, hers with admirable evidence of having worked extremely hard at her second language.

When I explained how it was that I came to know their language, the woman smiled knowingly and said, “I think we’ve heard of you!”  It turns out that a Turkish lady I met last summer at the grocery store is a good friend of theirs, and she’d told them all about “this local girl who is a photographer in Turkey and can speak Turkish.”  

He is an economics professor at a local university, and she gave birth to and raised their children in Vancouver.  Their house is just a five minute drive from where I grew up, and my Turkish family lives one bus stop away from their old family home in Istanbul.  

Small world indeed. 

I was sad to have to decline their invite to come over for çay (four days left and a mile-long to-do list) but when I told them about my “homeland” book project, they said they’d love to be interviewed when I’m back next summer.  They’ll be the perfect candidates, too.  “We’ve been in Canada thirty-five years,” she told me, “but I’m still completely a Turk in my heart.”

She looked so wistful when I told her I’ll be spending all of July in Istanbul for my language course, remembering with fondness, I imagine, humid evenings of tea and backgammon and wedding fireworks over the Bosphorus.  I, on the other hand, envy the fact that she’ll spend the summer walking the Dyke and the path around Garry Point, eating all the Pajo’s fish n’ chips she wants.  And both of us, no doubt, will hear the laughter of the seagulls and inhale the salty sea air of our second homes and long for the places we came from.

As I sat at the Vancouver airport last week, eating my traditional “last meal” of yam fries and chipotle mayo at A&W before heading home to Turkey, I thought back to the national-anthem singers and the Turkish couple.  The former were getting ready to mark what would be, for most of them, their first Canada Day.  The latter have celebrated more Canada Days than I have, having lived in my hometown longer than I’ve been alive.  And I, the only locally-born one in the bunch, would be in the air on July 1st, flying further and further away from the Salmon Festival and Timothy’s Frozen Yogurt, and closer and closer to Ramadan and the tinkling of spoons in tulip-shaped tea glasses.  

The new immigrant painting a maple leaf on her face, my new Turkish friend waving a flag at the parade in her headscarf, and I wearing my Old Navy Canada Day t-shirt as the familiar Mediterranean coastline came into view outside my economy class window - who’s to say which one of us carries “O Canada” most strongly in our heart?

“Where are you from?”

Having lived outside my “passport country” for nearly half my life, I don’t always know exactly how to answer that question.  I’m from Vancouver, and that will always be “home.”  But eight years in Turkey make me “from” here in a different sort of way.  I’ve got a house, a bank account, a bus pass, favourite foods, a language, and a circle of friends that all make here “home” as well.  I “grew up” in Canada, but I “became an adult” in Turkey.  The first is a part of me by nature, the second by intention, and sometimes it’s hard to say which is stronger.  Double doubles and Turkish coffee, smoked salmon and stuffed peppers, weenie roasts around a campfire and dinners eaten seated cross-legged around a pile of food on the floor - each of them makes my mouth water and my heart come alive in a different way.  Each of them is me.  Each of them speaks of “home.”

The longer I’ve lived in Turkey, the more I’ve come to see just how much weight that word “home” carries.  There’s a word in Turkish for “hometown” or “homeland” - “memleket” - that almost never fails to bring a gleam to the eye of the one who utters it.  Whether you were born there or grew up there or have never even set foot there, it’s where you are from.   It speaks of family, of roots, of belonging.  One’s memleket is something almost sacred - a place to be longed for, a place that takes on a sort of mythical quality the longer one has been away.

It was summer when I first moved to Istanbul eight years ago - the time when everyone who can gets outta Dodge and heads somewhere cooler.  I remember people constantly telling me they were heading to “memleket” for a few weeks, or that so-and-so had just returned from “memleket.”  I kept thinking, “Wow, this Memleket must be quite the vacation destination.  I wonder why I can’t find it on a map?”  And when I finally learned the actual meaning of the word, I understood why everyone was so excited to be heading there:  they were going home.

I am so intrigued by the role of the memleket in Turkish culture, and the way that it so defines people in a way that seems much stronger than in North American society.  I have friends who have spent their entire lives in big cities like İzmir or Ankara, and yet feel inexplicably tied to the hometown of their parents, even if they’ve only ever been there to visit Grandma.  My “Turkish sister” was born and raised in Istanbul, and yet when you ask where she’s from, she’ll tell you she’s from Gaziantep.  That’s where her mom is from.  That’s what’s in her blood.

While jobs and opportunities may have caused many Turks to relocate to somewhere clear across the country, they are often very “clannish”, preferring to stick with people who eat, think, talk and worship they way they do.  It turns out “home” is portable, to a degree, and can be set up somewhere else.  In the big city, it’s common to find entire apartment buildings inhabited exclusively by people from Kayseri, a group of women from Van building a tandır clay oven in an empty lot so they can bake their bread “just like at home”, and a “tea and backgammon” cafe frequented only by men from Erzurum.  In the same way I lug suitcases full of butterscotch chips and Oregon Chai and curry paste and Betty Crocker frosting halfway across the world, my neighbours return from their hometowns with gallons of tomato paste from Batman, sacks full of walnuts from Erzincan and tubs of salty cheese from Antakya because “it’s better where we come from.”  

My fascination with this whole “memleket” concept has inspired me to write a book on the topic.  I’ve recorded hours of fascinating interviews with friends and neighbours telling me what they love and miss about their hometowns, what it’s been like to adjust to living where they live now, what of their habits and thinking has changed since moving to our “westernized, modern city” and which place feels more like home.  My goal is to explore the ties that bind us to where we came from, and to learn more about what makes us belong to a place, and it to us.  

In the process, I’m gaining a deeper understanding of my friends’ hearts as they share memories of their childhoods, both sweet and incredibly painful.  I’m learning more about why people think the way they think as they explain the (often extremely conservative) societal rules and values of the towns they came from.  I love watching their eyes light up when they talk about “taking naps under the cherry tree in Grandma’s orchard” or “the smell of the soil in the town where I was born.”   And I’m seeing so much of myself in them as I ponder the way the sound of the seagulls in Istanbul and the scent of the pine trees in Antalya and the rainy weather of the Black Sea stir up feelings of “home”.

I imagine this project will take several years to finish, but I’m excited to share snippets of my interviews and findings along the way.  I hope you enjoy this "journey home" as much as I am!

Not all headscarves are created equal.

A headscarf isn’t just a headscarf.  It’s a statement.  It says a lot about the girl underneath, but also about her family, and possibly the religious sect she belongs to.

For example, if it’s loosely tied with the ends flowing down the back or hanging forward over her shoulders, she’s probably your average village lady - possibly covered more out of tradition than religious conviction.  (You might even - gasp! - catch a glimpse of a little hair showing around the edges.)

Hair pulled up into a bun underneath with a bone (band/wrap) covering the upper part of her forehead (no exposed tendrils here!) and a silky/shiny scarf tied tightly under the chin means she’s covered-with-a-purpose.  Depending on the style of tying, she might be part of a religious group or attend a religious school,  and certain styles often signify a lot of money and certain political affiliations.

The full black çarşaf (this literally means “sheet” and refers to the head to toe covering most know as a burqa) is the most conservative.  It used to be that you’d find these mostly out east, but they are increasingly common in the big cities in the west now, too, which the secularists find a bit alarming.

I always wondered exactly how many layers some of those girls were wearing, and I’ve marvelled at how they manage to cover every bit of skin but their face and hands without sweating to death.  But in the “Yazmacılar Çarşısı” (“Headscarf Bazaar”) I found my answers.  That street (and the surrounding area) had every style, weave, fabric and design of headscarf imaginable, so that everyone from the accessorizing Bohemian to the ultra-religious Saudi tourist would find something to please.   (Not to mention a huge selection of prayer mats and "pilgrimage supplies" as well.)

There the mysteries of The Covered Girl’s Secret Weapons unfolded before my very eyes:  a bone that also comes down to not only frame the face, but cover the chin and neck, kinda like the top of a diver’s wetsuit.  This would be handy in the summer because it means she doesn’t have to wear a turtleneck underneath her other shirt.  Or, even more useful, the “turtleneck dickie” that covers just the neck and shoulders.  And then there were the arm covers that cover the forearm up to just above or just below the elbow, so you can get away with a short sleeved shirt and not expose your skin, but not have to roast to death underneath either.

Now, if the day comes where hair flowing freely in the streets is no longer acceptable, I know where to go for supplies.  And with as hot as it gets where I live, those "secret weapons" would come in mighty handy!  (And if, for some crazy reason, men begin to cover their heads, well, apparently there's an answer for that, too!) 

We weren't sure what to make of these bins we saw in the "hunting supply district."  Exploding duck decoys, perhaps? 

Customers with a lot of items on their list can hire a hamal to follow them from shop to shop and carry their load on his back.  That has got to be an exhausting job, especially considering how the entire bazaar quarter is built on a rather steep hill.