Finding Someone Who Remembers-An Expat’s Search for Connection
Dates in the blue and green passports were deciphered, childhood photos were exhumed with their faded hues, the handful of high-school essays mined. Still, there were gaps in the chronology of the 17 schools I attended around the world in the pre-internet era. The only yearbooks were from the first and last schools I went to. For some, there were no photos, no report cards, no teacher’s notes, no school papers. Only fuzzy memories of hasty military evacuations, temporary ceasefires, and wrenching goodbyes. For our short time in Dacca, East Pakistan (now Dhaka, Bangladesh), the gaps were even more acute. Mom and Dad were gone — how could I find someone who remembered?
Lost Memories
I set pen to paper to write about our time in East Pakistan, just before the Liberation War that led to the birth of Bangladesh. My school was….what? Had it been a house, like I remembered, or was that something else? It was located… where? Was it near the Intercontinental Hotel? Or the Gulshang district? Another spin through the single album page of our grainy Bangladesh photos revealed nothing. There were no photos of any building that looked like a school. Did I remember a backyard with leafy trees? Was there a basketball court? My grey matter buzzed to no avail. For the tenth time, I lazily poked at my keyboard, entering Dacca, as the capital city was known then, Dhaka, as it is called now, Dacca American School, Dacca International School. Nothing came up. Adding “1970” to the search didn’t help. With “1960,” an image of a bland library interior appeared. I sat up. Familiar it wasn’t, but maybe it was generic enough that it could have been. A click landed me in the cryptically named “AISD Alumni Network” in Facebook. What was that acronym? I rubbed my eyes. It finally registered–it’s the name of the new school, opened after the war, after we were all scattered to the winds. Acronym deciphered, images of the American International School Dhaka featured photos of shiny modern buildings on a spacious campus that bore no resemblance to the school in my memory. It was another dead end.
The same library photo surfaced the next day when I tried again. Back in the Facebook group, I read some comments. Letters leaped off the screen — DASS. A flash of memory — that was the name that eluded me, the Dacca American Society School. The edges of the words became fuzzy as my mind raced to take it all in, like trying to eat a whole hamburger at once. The laconic paragraph churned as I chewed on the words, parsing the phrases. “Seventh grade, school was in two houses, never had a library like the one pictured.” Yes. That’s exactly what I remembered. “Quick evacuation because of the Liberation War.” Amazing. This woman, Rachel Haight, had gone through exactly the same traumatic time in the violent, chaotic, early days of the war when we were girls.
I sat back, staring with an unfocused gaze out the window, transported back to the airport in Dacca on April 13, 1971. The night was inky black, but the airport was drenched in radiant lights, like a scorching sun. Milling around with vacant eyes, having been on high alert through the intense fighting that had started on March 25 and the mental gyrations of getting our confirmed evacuation date, were mostly American families, anxious to get out. But the evacuation was only for the women and children; my Dad had to stay behind. Again. Just like in Lahore six years earlier.
I looked at the dates of the comments on Facebook, and my heart sank. Three years ago. Was Rachel still in the group? Was the group still active? Had I missed an opportunity to connect with classmates, the only people like me, who were my age, at my school who shared this intense experience together? I wrote a brief comment on the thread and sent a direct message to Rachel. I checked back 10 minutes later. Nothing. I tried to keep from obsessively checking and went for a hike. When I returned, my heart leapt when I saw she had responded and the next day we talked by phone.
A Crucial Conversation
In the first 10 seconds of the conversation, when Rachel mentioned Dacca, I felt a surge of electricity that jolted me into overdrive. Every nerve ending tingled. The words piled on so fast I could barely keep up, my brain trying to accommodate all the familiar words being spoken by a stranger, mirroring everything I went through, how we had to leave suddenly, how our classrooms were in bedrooms in a house, how she swam at the Intercontinental Hotel, how she made friends easily but had to leave so fast, how they evacuated to Tehran, how they lived in all these different countries. My life story streamed out of someone else’s mouth. It was too much. Our words tumbled over themselves like two streams coming together over a rocky weir, a gush of emotional intensity that neither of us was prepared for. We exchanged what we knew from that harrowing year, but she knew so much more since her father worked at the State Department and my dad worked at a private company. An hour flew by in a rapid volley of our mirrored lives, and I was spent. I abruptly cut off the call, saying that I wanted to stay in touch but had to go. I was on overload, unable to absorb more.
Finding DASS
In the coming days, I reached out to others and learned of another Facebook Group, “Alumni of D.A.S.S.”. It was dazzling to hear from so many classmates. A flurry of posts resulted in images of yearbooks, Dacca street scenes, orientation pamphlets, and school badges. Best of all, one kind soul posted photos of our school, including the backyard and basketball court, confirming that my fuzzy memory was more intact than I thought. Swirls of emotion accompanied each post, the shared memories touching something deep inside me.
Finding Someone Who Remembers
A week later, I flipped through the book, “Third Culture Kids, Growing Up Among Worlds,” my guidebook to all aspects of my expat childhood, the essential reference for understanding the impact of a globally mobile lifestyle. It fell open to a page that gripped me when I saw the heading, “Finding Someone Who Remembers.” That’s what this was all about. I had found people who remembered. My parents had remembered, but they are gone now and even when they were around, they had been adults when I had been a child. Their perspectives were different. In this social media group, I found people who were my age, at my school, at my stage of development. Many had finished the school year in Tehran in 1971, but I went to Texas while others went to Bangkok, West Pakistan, Spain, New York or Berkeley. We never had a chance to process our feelings about the war before we were flung to the far corners of the world.
A third culture kid (TCK) is a person who spent a significant part of their early years outside of their parents’ culture. The sense of belonging for a TCK is not associated with the culture of a place, but with those who lived a similar lifestyle. Finding other TCKs doesn’t diminish the relationships I’ve had since being rooted in the US, but allows me to reclaim a part of me that has been dormant.
The benefits of living abroad are well known, but there are downsides. One of the issues with a mobile lifestyle is the unending cycle of losses of friendships and relationships. It’s not easy to find someone to ask, “Do you remember when…” and they do. In the “Alumni of D.A.S.S.” group, I can say, “Do you remember our yearbook?”
“Do you remember the whine of the fighter jets?”
“Do you remember the villages smoldering?”
“Do you remember the refugees trudging to India?”
We remember like it was yesterday, though it was 50 years ago. No one got therapy in those days, though both the children and adults could have used it. So, we scrabble around decades later putting together the scraps of what we knew and what we felt. Finally, I found someone who remembers.
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Follow me at Inga’s Adventures
Photos as credited, mostly by others as I have only a handful of poor quality photos from our short time in Bangladesh.
