I recently returned to my hometown of Minneapolis and had a few thoughts on the word ‘home’. I’ve been living in New York City now for about 8 months. It has been a wonderful experience overall, but the journey has definitely been pocked with difficulty. The biggest difficulties for me have been adjusting to the cultural differences between the Midwest and the East Coast. There is a term in Psychology called code-switching where, typically, minorities will speak differently when dealing with the majority population as a way to ease the interaction. They sort of wear a “face” to get by and then show a different “face” to people of their own culture. I think I’ve experienced a faint glimmer of this being a Midwesterner on the East Coast. It’s a little different in that I don’t actually speak differently out here, but I am constantly being reminded that the social norms and graces that I was so used to and navigated unconsciously are quite different here. An example might be how people out here seem to more openly discuss intimate details about their life much quicker than in the Midwest.
But what I’d really like to focus on are some of the thoughts and feelings I had upon returning ‘home’. What struck me as I deplaned and walked amongst my fellow Minnesotans was that there wasn’t a person I saw who I didn’t feel I sort of ‘knew’. I saw a Hmong family saying goodbye to each other. I went to school with many Hmong, worked in a kitchen for two years with almost exclusively Hmong and even learned to speak a little Hmong. Even though I didn’t know them specifically, I at least have an idea about what it means to be Hmong. I saw various young white kids walking around. I was young and white in Minneapolis, I felt I understood their awkwardness, the sort of blank looks on their faces and the difficulty of growing up in the slightly suppressed Northern European cultural tradition that seems to dominate Minnesota. And the list went on, everywhere I looked, any cross-section or ‘grouping’ of people you could identify I felt like I had some connection to, some understanding of where they were coming from, because I did, I’d lived and worked and grown in and amongst Minnesotans nearly all my life.
Now, I know this can sound a bit like stereotyping, if you say I didn’t really ‘know’ any of the people I saw, you’d be right. They each are individuals with a unique combination of likes and dislikes and particular characteristics. But if every individual is an intersection of hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of variables then I felt I shared more of those variables in common with Minnesotans than New Yorkers. I don’t know what it’s like to grow up in Staten Island as opposed to Bed-Stuy Brooklyn or upstate New York. I didn’t do any of those things nor do I know anyone who did. And the list goes on there as well, thousands of variables that make up a life living in and growing up in New York.
That said, I am constantly meeting and getting to know more New Yorkers (and transplant New Yorkers) and am broadening my knowledge of different people and the cultures they come from. In fact, my interest in meetings different people and broadening my experiences drove my interest in moving here. I am getting exactly what I was after. And it feels great sometimes. But sometimes I long for things to be a little easier, for my experiences to be validated and just understood, and thus far, Minnesotans still hold that for me. It’s a double edged sword. Comforting and somehow boring at the same time. Weird, huh? I think for now I’m happy to have less comfort and more excitement. Who knows, that may change. But what if I one day return ‘home’ only to find that it isn’t ‘home’ anymore? Hmm…sounds like a song, or a theme for a book or movie, in fact I think that might be one of the archetypal stories we tell ourselves again and again. I love those pesky universal human themes!
Real Life,
Real Time,
Real People,
Hans Erik
Content Marketing Director
Hans at Next2Friends dot com
