I looked around the airport in a daze. I felt strange, out of place. The airport signs were in my language. People looked like me. But I felt awkwardly uncomfortable like I just didn’t belong here. The customs officer handed me my passport back across the counter. The country’s name on the front of my passport matched the badge on his uniform. “Welcome home, ma’am.” He said. His words took me a bit off guard. I, a bit surprised by how strange his words sounded to my ears, nodded and replied clumsily, “Yeah…thanks, sir.” I clutched my passport as I walked toward the baggage claim; my mind racing from overload yet sluggish from the long sleepless flight.
Home? I thought to myself. This is supposed be my home? I didn’t feel like I had come home. Although everything around me was familiar and seemingly comfortable, I felt like I had landed on an alien planet. I felt like I did not belong. I felt like a foreigner in my own country.
My blog is entitled “Musings of a Waiguoren”. Waiguoren means foreigner. This blog was meant to hold my thoughts and experiences of living in a foreign country, a country that I did not come from, a place that was different from what I knew, an experience of another world. But here I was, standing in the place I should know best, discovering that I had come off the plane as the same foreigner who boarded the plane. I felt like a stranger here. Like I didn’t belong. I stood there waiting for that eternity we all have experienced at the baggage carousel thinking: So I don’t belong anywhere now? I will be a foreigner no matter where I go?
This thought first made me sort of panic. But then I realized why I was feeling this way. It was not just that I had seen more of the world and had grown accustomed to a different way of life. It was not just that my perspective of culture, people, and the world had changed. It was because I had changed. The more I saw of the world, the more I realized I do not live for this world. The more homes I made, the more places I lived, the more countries I traveled – the more I longed for Home. After a year of traveling, of being the stranger, and after returning to my native land, I realized if I base my sense of belonging on the degree of familiar, comfortable, or fulfillment a certain place provides I will search in vain for a place I truly belong.
In fact, I was intended to view this world, this life as a foreigner. I was not made for here. I am an outsider. This planet and my time here is merely a single adventure within the grand adventure of real, eternal Life. Yes, I now saw the world through a different lens because of my travels. But more than anything it was that my sense of belonging in Him has grown.
In addition, there are elements of my culture I never considered strange before that I now just find plain weird. Tanning for instance. Why on earth are people obsessed with looking orange? And food! Why does one need seven different kinds of butter to choose from? Why do we think we cannot live without an overwhelming supply of variations? And why is everyone so busy? What are they busy doing? I think we should take a break from being busy and go dance in the park or sit outside on street corners and share a drink together. Where’s the laughter? The smiles? The sharing of real life? Where’s the things that matter? If there is one thing I’ve noticed in my travels it is that I’ve seen people with a lot less than me, laughing and smiling a whole lot more than me.
Life is so much more than what we give it credit for.
Yeah, I’m kinda sad that I’ll probably always feel like an alien wherever I go now. But it makes life on this planet all the more adventurous. I’ve learned I can make anywhere I am home because I belong in Him anyway.
And that’s my musing as a waiguoren :-)
