Pre-travel jitters and more

Sometime in late June or early July, I’d booked a one-way ticket for Dhaka, Bangladesh to leave on August 13. Just in case a university position works out somewhere, I booked a refundable ticket and kept my fingers crossed. Things have been going downhill ever since my financial crisis began in early September last year. Since then, I’ve felt like I’ve been digging myself deeper into a hole while trying to dig myself out of that hole.

The closer the date comes to my flight date, the more sure I am that I am leaving, that nothing is going to work out in Iowa or even the Midwest and so, I continue to prepare accordingly for my departure. A depressing time but one which has to keep me active in taking care of my paperwork, travel shots, and other things while preparing myself mentally to leave.

I am definitely eager to see my mom and relatives since I haven’t seen them in years. I also want to see for myself how my birth country has changed over the past 20 years since I’ve been there last. I’ve found most satisfaction in knowing I can start my career there and be able to pay off the numerous loans I’ve accumulated over the past few years. I don’t have a job yet…but I will…soon. J

What is most painful is that I miss the States, my sister, all my friends, in particular, my closest friends, and also, living there on my own. Bangladeshi culture I expect to be totally opposite to how it is in Iowa, with one exception, strong family ties in which everyone is involved in everyone’s business because they’re all family.

Having lived on my own for the past two years, I’ve come to realize I want an independent life, one which involves me doing what I want and need for myself, not because I’m being told to do so by family. I was raised in the States. American culture is what I know and have experienced growing up, along with some Bangladeshi culture which my parents tried to instill in me. It worked somewhat. I never forgot how to speak in Bangla because they insisted on my speaking it at home.

Over the past twenty years, I’ve never felt my ties to Bangladesh to be that strong. Maybe I did feel them more so as a child because I returned there often. I had lived in and traveled back and forth between Bangladesh and the Middle East, namely, in Iraq and then Kuwait, for a couple of years each. I lived and traveled in Baghdad back when the US still supported Iraq and Saddam Hussein. No matter what, I never felt I had roots anywhere, and even though I had family to return to, I was used to being uprooted and felt out of place. Thus, after I moved away to Houston, my connections with my relatives, my uncles, aunts, cousins, and my grandmother became nearly zilch. We talked rarely and never knew each other.

The primary question most Bangladeshis have asked me over the years is “Don’t you miss Bangladesh?” No, not really. I don’t have roots there. I have memories, and my parents have roots there. My roots have grown deep in America, despite not legally belonging here. Also, I forgot how to write in Bangla a long time ago, within a couple of years after I arrived in the States. Still, like so many others, I’ve felt caught between two equally influential worlds. Not being able to find a place for myself in either one, I tried to bridge the two and then created a mixed one for myself.

For me, working in Bangladesh is something I have to do get myself out of the muck into which I’ve fallen. I want to return to America, and back to the Midwest into a Creative Writing program. That’s the area in which I want to be…writing and definitely in publishing. Whether I focus on and apply for a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program or in a Ph.D. program will depend on how my teaching career, if that is the area in which I land at here, changes my mind about being good at and enjoying teaching. If I hate it, then a Ph.D. is out of the question. I’d have to teach introductory writing courses as a MFA student but won’t consider teaching as a career.

I have come to realize that no one will understand what I want and what I need better than myself because only I understand my situation best, from the inside out. Everyone always has advice to give which, of course, they will, whether I want it or need it, or not. But at the same time, I understand that they are looking at the situation through their perspective and it’s colored with their experiences and their understanding of those experiences. Essentially, they have seen the world and do understand it, but there’s always more beyond what they’ve seen and know.