As I jumped from one man to the next, the end result was always the same. I’d settle into a relationship, only to be left feeling trapped and imprisoned by my partner. I would always end up looking for an escape, a means to bail out of what was otherwise a seemingly happy and healthy relationship. Craving my freedom and the world of possibilities outside of the union, I would fashion a mental prison from which I’d flee to singlehood with reckless abandon.

Perhaps I wasn’t meant to settle down. I’ve bailed out of every major relationship in my life after feeling smothered, sacrificing any future the relationship had.

But then, how is it that I ended up with this rock on my finger?

My constant musings about freedom and my lack thereof left my live-in boyfriend, a finance professional, with feelings of instability. Every other weekend I announced wanting to split, until I finally did so in dramatic fashion. This scene played over and over again, as I left a small army of broken men scattered across the globe.

These haven’t been unhappy relationships by any means. The men have been considerate, loving, genuine, and romantic. They’ve offered me the world and then some. But something within me always shouted, “Run! Get Out!” I’ve tried to quiet this inner voice over the years, with little success.

I’d find ways to ease my escape. I’d nitpick at his habits and perceived flaws until he’d almost beg me to leave. Oh, the egos I have crushed.

I had incessant nightmares, waking up in a cold sweat with images of white dresses and babies fresh in my mind. As I escaped to the next room to lie alone and contemplate in solitude, I’d feel a rush of relief as I left his side. His mere presence gave me anxiety.

To what can I attribute this fear of relationships? My parents have been happily married for 32 years, though they might argue about the “happily” part. All my aunts and uncles married their high school sweethearts, forming a 12-person coalition of long-term love advocates. With not a divorce in my family tree, where did this fear that gripped me so powerfully come from?

Some pointed to a fear of intimacy, while others explained my trepidation as a manifestation of my own discomfort with the idea of marriage. For years I took solace in the male propaganda that monogamy was an unnatural state. My beer-swigging buddies pointed to examples in the animal kingdom, and I wholeheartedly agreed, as did my female friends.

But as I grew older, those women shed their roaming tendencies and donned the gown in all its traditionally assigned glory. I watched these friends marry off, headed to the no-man’s-land of married folks, and I wondered, “Is there something wrong with me? Why do I always bail? Why can’t I stick around for the long-term love?”

Just as I jumped from place to place during my twenties, I jumped from man to man. In the same way I’d feel the need to go as soon as I became comfortable in a locale, I’d let my instinct for freedom take over as soon as I saw a future with a man.

Like a child who assumes that the world rides ponies and eats cake while in bed, I couldn’t help but wonder: Isn’t there something better?

And then I met *Kevin. He was everything I didn’t want in a man: blue-collar, simple, and incredibly masculine. But he fell for me and professed his love, to which I responded with utter horror. I shot him down instantly, wounding his confidence, no doubt.

But as we continued to spend time together as friends, I noticed something quite profound. He didn’t want to keep me from exploring or from seeking my freedom — he wanted to watch me do so. He pushed me to leave a career that I hated to pursue my love of writing. He encouraged me to head off on solo vacations and volunteer missions. Eventually his kind spirit and nonthreatening demeanor won me over, and we began to date.

Now I’d like to say that once I met him, my thoughts of imprisonment evaporated. But they were still present, and I voiced them liberally. I’d tell him I was leaving him, off to Japan to teach or to the District of Columbia to volunteer. And he’d calmly nod his head and proclaim he’d wait for my return.

Where all the other men had fought me, he agreed to give me my freedom.

All the men in my past had wanted to make a housewife out of me, to restrain me from all the world had to offer. In this new one, I found someone who took pleasure in watching me take on the possibilities and potential of my future.

Now we have made a home together, and he proposed this past Christmas Eve. For 10 years, commitment was a four-letter word.

But now the weight of those prison bars has been lifted.

*The name has been changed for this story.

Related: Victoria Witchey

In The Fray Contributor

There are moments, like long stretches of New Zealand’s Whanganui River, when time flattens out and one need do nothing but simply exist, floating along the surface and enjoying the fine day. My wife and I spent three such days on the Whanganui River Journey, one of New Zealand’s famous Great Walks. To dip your paddle into the river is to dip into a perfect reflection of the deep, wild valleys and the clear blue sky. At times the river is so peaceful that these moments can stretch into infinity, and time, a construct for lesser beings, vanishes.

There are other moments, both in life and on the river, that demand action. A canoe can be an unforgiving method of travel on rapids, all too apt to turn sideways and capsize, dumping its occupants into the roiling current. When the front of your canoe enters a rapid, the water beneath it begins to move faster, until the boat and the river are moving at the same speed. It is critical at this point to maintain the boat’s momentum, and so you paddle as hard as you can, reaching and pulling at the churning water while wrenching at the river with your paddle, maneuvering your canoe around rocks and keeping yourself upright and inside the boat. It is a rush, a blur of action independent from conscious thought, and it is even fun when you spill into the river. If you do find yourself in the river, you just wring yourself out, collect your belongings, and continue on your way. The sun is warm and the water soon calms.

And if your way should include your rental car grazing a guardrail, you should laugh and try to forget about it, and remember that Kiwis are nice people. I learned this at a panel beater in the small town of Renwick, in the heart of the Marlborough Valley, New Zealand’s wine country. The owner of the local shop looked at the scratch, squinted, and said, "I think we can get that out." While he worked on the car, we told him our story. In a few minutes, the scratch was gone and we were on our way. "Just tell everyone that Kiwis are nice people," he said, refusing our money. Consider yourself told.

There are more than 20 vineyards within a few miles of Renwick. The spectacular countryside and density of the vineyards makes the bicycle an ideal mode of transportation for a wine tour. The wineries in the region offer free or low-cost tastings and sell their wines in their "cellar door" shops. The regional specialty is Sauvignon Blanc, but slight climactic variations means that each vineyard grows slightly different grapes, producing distinct wines. You learn quickly that the bartender is the gatekeeper to each winery’s finest vintages, and it is in your interest to make friends with this person, since he or she decides if you are good enough for the good stuff. It pays to speak the language: You may refer to a Sauvignon Blanc as reminiscent of an unoaked California Chardonnay, or comment on how the Pinot Noir of the region is spicier and less dusky than French or Italian varieties. We tasted many inferior vintages, but we were finally rewarded with a taste of a fine, single cask Pinot Noir at the Nautilus Vineyard, where an ex-pat American cracked open the vineyard’s Special Reserve for us. It was brisk and unique, inviting and beguiling, much like the rest of New Zealand.

Queenstown is the adventure capital of New Zealand, a country famous for its adventurers. We were ready for an adventure; it is what we came to New Zealand for. Some people like bungee jumping. Some enjoy parasailing. Others are more into skiing, snowboarding, mountain-climbing, hang gliding, or jet-boating, all of which is available in or around Queenstown. Not us. We prefer trekking up a steep hill and back down the other side, preferably across streams and other difficult terrain. We settled on the Rees-Dart track, a four-day jaunt into the Southern Alps.

It was great. We slept in DOC huts and walked through open alpine tundra, above the tree line, rocks and hardy plants clinging to the hills around us. When a heavy fog rolled in and enveloped us in its thick, misty embrace, it felt as if we were walking across the surface of Venus. The atmosphere was ghostly; people drifted in and out of view, and the moisture in the air absorbed sound like a wet sponge, enforcing an eerie silence that hung over the trail.

But when the sun finally broke through, peeling the gloomy mist away, it felt glorious. The warm rays slanted down, carving thick slices through the mist and awakening us from our slumber. The wet landscape glistened in the bright light, and the mountains’ snow-topped peaks winked and sparkled at us. I smiled as we clambered over boulders and across small streams, tramping through the New Zealand countryside in a local tradition as old as human settlement in the region.

After our hike, we continued north from Queenstown, and climbed Avalanche Peak, near Albert’s Pass, our final exploration of New Zealand’s astounding natural beauty. The peak overlooks a valley in the middle of the South Island. A highway and a railroad snake past the small town at the pass. As I stood there at the crest, a frozen instant in time, I felt as if I were on the shoulders of giants, with snowy peaks soaring to the sky all around me. I was born in the flat, featureless Midwest, but my grandfather is from Colorado. It is from him that I get my love of the mountains. They are breathtaking in their sheer size, and the blue-white snow that clings to the tops looks so majestic — a powerful reminder of my relative size and place in the world. I do my best to remember this and stay respectful. It is all any of us can do.

Aaron Richner I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.

When U.S. President-elect Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination, he explained that “we Democrats have a very different measure of what constitutes progress in this country.” And that is what the Bhutanese have been working on since the 1970s, when their last king realized that the country’s gross national happiness was more important than its gross national product.

It’s my first time in Bhutan, but after two days here, I am captivated by the country’s beauty and the civility of the people. And as I open a second bottle of Red Panda beer and gaze over the lights of Thimphu, I feel very privileged to be here. Just a few years ago, it would have been pretty unlikely for someone like me from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to have even thought of attending a conference like this. But over the past few years, the idea of developing alternative measures of progress has become close to the OECD’s heart. It is work that has been the focus of the OECD-hosted Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies for the past three years.

For 60 years, gross domestic product (GDP) has been the dominant way in which the world has measured and understood progress. This approach has failed to explain several factors that have the most significant impact on people’s lives. During the last decade, a large amount of work has been carried out to understand and measure the world’s progress. The Global Project is the first systematic global effort to “go beyond GDP” by enabling and promoting new ways to measure societal progress, one high-profile example of which is French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Commission on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress. The commission comprises some of the world’s great thinkers and includes five Nobel laureates.

The Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies aims to foster the development of sets of key economic, social, and environmental indicators to provide a comprehensive picture of how the well-being of a society is evolving, and seeks to encourage each society to consider in an informed way the crucial question: Is life getting better?

The Global Project is an international network of organizations from all sectors of society. The main partners in the Global Project are the OECD, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, and the European Commission. Research institutes, development banks, nongovernmental organizations, and statistical offices from both developing and developed countries are also working with us.

The project has three main goals:

• What to measure? In order to measure progress, we must know what it looks like, and so we are encouraging debate about what progress means in different societies. The project is developing methods and guidelines to carry out these debates effectively.
• How to measure progress? The project is developing best practices in how to measure progress and its component parts, some of which are not yet measured well using existing statistical indicators.
•  Ensuring that those measures are used. New information and communication technology (ICT) tools offer huge potential to turn information into knowledge among a much broader swathe of citizens than those who currently access such information. The project is developing new tools for public use.

At the heart of the Global Project is the development of Wiki-Progress, a global collaborative online platform that will serve as a hub and focal point of the many existing and nascent initiatives to measure societal progress at national and local levels.

The OECD is among those that believe that grassroots conversations around measuring progress — and the outcomes a society wants to achieve — can change the political debate: They can shift discussion from arguments over the political means to agreement on the societal ends. This also echoes U.S. President-elect Obama’s Democratic nomination acceptance speech: “We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country. … Passions fly on immigration, but I don’t know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers. This, too, is part of America’s promise, the promise of a democracy where we can find the strength and grace to bridge divides and unite in common effort.”

There is mounting evidence that discussions on indicators of progress can foster a sense of what the U.S. president-elect described as “our sense of common purpose, our sense of higher purpose.” The OECD is working to promote this approach. And there is much we can learn from the Bhutanese.

Jon Hall is project coordinator of the Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies. He presented the paper “A global movement for a global challenge” at the 4th International Conference on Gross National Happiness held in November in Thimphu, Bhutan.

Additional reading:

Measuring the Progress of Societies
A global movement for a global challenge
Papers from the 4th International Conference on Gross National Happiness in Bhutan
A teacher’s view on the Gross National Happiness conference

In The Fray Contributor

My romance with Bhutan began in February 2000, when I flew for the first time from Bangkok to Paro, the only airport town in Bhutan. The airport had no radar detection device. Planes could only land and take off in broad daylight, in good visibility. At the time, “planes” meant the two aircraft owned by Bhutan’s national airline, Druk Air. As we neared Bhutan, the arid landscape gradually gave way to layers of mountains looming grey and purple in the distance, becoming luxuriant with vibrant shades of green as the plane glided over them. Mountains and valleys interlocked with one another like fingers of hands clasped in prayer. I had the inkling I was about to experience something quite different from what the biggest cities and fanciest resorts of the first world could offer.  

The day my husband Mike told me about his potential assignment to consult in Bhutan, I looked up the country on the Internet. Cradled in the foothills of the Himalayas, about the size of Switzerland, was the Kingdom of Bhutan, with India to the south, east, and west, and Tibet to the north. Further research told me the country had no constitution or political parties, no freedom of assembly, press, or religion. No church to attend, only Buddhist temples. No electricity in most parts of the country, and limited TV broadcasting even in places with electricity. No traffic lights anywhere, not even in its capital, Thimphu. No fast food restaurants. And little medicine except the indigenous kind.

There was a dress code: National dress was required to be worn in public. My findings were depressing enough to make Bhutan a curious — even fascinating — place to see. 

As tourists in the first two weeks before Mike started work, we had a guide who took us from Paro to Thimphu and across the mountain pass Dochu La to Punakha, the winter home of the Central Monastic Body. We also journeyed eastward to the Bumthang district in central Bhutan. We even braved the narrow, nerve-racking, mountain-hugging roads south all the way to Phuentsholing, on the border of India. The fortress-like dzongs, or monasteries, intimidated and awed me. Houses decorated with auspicious, painted symbols of dragons, flowers, and wheels caught my fancy, while wooden phalluses — hung from roofs to ward against evil — initially rendered me speechless. Buddhist relic-filled chortens, prayer wheels big and small, and forests of prayer flags fluttering in the wind were spiritually uplifting.

But what really filled me with wonder was that every man, woman, and child looked happy.

Happiness radiated from weather-beaten faces, with their windburned cheeks and smiles that showed teeth stained red from betel nut addiction. It was quite obvious that happiness in Bhutan was not born of material wealth and comfort, for those were lacking everywhere I looked. The Bhutanese people as a whole might be poor by Western standards, but they are not destitute. Begging and unwelcomed soliciting are not in the Bhutanese vocabulary. While tourists to many countries would have to pay to get a picture taken with a local outfitted in his or her national dress, I got all my pictures taken with Bhutanese men in ghos and women in kiras for free, for my payment often came in the form of letting adults pore over my Lonely Planet Bhutan or showing children the magic of my binoculars. What a breath of fresh air. The children might look shabby, with snotty faces and dirt-encrusted fingernails, but they all had school and parents who provided for them.

And they all looked happy.

A highlight of that first trip was a night in a farmhouse in a small hamlet during our Bumthang Cultural Trek. That evening, we shared a meal with the family, comprising a couple and their two sons. We sat on the floor around the bukhari, or wood-burning stove, in a kitchen surrounded by soot-blackened walls. The room was dimly lit with a low-wattage bulb, which our host proudly told us was fed by electricity generated by a solar panel on the roof. We dined on buckwheat pancakes, yak stew and curries, and lots of chilies, which Mike and I politely declined. Arra, a strong wheat- or rice-distilled drink, was poured, warming the body and the spirit.

In spite of the dark and drab surroundings of the interior, it did not take much to feel the contagious effect of happiness. That night, Mike and I were given the best room in the house in which to sleep: the altar room, reserved for the deities and VIP guests. In the darkness of the room, lit only by a flickering butter lamp on the altar, surrounded by statuettes of Buddhist saints and thangkas depicting deities, I was not afraid. Mike fell asleep as soon as his head hit the mattressed floor, but I stayed awake for a long while, thankful for the opportunity to be sharing in the happiness of an extraordinary nation.     

On my second visit to Bhutan, in 2002, I went to the public library in Thimphu and picked up a copy of Kuensel, the national weekly. “Chorten vandal sentenced to life,” the headline read. Also on the same page: “Eight HIV cases detected in Bhutan.”

Little international news made it into the paper. Neither did anything critical of government policies. Surely there must be some souls unhappy with contentious issues even in the most fairytale paradise on earth?    

“They are careful of what they print, aren’t they?” I remarked to a man reading nearby.

He gave me a curious look, and said, “Yes, it’s a pretty good paper.”

Up until 2008, the country had no constitution. But for 100 years, the Bhutanese people had placed their faith in the king and his benevolent, if absolute, governance. Peace and harmony reigned in this kingdom which, to the developed world, might seem deprived of the fundamental rights of democracy and freedom. On my visits to Bhutan, I have observed that the Bhutanese are intrinsically happy, if happiness could be summed up to trust in their beloved king and his government, contentment with their way of life, faith in their religious beliefs, harmony with their environment, peace with all sentient beings, and the highest regard for the cultural and spiritual traditions of their country. 

With a new king and Bhutan’s first constitution, the kingdom has entered a new era, one of democratic beginnings. The Internet has become accessible, more programs are broadcast on television, and new hotels are being erected.

It’s progress by Western standards.

But what about happiness?

Elsie Sze is the author of the novel Hui Gui: A Chinese Story, which spans from the war torn China years of the 1930s to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong. Her forthcoming novel, Heart of the Buddha, is about Bhutan.

Additional reading:

Books offer clues to finding happiness in tough economy
Substantiating GNH
Lessons in Gross National Happiness

Elsie Sze

Since Alaska governor Sarah Palin became Sen. John McCain’s running mate, the barrage of misogynist media criticism has been relentless. Does any of this anti-woman talk sound familiar? Just when I thought we had left the chatter about Hillary Clinton’s pearls, cleavage, and cackle in the dust, the media got me again.

We all understand that McCain chose Palin for political reasons. She has the highest gubernatorial approval rating in the country: 80 percent. Her accomplishments, lauded by conservatives, have included cutting taxes, balancing the budget, and putting the kibosh on the Bridge to Nowhere.

With so many would-be Clinton voters left behind after Barack Obama chose Joe Biden instead of a successful and seasoned woman who says she received more of the popular vote during the primary than Obama himself, McCain obviously chose Palin to try to snare some of those voters. In picking Biden, Obama was using the same strategy. He was aiming to shore up his own national security shortcomings and to grab the blue-collar, Catholic voters who supported Clinton — the same voters he’d denounced a few months before as people who “cling to their guns and religion.”

The media tore immediately and salaciously into Palin, branding her as unqualified to be vice, let alone president. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews has repeatedly called Palin an “empty vessel” told what to say and do. The Daily Kos, without evidence, claimed that Palin’s 15-year-old daughter was the real mother of Palin’s newborn son. A Salon article featured Palin in a dominatrix outfit, flogging a moose. Maureen Dowd of The New York Times has compared her to a cheerleader and a Lancôme salesperson. A reporter from Denver’s local Channel 7 news was even caught on camera, moments after Palin’s nomination, saying she had a “nice ass,” and suggesting the running mates were sleeping together. And in perhaps the most egregious, anti-woman comment to date, CNN’s John Roberts questioned Palin’s ability to be a mother and vice president at the same time.

We haven’t heard reporters question Barack Obama about whether he could be a father to his two children and president at the same time. Nor have we heard them comment on Obama’s butt cheeks, or seen him placed in sadomasochistic sexual attire.

Even more to the point, why haven’t the media focused on Obama’s inexperience? Fact: Obama has the least amount of political experience, measured in years, of any candidates on a national ticket in the past 100 years. In perhaps the most telling line of the primary season, Hillary Clinton noted: “Senator McCain will bring a lifetime of experience to the White House. I will bring a lifetime of experience. And Senator Obama will bring a speech he gave in 2002.” Ouch.

Instead of focusing on her pregnant teenaged daughter or her husband’s 20-year-old DUI charge, reporters should focus on Palin’s record. She has taken strong positions on abortion, gay rights, and the environment, and has drafted key, if not controversial, legislation for her state.

We’ve seen the clips of Palin’s sportscaster days and have heard more than we want to know about the teenaged father of her daughter’s baby. Let’s talk about the issues that matter to Americans — and leave Palin’s family life and X chromosome out of it.

Keith S Olsen

Aşure, or Noah’s Pudding, is an ancient Turkish recipe. It has pretty much everything in it, including garbanzos, wheat, beans, rosewater, dried figs, apricots, and nuts. It’s not smooth and creamy like other puddings; it’s lumpy and chewy. It seems healthy because there are so many fruits, nuts, and whole grains in it. I have often heard people say aşure is “an acquired taste.” In this case, “an acquired taste” means it’s pretty sticky and gross, but despite appearances, it’s traditional, and people enjoy eating it.

As a half-Turk on my mother’s side, I have eaten the pudding many times. However, I have never actually made it because it’s one of those really daunting dishes to prepare. Plus, every chain store in Turkey carries the instant, packaged version, so if I ever got desperate to have some, it could be ready in 20 minutes.

However, I want to learn how to make some traditional dishes as part of my stay in Turkey, so I open my Internet browser to see what’s involved. “Oh yeah, no problem,” I tell myself, scrolling up and down ethnicfood.com. I can totally make this for my grandparents.

I have made other dishes for my grandparents, but none quite as demanding as aşure. In Turkey, “one-stop” grocery shopping is uncommon. Every town has its own magnificent farmers’ market, as well as a butcher, bakery, and kuruyemiş (dried food store). I think of the kuruyemiş as a trail mix store. My local place sells treats like dried apricots, figs, pumpkin seeds, and walnuts by the kilo. My favorites are the dried chickpeas because they have a nutty flavor, and they are really crunchy, like corn nuts. I take great pleasure in exploring the Turkish purveyors and chitchatting with the vendors, but it’s time-consuming to shop this way, so tracking down the aşure ingredients takes me several days. I keep poking my head into corner stores and asking, “Incir var mı? Aşure için?” Do you have figs? For aşure?

“Aşure? Aşure yapiyor musun?” You are making aşure? Shopkeepers always have a look on their face as though they’re thinking, “It’s pretty funny that this foreign girl is making aşure.”

In a few days my grandparents are coming home to Istanbul from their summerhouse on the Aegean. While they have been away, I have been in their Istanbul house, studying Turkish, cooking, and looking for a job where I don’t have to speak the language.

Kanlica and tea culture

My grandparents’ home is in a town called Kanlica, on the Asian side of Istanbul. The Bosphorus Strait divides Istanbul into two continents — Asia and Europe. And though the two are separated by only a three-minute ferry ride, the European part of the city is much more urban and progressive than its Asian counterpart. There are lots of universities and 20-something students supporting radical causes on the European side, but Kanlica is like a sleepy little resort town.

Commuting back and forth between the continents is one of my favorite parts of life in Istanbul. At the end of my day on the European side, I usually wind up lugging all of my Turkish dictionaries and notebooks, as well as groceries, back home on the ferry. I like to sit on the top deck and stare at the waterfront mansions as we glide by. The properties that pepper the edge of the Bosphorus are among some of the most beautiful and expensive real estate in the world. Wealthy Ottomans who treasured the view of the Bosphorus built most of the waterfront mansions, or yalilar, in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the buildings are still an important part of Istanbul’s landscape.

One of the most incredible homes that I pass daily is 30,000 square feet and was put on the market for $100 million in 2007. As most of the homes on the water, its stately European design mingles with Islamic touches, like dome-shaped windows. An expansive outdoor dining area and swimming pool connect the main home to the enormous pool house, where I imagine the residents sit and drink their afternoon tea when it’s too hot to sit in the sun. It always seems like the ferry passes by this house too quickly. I never have enough time to inspect the elaborate latticework or to catch a glimpse of the house staff setting out the breakfast trays. The boat ride might be too short, but I really appreciate the five-minute break the ferry affords me after a long day of carrying all of my things around like a pack mule.

I’ve become friends with the guys who run a teahouse next to the Kanlica Iskele, or Kanlica ferry port, so if I wave at them as I step off the boat, they call, “Cay ister misin?” — offering me tea before I walk home. Tea culture is very important to Turks. People often meet at teahouses and sit for hours, swirling the sugar in their glass teacups. Although I have grown to delight in the strong black tea accompanied simply by sugar cubes, I still get incredibly antsy sitting over tea for such a long time.

I do, however, like to stop and talk with Mehmet and Cenan because I think they are extremely generous to want to hang out with me. I must be maddening to interact with. This is how conversations generally go: Mehmet will ask me some very simple questions, like how was my day or if the tea is nice. Then I stare at him with my head cocked to one side and my eyebrows furrowed as I try to assemble a Turkish sentence in my head. After an uncomfortable silence, the grammar of a two-year-old awkwardly stumbles out of my mouth, and I say triumphantly, “Iyi. Ben iyi!” Or, “I good!”

It might not be elegant, but I am very proud of this milestone in my language development, because I can now gruffly bark out infinitives, eschewing silly nuisances like prepositions and proper conjugations.

Two days before my grandparents come home from the summerhouse, I plop down at Mehmet’s little table by the ferry port with my heavy bags. I proudly point to my shopping bags and exclaim, “Aşure yapiyorum!” I’m making aşure!

My friends are clearly tickled by this, but they also look a little shocked. Perhaps I’m imagining it, but I think Cenan is skeptically eyeing my skinny jeans. Maybe my outfit doesn’t look Turkish, but I’m half-Turkish, I swear!

“Aşure? Sen?” he asks in disbelief. You?

“Yes! Yes! Fig, apricot, sugar, wheat, rosewater … uh-huh. Very big, this like!” I throw my arms out to the side. “Saturday! Saturday I bring. I bring! Okay, okay. I have to cook. Saturday!”

A “proper” Turkish girl

I’m pretty excited as I spread all of the ingredients out on the kitchen counter. I carefully measure out the sugar, water, and wheat, and put them in a big pot. A little bit later, I add the chickpeas and white beans I’ve been soaking for 24 hours. When I plop in the orange peel I have cut up, the kitchen starts to smell fruity and sweet. Now I have to start chopping the enormous pile of fruit and nuts. But the time is well spent because this is what you do to be a proper Turkish girl, right? You spend hours cooking aşure for elderly people and for ferry port boys.

Unfortunately, I have very little idea about what a “proper Turkish girl” would do. That identity has been worrying me since I arrived in Istanbul and noticed that I didn’t really fit my grandparents’ “proper Turkish girl” template. The primary thrust behind my aşure-fest is to attempt to be more of a proper young lady in my grandparents’ eyes, since I haven’t been fulfilling their expectations very well.

In the United States, I live in the liberal “la-la land” of San Francisco. I had some idea about what to expect from Turkey in terms of the food and the language, but I was unprepared for the behavioral expectations for Turkish ladies. The cultural expectations are significantly exacerbated by the fact that my grandparents have a very traditional perspective on feminine behavior. I have now come to think I’m supposed to stay home and read quietly with my grandparents, and only leave the house when accompanied by my grandfather. So now I think that if I partake in some very old Turkish traditions, I’ll show them I can be the kind of Turkish woman they expect and compensate for my not-so-demure disposition.

The problems seem to start with my fashion choices. For instance, people don’t really rock the faux hawk in Kanlica, especially among women. All the women have incredibly beautiful dark locks cascading midway down their backs. (Doesn’t anyone have bad hair days around here?)    

Unfortunately, it’s not just my brash haircut that sets me apart. I’ve managed to shock everyone in my family with my affinity for public transportation and my tendency to run all over Istanbul, visiting the historic sites … alone. As if that weren’t un-Turkish enough, my grandmother seems to have issues with the way I dress. She affirmed my suspicion that I’m not exactly feminine enough when she commented, “You have the pretty leg. You always wear the jean. You should wear the skirt.”

“Oh, yeah. You’re right, Anne Anne (grandmother), sure,” I replied as I looked in the mirror and self-consciously smashed down a flyaway hair on top of my boyish hairdo.

The proof is in the pudding

At first I was pretty frustrated with the generational friction between my grandparents and me, but I am really trying to take a deep breath and understand our differences as part of this experience.

That is why I am spending this Thursday evening standing over a steaming pot of ancient recipe, to hopefully channel my inner “good little Turkish girl.” Unfortunately, I accidentally botch the ingredient ratio, and the whole operation seems to have a texture problem; somewhere in this process I wind up with way too much water. Ay! I can’t believe I cockily promised the iskele boys this vat of pudding. I am never going to be able to walk past the ferry stop again.

Thankfully, Fatma, the lady who cooks and cleans for my grandparents, stops by the following day and fixes the consistency. But only after she cackles at me as I forlornly swing the fridge open and wail, “Aşure yapiyorum ama iyi değil! Bak!” I’m making aşure, but it’s not good! Look! I also point at a set of jars on the top rack, telling her “…ve, turşu yapiyorum ama bunlar çok tuzlu!” And I’m making pickles, but they’re too salty!

Leave it to a jolly, aging Turkish lady in a long skirt to save a really hopeless batch of pudding. It takes Fatma 10 minutes to dump the aşure back into a big pot and cook out most of the extra water. Then she pours the mixture into individual bowls, covers them neatly with plastic wrap, and puts them back in the fridge.

As soon as the pudding cools, I run outside to the night guard with a dish and a spoon. He checked up on me when the water boy, Ali, suddenly became infatuated with me and started chasing me down on his scooter every morning, shouting, “Tea! Leyna! One minute! Tea with me tonight!” So he is first on my list of aşure recipients. "Buyrun! Aşure!” Here you go! Aşure!

Next, I take off for the ferry port with a bowl of aşure for Mehmet and Cenan. It’s such a small-town thing to be hand-delivering my homemade pudding. I am even using glass dishes because I know that each of the recipients will wash and return them. The guys are really nice about the gift, but Cenan mentions the extra water more than once. I get pretty defensive and reply that it’s my first time and that I will make it again.

The real test is my grandmother. When she comes home the following day, she does her usual once-over of the house. I can see the wheels in her head turning. Are the counter tops sticky? Nope, clean! Are the flowers in the garden blooming? She opens the back door and walks along a row of green bushes. No, they seem to be taking their time. She goes back into the kitchen. Have the dishes been washed? Yes! Everything looks very orderly.

Once my grandmother completes her ritual, I tell her about the pudding and open the refrigerator. “From a package?” she asks. I put my hand on my chest in mock horror. “No, no, no. I made this aşure from scratch! I went to every store! I bought almonds, figs, apricots — everything. Fatma helped, but only a little tiny bit.”

“Oh Leyna, you are something,” she says, shaking her head. “This is not the easy!”

I shrug and bat my eyelashes. “It’s not hard,” I tell her. “I just had to ask around for the different ingredients.” 

My grandparents leave Istanbul for the winter shortly after I present them with the pudding. They were really worried when they left me alone before, but they seem a little less reticent this time. I think I managed to prove myself by running all over town to find the ingredients for my aşure. Clearly if I am capable of handling the ingredient hunt, I will be able to survive the remainder of my stay in Turkey alone.

In terms of the proper Turkish girl idea, I hope I demonstrated that I am not a complete savage. Okay, I admit that my hair is not always perfectly kempt, and I’m balancing precariously between being not quite Turkish and not quite American. But it’s not always easy trying to figure out where you belong. For the moment, I think it’s perfectly fine if my identities blend in a way that is less than graceful and less than defined — just like my watery pudding.

Leyna Lightman

     As I step uncertainly through the doors beyond the Nothing to Declare lane, a catholicity of stimuli greets my senses. A sea of earth-toned faces of various gradations waits eagerly. Arab North Africans, dark-haired Andalucianos, and fair-skinned Vascos mix with expectant German and American tourists, completing a cultural mosaic. The dry, crisp smell of winter hits my nose, making it tingle slightly. I think I am already engulfed, when suddenly I hear it: the deep, sonorous music of words. 

    It slides off tongues quickly, but consciously, pointedly. It lacks the song-like sprightliness of Swiss-French and the sharp, long tones of Swiss-German. Dialogue now has a smooth, rich molasses quality; it clings to the ears like the lingering aftertaste of a robust red wine on an attune palate.

   “Querida mía, hace mucho tiempo.”
   “Hola guapa, que tal?”
   “Como fue tu viaje cariño?” 
   I am inundated, overwhelmed, enraptured.

    In Salamanca, Spain, I was una americana to the Spaniards, “so Euro” to the Americans, and to the three Gabonese in the entire city, I was une Camerounaise—une belle café au lait, that they would gladly bring home to Mom and Dad. My identity shifted constantly, based on the story I told people. When I felt like being adventurous, I laid it all out—a ten-minute saga describing my Cameroonian origins and upbringing, my current dual residency in Geneva and Providence, and the fact that I now simultaneously call three continents home.

    Other times, surrounded by scrutinizing Spaniards who claimed “hablas muy bien para una americana,” I claimed Boston as my home turf, although I have never lived there, and neither of my parents are from there. Given my time at Brown University, only fifty short minutes from the city, and the many summers I escaped Cameroon to find solace in Boston’s commercialized downtown districts, I figured I could make this slight breach of the truth. Mom often attested that she was from Boston when questioned. Although she was born in Georgia and lived most of her life outside North America, “Boston is the place where I spent the most time within the U.S.” she would justify. Calling it my own didn’t seem too far-fetched, I decided. —

    When I felt like being exotic, I snobbily expounded on my life in Geneva with tales of Gruyère and Vacherin fondue savored with Chasselas wine, indulgent soirees at expensive Swiss night clubs, and daytrips through the Alps. With these slightly fictionalized accounts, I dazzled the Americans, coloring their pre-existing fantasies of Europe as a bastion for cultural and gastronomic excellence.

    But encountering sub-Saharan Africans in Salamanca made me squirm.

    “Mais, tu parles français avec un accent américain? Et la langue de ton pere?“ they would ask, as if my seventeen years in Cameroon and native Cameroonian father guaranteed that I would speak French and the language of my father’s ethnic group perfectly. The backlog of memories from my upbringing in an isolated international, largely American, community in the heart of Yaoundé would stream before me, strangling my tongue. I didn’t speak perfect French, or my father’s Bamileke language, because  we spoke English at home. And so that was my final answer.

    Whenever I came into contact with Cameroonians the realization that I was half-white often emerged amid these heated cultural discussions, often followed by a barrage of professions of love and marriage proposals.  To these I simply answered no, in Spanish, the language that helped erase some of the societal barriers that threatened to separate us extranjeros. Most often it served to unite us across cultures, creeds and colors in our new country.

    As I grappled with my identity, for perhaps the first time since freshman year—when I was encouraged to associate and self-identify based on my race—I  had to recall my personal mission for my study abroad. My desire to experience Spain was the primary objective, and although this understanding would be colored by culture and identity, I would not allow these issues to obfuscate that goal.

    The truth is that I am an amalgamation of all these cultures, each subsequent experience in my life shedding a little piece of itself into my collective identity. Pooled together, these seemingly disparate parts have become the all-encompassing me.

  ***

    It has been three months since my American comrades and I have hit Iberian soil, and tonight we have begun yet another noche de fiesta.

   We sashay along, Marlboro Lights in hand, teeth tinged blue by cheap Ribero wine, swaying to the music in our heads. Passing by O’Hares we laugh at the American mini-circles of exclusion, holding the walls for balance against the turbulent forces of legal drinking. We smirk at the Spaniards calling out their piropos to us with that sensually slurred manner, undoubtedly attributable to the calimocho we have all been drinking for hours. I am sloppily reflecting on the lewd, wine-savoring stereotypical Castellanos before us, the kind we hear about from politically correct northeastern American tourists returning from their first European vacations, utterly scandalized. And then, puzzlingly, I am gripped by something.   

    There is something all too familiar about los Castellanos, both men and women. It is an indescribable, amorphous passion for life that one cannot fully describe and must simply be experienced. It is something that many Americans are removed from in their commercialized, commoditized lives-on-the-go and something many Europeans tend to regard as inappropriately effusive in societies where emotions are expressed through a veil of reservation.

    It is a fervor that reminds me of the countless celebratory, makossa music-infused Cameroonian nights, garnished with bitter plums, ndolé greens and rice, topped off with palm wine. I remember the numerous troops of joggers who would trot by our school in Yaoundé singing in harmonious tones almost unaware of their beautiful sound; the creativity of the little boys in my quartier, who would use metal and rubber from old flip-flops to create trucks and cars to play with. I am taken back to the cries that would shake the valley when a goal was made or missed during a Cameroonian football game and the pride with which Cameroonians embrace their culture—seeking out occasions to speak their native tongues, wearing their traditional clothes in cultures of suffocating uniformity and commercialism, gaining simple happiness by meeting other Africans in foreign lands, and artfully recreating customs and traditions through music, food, and art. The Cameroonian and African zest for life is something that I had never seen reproduced so powerfully in any other country.

    But Spain embraces its own customs as fervently and passionately as Cameroonians. I was taken aback each time I observed the multitude of older men sitting in plazas sipping on cafes con leche and tortilla espanola while reading El País; the way the city shuts down at two p.m. and everyone goes home for the sacred family lunch, followed by the religiously-observed cena six hours later; the constant responses of no pasa nada and tranquila which categorize the Spanish mentality; the tapas bars and vinotecas bursting with people eating, conversing, watching their favorite teams battle it out in La Liga, and of course the passionate, drunken uprisings upon each potentially goal-resulting flick of the foot. This lifestyle, and the way los Castellanos embrace it, strikes a deep chord in me; it resonates and harmonizes with the other facets of my identity. It is as if somehow a piece of Cameroon has nuzzled its way into mi Salamanca, this tiny diverse town.
   

     Mom always remarked on the dancing at parties thrown by her African friends. People were never shy; everyone was extremely outgoing and eager to move. Whereas at parties sponsored by her white American friends, people had to be pried off their chairs and lured to the dance floor, or jostled out of their comfortable chatting circles after one too many beers. This memory comes to me as I sit at the bar at Capitoleum, surrounded by eager Castellanos trying to chat up my friends and me. I am amused. As a short, dark-haired Andaluciano approaches me, I smile. He thinks I’m flirting with him, but I’m really smiling at the memory, lifted from the rest,  rising to the forefront of my mind. “Anímate, be alive,” he encourages. He is aggressive, nearly knocking me off my chair with his forceful, tugging hands. As we rise and join the stream of dancers, I lose myself in exuberance.

Glossary

Spanish terms:

“Querida mía, hace mucho tiempo.” – Darling, it has been awhile.
“Hola guapa, que tal?” – Hello gorgeous, how are you?
“Como fue tu viaje cariño?”  – How was your trip, sweetie?
Una Americana – an American woman
“Hablas muy bien para una Americana” – You speak Spanish well for an American woman
Extranjeros – foreigners
Piropos – cat calls and flirtatious comments
Calimocho – typical Spanish drink made of beer and red wine
Los Castellanos – Spanish people
Cafes con leche – coffee with milk
Tortilla Espanola – Spanish dish made of eggs, onions and potatoes
El País – Spanish periodical
Cena – dinner
No pasa nada/tranquila – don’t worry about it
Vinotecas – wine bars
Salamanca – small town in Central-West part of Spain

French terms:

Une Camerounaise – a Cameroonian woman
Une belle café au lait – a beautiful coffee with milk
Gruyère and Vacherin – two types of cheeses native to Switzerland
Chasselas wine – typical Swiss wine often eaten with fondue
“Mais, tu parles français avec un accent américain? Et la langue de ton pere?” – But you speak French with an American accent. And what about your father’s language?
Bamileke – Language spoken by the Bamileke people of Western Cameroon
Makossa – type of music popular in Cameroon
Ndolé – Cameroonian dish made of greens and bits of beef
Quartier – neighborhood

In The Fray Contributor

I’m a white American, so I suppose that immediately means I have this great white privilege, like I got a VIP card in the mail or something. Let me say, to start, that I absolutely believe that racism is still around. Institutionalized racism and white privilege are both very real in modern American society. I’m not denying that at all.

I’m uncomfortable being associated with white privilege, because I wasn’t born here. In fact, I’m a refugee.

I came from Poland to America as a baby. In my early days, we lived in Section 8 housing and my mother worked at a Kmart in the ghetto. It was I who taught my mother how to drive: Along with English, driving really stumped her. I had to learn the fundamentals from our teacher in English and then drive around yelling “CLUTCH!” in Polish. I also translated for my grandma when she lived with us. We went to refugee groups with the Vietnamese, and attended “poor” family activities at the YMCA.

At about seven years old, I remember riding the bus with my mother with an incredible tension inside me. My mother had taken the civil service exam and aced it. Having studied half a dozen languages growing up, she found written English far easier than spoken. Now she was going to find out if she had landed a job at the post office. In our home country she had a job as a newspaper editor, and now our only salvation was the post office.

She got it and has worked there for over 20 years now. The reliable pay and good benefits of that government job slowly pulled us out of our lives as poor immigrants. I went to Catholic school, where I was ostracized for my Nutella “chocolate sandwiches” and thrift store clothes. She eventually pushed me to go to a “fancy” private university, where I felt very out-of-place among the 98 percent very rich, very white population. I hung out with the poor kids on scholarship like me. My best friends were a black woman from Atlanta and a redneck from Mississippi.

I was hurt when my black friend started hanging out with the girls in the black sorority. They and the other minority students in my junior high and high schools got to bond in their ethnic clubs once a month.

From kindergarten through 12th grade, we spent half a year reading black history books and researching the Holocaust. To this day, I’ve only met two other Eastern European refugees. I’ve never learned in school about what happened to me and my family.

I’m white, right? I get a passing grade if not privilege.

As an adult, my skin color has allowed me to drop almost all issues of being an immigrant and of being poor, within a matter of years. I do get it: Fat people get hassled in grocery stores and restaurants because they can’t hide their weight. Black people get turned down for loans and jobs because they can’t hide their skin color. Fourth-generation Americans get pulled over by airport security for “looking like” terrorists. My Asian friends, despite saying they are from America or Canada, get asked, “But where are you from originally?”

By contrast, I tell people I wasn’t born here and “that’s right, I’m a stealth foreigner, here to take your jobs.” Sure, there’s no big “FOREIGNER” stamp on my forehead, but sometimes I want to share in that struggle with my fellow “underclass.” That’s why I live in Harlem and eat in Greenpoint.

I feel as if I spent my childhood with all the poor immigrants and at some point in my teens someone ran in and said, “Wait! Dear God, what’s a trustworthy, white American girl doing mixed in with these people?”

There are snobby, rich people in every country, but I always found it somewhat sweet that so many wealthy people in the United States are completely egalitarian. Even as they earn six figures, most “middle-class” friends of my mother and me are quick to defend the fact that they work, have only part-time cleaning services, and that their kids’ cars are used.

My fiancé’s family is fairly well-off, though I suppose they’re still middle-class by American standards. They’ve only had positive things to say about my family’s early struggles, and openly embrace the color I bring to their lives. I imagine it is taboo in their culture to consider themselves above people like me.

Still, the other day we were driving through Connecticut, and I mentioned that my cousin lived and worked there.

“Illegally?” my fiancé asked, and I murmured an affirmative. There was no judgment, just surprise. Just a bit of weight in the air between us, as my other life — the life of a poor refugee — drifted into the car and sat between us. It left quickly though.

We were a nice white couple driving through Connecticut, after all.

Rose Symotiuk

“How is it that you do not have any children, Jennifer?”

I thought about it for a second, bewildered. It was a question I’d never been asked before, considering that I was 27 and not yet married. Then again, this was the first time that I’d made polite conversation at a party in Uganda, a country where most women are married by age 17 and the average woman has seven kids.

I visited Uganda last December to attend meetings for a reproductive health network in East Africa as part of my work for a Washington, D.C. nonprofit that advocates for women’s reproductive health issues. It was my first time in Africa and only my second time abroad, so to say that I wasn’t sure what to expect was the understatement of the century. I imagined exploring local villages, visiting health clinics, and meeting the people that my organization supported. Instead, it was day four and all I’d seen was the over-air-conditioned conference room of my hotel, where I’d sat in all-day meetings discussing policy with regional officials. Not exactly the eye-opening experience I’d been expecting. A conference room is a conference room, no matter what part of the world it’s in.

But things were looking up now that I’d finally been let out of the hotel. Our meetings were over; I still had three days in Kampala ahead of me, and our Ugandan hosts were throwing a party to celebrate all our hard work. In the United States, business meetings end with a handshake and the mutual signing of contracts; in East Africa, they end with a party, complete with a DJ, an open bar, and dancing. In another stark contrast to American business practices, the guests at this party actually let loose and had a good time. This was no stuffy affair filled with empty speeches and pretense; this party was truly an opportunity to break out of the rigid formality of our meetings and “get to know each other as brothers and sisters,” as one of the group’s leaders explained it. It looked like I was finally about to learn more about the country that I’d flown halfway around the world to experience.

We were still in a hotel, but this one was a little more inviting than the one I was staying in. The party was in a third-floor party room, complete with a beautiful veranda overlooking a garden. Brilliant fuchsia blossoms bloomed from vines twisting around the veranda’s railing, and you could hear the steady hum of insects mingling with the distant roar of Kampala’s ever-present traffic jam. We all converged at the veranda’s bar, tipping back our heads to drink to the success of our meetings.

Throwing myself headfirst into the festivities, I started chatting with a group of young government officials who were more than eager to tell me more about life in Uganda. Twenty minutes later, I somehow got caught up in a conversation about the state of my fertility with Joseph, a short Ugandan man with piercing brown eyes and a boyish grin. I told him I was getting married in April and that I was waiting to have children until I was ready. “I guess America is different,” I said. “A lot of American women like to wait until we’ve experienced life and had a career before we get married and start a family.”

Joseph was incredulous. He shook his head slowly, convinced that I was putting a happy face on my clear failures as a woman. He looked so sad for me that I started trying to convince him that I really was happy. How did I get to the point in my life where I had to defend my life decisions to a guy at a party in Kampala? “So, how many kids do you have?” I asked playfully, trying to turn the conversation back to him.

“Only five. Three girls and two boys.”

“Only five? Sounds like a lot to me.” I was pretty sure that Joseph was younger than I was. How did he have five kids already?

“Is not so many, my brother has eight. I have to catch up!” Joseph wasn’t joking.

“So, who is taking care of them right now?” (It was 10 o’clock on a Wednesday night.)

“They are with their mothers.” Mothers. Slowly I teased out of him that he was married, but also had kids with a mistress. Not only that: He spent a few nights a week going out dancing and drinking without his wife, but not without female companionship, if you catch my drift.

I made the joke that if my fiancé did that, he wouldn’t be my fiancé anymore. “Why not?” he asked. Joseph was genuinely bewildered. The other people in our little group all stared at me like I was crazy. I was starting to feel like a judgmental prude.

“What is wrong with going out?” one woman asked me, curiously.

Good question. What was wrong with “going out” if both parties involved are okay with it? I’d read about infidelity in Ugandan culture and always imagined that it was the men who were “at fault” and the women were victims. Could it be that women were just as likely to be cheating? Was it really cheating, or did relationships just work differently here?

And that was when I realized that throughout our entire conversation, I’d been judging Joseph based on my American perceptions of how a relationship between a man and a woman should be. Now, I don’t know what Joseph’s wife thought about his infidelity, or if she even knew about it, but after talking to a dozen different people of both genders at this party, I did know that Ugandans had a very different stance on infidelity. And these were the people who worked in reproductive health, the people who know that having multiple concurrent partners raises the risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease and who had devoted their careers to educating their peers of this fact.
 
By assuming that a woman should be offended (if not incensed) by her partner’s infidelity, I was viewing Joseph’s relationship through a lens tinted with my own cultural biases. Even worse, it was keeping me from really understanding what it was like to live in Kampala, which was the whole point of my trip.

I felt like the people I hated: Americans who travel abroad and then spend the entire time limiting their experience to fit preconceived notions of how things should be, rather than opening their minds to new adventures, new friendships, and a greater understanding of the world. Traveling in a self-contained bubble isn’t any different from staying home; by filtering your experiences, you aren’t really experiencing anything.

So I smiled and said, “Nothing’s wrong with going out, it’s between you and your wife.” The group of us then took a shot of what Joseph called Ugandan Orange, a very strong whiskey-like liquor distilled from oranges, and I left the rest of my preconceptions at the bar. The music started pumping loudly from the dance floor — it’s not an African party if there isn’t dancing, I learned — and we all hit the dance floor, singing along to Madonna’s “Holiday.” (Knowing all the words made me quite the popular dance partner!) We stood in a circle, teaching each other dance moves and laughing the night away, forgetting the ways we were different and relaxing into our new friendships, all to an ’80s pop soundtrack.

In one night of drinking and dancing in Kampala, I learned more about what it was like to live there than I did during the entire first half of my trip. More importantly, by shedding some of my preconceived notions, I was able to view the rest of my trip through the eyes of Joseph and my other new friends, opening myself to really learning about the country and its people.

I might not have been in what my new friends would have called a happy “relationship,” but the men and women I danced with that night sure were. After all, who am I to judge? I’m 27 and I don’t even have any children yet!

Jennifer Lee Johnson