The Familiar Foreigner

Though I was born and raised in San Francisco, touching down on Italian soil makes me feel at home. I have no ethnic connections to Italy. Florence especially calls to my heart; I find comfort in the tuscan accents, in the smell of fresh olive oil, and in the warmth of the people. I suspect this solace has something to do with the fact that for me, Italian culture is uncharted territory. While I understand this makes little sense on the face of things, for me, foreignness brings a sense of peace.

When I was fifteen, in my freshman year of high school, I was diagnosed with a rare form of ovarian cancer. I took an absence at school and underwent four rounds of chemotherapy, and then completed my schoolwork during the summer to get back on track for the next year. During the time I was undergoing treatment, I found myself immersed in contradiction. I maintained a level of ignorance, especially in relation to the medical intricacies of my situation. I was purposely left out of the loop because my parents didn’t want to scare me with clinical statistics of my survival. On the other hand, I became very emotionally familiar with something most people view as foreign their whole lives: cancer.

For me, sickness meant a constant battle with sensory experience as I navigated new experience. These battles built their way into my everyday life, until they became standard and familiar. I became used to nausea underlining every encounter I had. I knew the sharp whip of wind on my baldhead every time I went outside. My sense of smell was particularly affected. Once, my mother wanted to revitalize my inner foodie (who I had lost in a blur of hospital food and lacking appetite) by making homemade falafel from ingredients doctors said I could eat. The smell was so pungent that I had to lock my self in the farthest room from the kitchen. I sat helplessly imprisoned by my own nostrils, each breath a test of whether my stomach of steel would finally give in. I had never been so deceived by my own sense of smell before. Up to that moment it had been my trustiest aide, telling my where I was and what I was doing.

I can recount a million bad things about my illness, but one benefit of it was that I was forced to learn how to adjust quickly to new and uncomfortable situations. At this point in my life, I feel at ease in the foreign, because I am quite familiar with the experience of having no control over my environment. Perhaps this is why I like traveling. With traveling, I am exposed to new things, but I also get to choose how and if I absorb the foreign into the familiar, often utilizing my senses as an indicator of my surroundings. Through traveling, I have learned that I have a preference for one type of sense-related anxiety over the other. The anxiety of smelling in a foreign city is exhilarating for me, whereas the anxiety caused by the smell of needle sterilizer is draining and frightening.

I love walking around a foreign city, not knowing the language around me, or the streets through which I wander. Meaningless words pass through one ear into the other, as I get lost in the new. I love the ironic comfort of smelling a foreign food. Once, in Florence, I took a cooking class where we made fresh tagliatelle, a flat pasta. I had never touched or seen semolina, the flour for making fresh pasta. The aromas of fresh garlic and parsley met my nostrils as il capocuoco (head chef) sternly instructed my kneading skills in Italian, showing me the correct consistency. My senses acted as a steady aide, a feeling I temporarily lost while sick.

When traveling, I find my anxieties are superficial: a language comprehension issue or a cultural disconnect that I eventually sort out. When I was sick, the anxiety was very different. I would feel stress creeping up on me every time I smelt food, because it signaled the battle between my mind and body that was about to occur. I remember the distinct smell of hospital soap, and eventually I connected that smell with nausea. While I was sick, I lost the ability to decide whether a smell was just a smell, or a larger signal of an impending conflict within my body. This anxiety, which stems from lost control in a familiar situation, is one of the reasons I prefer traveling and investigating the foreign. I use my trusty senses with confidence, a feeling I lost while I was immersed in my sickness.

There is another reason I enjoy travel that is tied to my past illness, and it has to do with identity. As a traveler, I am anonymous and fleeting. I have no permanence and no one really knows who I am. As a patient, everyone knew who I was. They knew the intricacies of my body privacy being out of the question. As a traveler, people don’t care if you are able to shower yourself; however, as a patient, that is a huge feat. I crave the anonymity of traveling because it puts me at ease to retain some of my mystery. The invisibility involved in foreign travel is a breath of fresh air, and another reason why I believe I find solace in the unfamiliar.

For me, foreign travel brings a sense of peace. It allows to me to trust my senses in a way I haven’t always been able to do, all the while encouraging investigation of anxieties I have experienced and identities I have adopted. My final reason for enjoying travel so much has to do with the question of return. A host country wants to entice a traveler back, and feed the tourist economy that is vital to the national wealth. This is especially true in regards to Italy. As out of place as I felt traveling, there was always the underlying notion that I was wanted back. Every interaction ends with a varied version of “see you soon!” As a patient, I had a very different experience. The motto of the pediatric oncology floor was “hope I never see you again.” They didn’t want to see us again, because it meant there had been an issue with the chemotherapy, and the cancer was back. By contrast, when a host country want me back as a traveler, it makes me feel weirdly satisfied to know I am both wanted somewhere, and considered well enough to make a return visit.

Foreignness provides a sense of peace and control for me that I continue to hold close to my heart.