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Hola de Mexico!

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Kirk

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Hello everyone!  My name is Kirk, and as of four months ago, home is now Guadalajara, Mexico.

So, a brief intro to my story: I was born in San Diego, California to a Mexican mother and an American father.  My family moved to Orange County, California when I was only a few months old and stayed there until I turned 5.   My father did, and still does, work for a large defense contractor company, so anyone in the bizz knows that that sometimes means moving to other countries.  October 1988, when I was 5, my family moved from Orange County to Cairo, Egypt.  Just image that culture shock…  I really don’t have too many memories of leaving California or arriving in Cairo, but my memories of childhood are of home, friends, comfort, all in Egypt.  But after 5 and a half years in 1993, we moved again to Khamis Mushayt, Saudi Arabia.  More culture shock since Egyptian and Saudi cultures are quite different and Cairo is a large city while Khamis Mushayt is a little town in the mountains.   This move lasted just long enough for me to get comfortable there and make stable friendships.  My family moved again after just 2 and a half years in the winter of 1995/1996; at least this time it was to a familiar place, back to Cairo!  I rekindled some old friendships and made some new ones, but unfortunately this was the shortest move of all.  One and a half years after moving back to Cairo, in 1997, we moved back “home” to Orange County.

As others here have said, that was probably the worst time in my life.  The whole time I had lived outside of the US my family had always referred to California as “home,” and so I too always considered that my home.  I was shown quite bluntly and effectively that that was not the case.  California might have been home to my parents, but just a few weeks in California and in the California public high schools showed me that it definitely was not MY home.  I honestly don’t know how I made it through that first year back and much of it is just a blur in my memory, which is kind of worrisome since that might hint at repressed memories and feelings…  But slowly, over the entire four years of high school in California, I did make friends and began to fit in.  And honestly, I believe that is how long it took for me to fully re assimilate, four years.  Well, let me rephrase:  I still don’t think I’m fully re assimilated after 11 years, but I now feel comfortable in American culture.  My friendship with these new friends might not go back to elementary school like all of their other friends, but over those years we developed a relationship and new memories that we built on and carried with us to college.

I stayed in California for undergraduate school and attended the University of California, Irvine.  Which is now why this most recent move has been one of the hardest.  As I said, my mother is Mexican, I lived in southern California for 11 years, so Mexican culture is not completely alien to me, and Guadalajara really is a great city and I do like it here a lot, but the actual moving was the difficult part.  While I was applying to the medical school here, I figured because of my background I wouldn’t have any problem moving to another country for several years, but this move made me realize that I did have a problem with it, a really big problem with it.

This move made me realise that for the first time in my life I actually did have a place to call “HOME”.  Slowly, without me noticing, over the past 11 years, Orange County and California had become my home.  I decided to drive to Guadalajara so that I could take my car and most of my “stuff” with me (you fellow TCKs should be well acquainted with “stuff’”), and not to get too sappy, I cried most of the way in the car.  The first week or two here I was quiet, anti-social, forlorn, etc., but gradually started opening up to people as I noticed that a majority of my classmates had come from southern California as well.

I do miss home a lot, both of them; that would be Cairo and California.  And that is what I started realizing as this moving was approaching last year:  that I don’t want to have several places that I call “home” and to be perpetually missing “home” since I can’t live in two places at once.

But after reading Ruth’s book, joining groups on Facebook and finding this site, I’ve come to accept who I am and  embrace it.  I think I would like to settle down in one place now, but if life takes me to more “homes”, then I know that I am strong enough to handle it.

So I guess that wasn’t so brief…  But I guess most of us like to talk when we know someone understands :).

And just to end my intro post, I attended CAC while in Cairo, so a big shout out to all of the other CAC alumni here!!

-Kirk


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May 3, 2008 | Filed Under Introduction 

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Comments

5 Responses to “Hola de Mexico!”

  1. 1
    IngridGiles
    IngridGiles Says:
    May 3rd, 2008 at 8:11 pm

    Welcome to Mexico, Kirk! Are you in the UAG or the other one? (I don’t remember what the other one is called, but it’s the one where most of the foreigners go.)

    (Is this spam?)

  2. 2
    Unregistered
    Kirk Says:
    May 4th, 2008 at 12:42 pm

    Thanks Ingrid! Yeah, I’m going to the UAG med school, the Institudo de Ciencias Biologicas in the colonia Lomas del Valle.

    (Is this spam?)

  3. 3
    IngridGiles
    IngridGiles Says:
    May 4th, 2008 at 3:14 pm

    Ok, I know where that is. I have never lived in Guadalajara, but I have been there many times and know people there. I used to fly in and out of Guadalajara because international flights were cheaper there than in any closer airports, but now international flights are more common (and therefore more affordable) out of both Aguascalientes and Zacatecas, which are closer to where I live. Anyway, it’s a nice city. (Even if they do call a “torta” a “lonche.” That’s a little linguistic quirk that catches me by surprise every time I’m there.)

    (Is this spam?)

  4. 4
    Unregistered
    Kirk Says:
    May 5th, 2008 at 5:23 pm

    Haha! I noticed that lonche thing too, I had to ask to find out what it meant…

    (Is this spam?)

  5. 5
    ezio
    ezio Says:
    May 9th, 2008 at 6:15 am

    Hi Kirk!

    It’s nice to read about you. I too recently joined TCKid: I think it was a day or so before you.

    I’m currently in Italy, but I lived in Mexico for over six years and we travelled it a lot, though we never went to Guadalajara. Still, I like a lot Mexican literature and especially Juan Rulfo who’s from Jalisco: I think I can picture the surroundings you are in now ;-)

    I do not yet have as clear a sense of home as you write of yourself, but I do understand the conflict you experienced in the move. I want to go away from Italy for my next job, and although what I managed to achieve here is far from what I’d have liked it to be, there are many little things that over time started to give it a more welcoming feeling.

    “but over those years we developed a relationship and new memories that we built on and carried with us”

    I found your sentence above very powerful; it really is quite a bit about sharing a common memory, through a process that is slow in itself, isn’t it?

    Cheers,
    Ezio

    (Is this spam?)

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