First there is Istanbul, the city that contains two continents, the oft-said meeting ground of East and West. Then there is the Bosporus with its divided current: the top, fresh water flowing south; the bottom, salt water flowing north. And finally there is me. Turkish father, American mother. Born in Istanbul, raised in Pennsylvania. From one angle, an American born in Turkey, from another angle, a Turk who immigrated to America.
I should add there is also my brother, built of the same parts.
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First there is a man and a woman, each curious about the other, more curious about the other than about themselves. Perhaps they are looking for a way out (my mother, let’s say) or they are looking for a way in (my father, let’s say), but perhaps they just like each other and their differences aren’t enough to stop their liking.
One way or another they are the beginning.
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What are you? people say, confronted with my American face and my Turkish name.
Half, I say.
Half of me left home at four years old, the other half returned home.
I’ve always thought of myself as half, have always described myself as half. But what does that label do to me? Other people say mixed, but they don’t usually mean mixed. They don’t mean ingredients blended into a new whole. They mean a person divided. But am I divided?
46.7 percent Anatolian on 23 and Me.
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In my childhood basement, we had half a ping pong table—a remnant of the whole ping pong table that was in my mother’s basement when she was a child. I have half my mother’s childhood.
But does that mean I am divided?
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I’m not the only one, of course. So many of us are this and that, from here and there. Half, mixed, both. In between.
What could we call ourselves? Generation Keanu?
Not a third culture kid but a third culture.
Not the 1.5 generation but American 2.0.
My friend, a poet, tells me I am an Amerigrant. Which sounds a bit like an airline.
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We arrived in the night.
Early morning, my mother corrects.
We took a taxi.
A van, she says. Driven by some college-looking kid trying to make cash to get to NJ. We had to throw pebbles at the window to wake your grandparents.
I remember people in bathrobes with messy hair answering the door.
That’s right, the pebbles were the time before, when we visited.
I don’t remember visiting.
You weren’t alive yet.
You said we.
You weren’t alive yet!
I stepped into a life that was waiting for me. My American side. The we that was waiting for me.
You forgot Turkish in two weeks.
I remember drinking soda on the plane. And you bought me Fuzzy Felts at the airport.
That was in Amsterdam.
Why did we leave Kıbrıs behind? And her kittens?
I don’t want to talk about that.
Where did you leave them?
I’m not talking about that.
Did I miss my friends? Did I miss Nene?
No.
Nobody?
Nobody.
I guess I forgot.
I took you and your brother to Topkapi so you wouldn’t forget that.
We forgot.
You forgot.
I still have that dagger from the gift shop though.
That belongs to your brother.
Who buys a six-year old a dagger?
He wouldn’t leave the country without it.
Maybe he thought he needed it.
Maybe he did.
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My first night in America I had a nosebleed so voluminous I had to be stood in the bathtub while my mother called the doctor. I find it satisfying that my American arrival was marked in such a dramatic, but not deadly way.
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In Turkey, at least so I am told, my mother used to take my brother and me (and all of my imaginary friends) to the park and when we headed home, inevitably I would insist I had left one friend behind, and back we would go to retrieve them.
Let us assume based on later behavior that I actually wasn’t worried about leaving anybody behind; I just didn’t want to leave the park.
What a little jerk I was.
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There are two stories, the creative writing teacher says.
1. A stranger comes to town
2. A hero goes on a journey.
But I can tell you, for I too am a creative writing teacher, that those are the same story just told from a different point of view.
My mother went on a journey: Philadelphia to Istanbul. Nine years. My father came to town: Istanbul to Philadelphia. 43 years until the day he died.
But when the point of view is mine, does that make my mother a hero and my father a stranger?
Sometimes. It definitely does sometimes.
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I may have immigrated to America (the toddler-citizen with two hundred years of my family’s American history in my suitcase) (the toddler-stranger coming to town) (the toddler-hero on a journey) but it’s only when I think of moving to Turkey that I understand the immigrant—so often without language, without history, without friends, without a clear future. The thought of moving to Turkey terrifies me.
At age three, I famously insisted, and I mean really insisted, on dropping out of my Turkish pre-school, Yuva, a word that translates to nest. It’s hard to imagine a pre-school-drop-out, someone who could not survive in The Nest, faring well in life.
It’s probably best that I left the country.
It occurred to me only very recently (by which I mean my mother explained to me very recently) that I may have hated Yuva because I didn’t really speak Turkish. My home life was a fluid motion of resorting to English for some words and Turkish for others. At Yuva, I would have been expected to speak Turkish all of the time and I would have been spoken to only in Turkish. Yuva may well have been a place where I was an immigrant in my own country, unable to speak the language. Half a Turk even when Turkey was the only place I had ever lived.
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For me to be born, my father had to go west, and my mother had to go east. Each crossing the Bosporus along the way.
Crossing the Bosporus has always been important. Wars fought and all that.
The one thing my parents had in common was that they each rejected their own identity and sought the complications of the other’s.
The thing I am most curious about, in all of life, is my parents’ lives without me, before me. The two lives that created me. And I should add, my brother.
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In the Metamorphoses, Io was
- turned to a cow by Zeus (because he “loved” her)
- given as a gift to Hera (who had her suspicions)
- guarded by Argus
- who was killed by Hermes
- leaving Io to wander the earth
- until she swam the Bosporus
- and was made whole again.
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“She was different than all the other girls,” my father said of my mother.
“I liked the way he ate an egg,” my mother said of my father.
“I liked the way she tied her shoes,” my father said
of my mother
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Tap tap tap all around the egg with the back of your spoon until you can take the top off then scoop out the soft center.
Loop, loop, knot. Loop, loop, knot.
Of course, I tie my shoes the way my mother does.
Of course, I eat an egg the way my father did.
But neither of them loved me for that.
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When I was in elementary school my father went back to Turkey for an indefinite period of time. I refused to answer any of his letters or speak to him on the phone.
He came back.
I suppose I am telling you this because I believe my behavior brought him back. Except of course surely it was so much more complicated than that.
In fact, he left and came back several times in the years to come.
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When you’re half, losing a parent can feel like losing an entire country. When my father died a few years ago, it felt like what Turkishness I had went with him.
Sometimes I feel like Peter Pan trying to sew my shadow back on. I’m complete without it, except I’m not.
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Half suggests even. Proportional. But I am not. Unless you consider me half mystery and half a lot of available paperwork. Half ancestors I can’t name, don’t share a language with, and can’t even imagine. The other half ancestors who left behind so much of themselves that 100,000 papers ended up in the American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia and that’s not half of it.
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Half means I can stand on one side of the self and wonder about the other and vice versa.
Mixed means I can stand one foot on each side and wonder about the whole world.
Both means I am two things undivided, simultaneous.
I don’t feel like any of that.
When Michael Ondaatje uses mongrel, I don’t mind. I feel like a mongrel. One of a kind.
(Except, I should add, for my brother.)
My favorite dessert is the Dairy Queen blizzard. A blend of ice cream and candy. Maybe that’s me, maybe that’s us: The Blizzard.
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By the time I was eight, I’d spent half of my life in Turkey and half in the United States. But it felt like I had spent my entire life in the United States. This, in my experience, is how halves work. As whole.
When I was eight did I remember being four? Was I more Turkish at five? Less so at six? Was I haunted by memories—by things left behind, family and friends left behind—ever? Or was it always this: a curiosity rather than a longing.
Is that why I find it so easy to walk away?
Part of being half is not being sure what I’m missing.
Part of being half is believing in the possibility of ghosts but never having proof. Part of being half is wanting proof.
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I was born a border crosser—a citizen of the U.S. and a citizen of Turkey, by parentage by geography by law—yet having crossed, I built a border up behind me. Or maybe it wasn’t me—maybe the choices of my family, my school, the ease of assimilation built the borders. But still they are there. Sometimes.
In this corner my great-grandfather, a kadi in the late Ottoman Empire. In this corner, my great grandfather, Thomas Wistar Brown III, a descendant of Robert Livingston who helped draft the Declaration of Independence.
I may have been born a hybrid but what I went through was a metamorphosis.
Sometimes I need checkpoints rubber stamps and passports to cross between the halves of myself.
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When Turks approach me, I literally put my hands up and back away. If I was smart, I would learn to say “I don’t speak Turkish” in Turkish.
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One time I went to Turkey and the Turkish border guard tried to let me in without an American visa. He said my name, he said born in Istanbul, he gestured for me to cross.
“I need a visa,” I said, unwilling to move. “Where do I get the visa?”
Finally a Turk who spoke perfect English helped me.
I entered Turkey as an American so that I could safely come back home again.
One of the clichés of mixedness is that we are forever without a home, forever without a people. The infertile donkeys of the well-bred world. But my father never felt at home anywhere. Me, I’m happy wherever I am. Is that his Turkish melancholy? Is that my mixed flexibility?
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I am the American-citizen-immigrant, the Turkish émigré American. I land here and there without ever feeling the need to stay. My brother on the other hand has never left the town where the four of us landed. My brother has the same halves as me, but he came out different. When we divided the world between us he got science fiction, physics, board games, and cats. I got dogs, shyness, and writing.
My mother would tell you that my brother is also shy.
Why don’t I believe it?
Perhaps because a big brother is always the braver one.
He’s also two years more Turkish than me.
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When you’re half, telling someone your name can feel like a pledge of allegiance. Usually it’s the opening to an interrogation conducted by police who think they are being friendly.
“When I named you I thought we were staying,” my mother says. But if we’d stayed I would probably long for an American name to attach me to that homeland that I never knew. As it is, my name is an anchor, a link, a hold on the country that we left; and I would never give it up.
When English sailors became Muslim (they had their reasons) they were said to be Turning Turk.
There are lots of things that turn the dial on my Turkishness. In Turkey, among Turks, I am less Turkish. When discussing my book of Turkish-American short stories I am more Turkish. When amongst mixed people I feel more mixed. But among other Turkish-American mixes I feel less Turkish. Inevitably I find a way to believe I am less Turkish than they are. I even think I am less Turkish than my brother because he looks like our father and I look like our mother. Even my American mother is more Turkish than me. She speaks Turkish. She lived in Turkey five more years than I did.
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“Your father wasn’t very Turkish,” my mother has been known to say. “He was a Robert College Turk,” she says, which is to say he was a Turk taught by Americans.
I guess we’re all mixed a little bit.
Listen I know how this sounds—like maybe I am embarrassed by myself, a self-loathing Turk. But if anything I am a self-loathing non-Turk, embarrassed by what I lack.
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If anything, really, I am half book. I am half Jo March’s burnt manuscript and the other half her cut hair. I am half the enormous N.C. Wyeth paintings made for TREASURE ISLAND that I saw in the Brandywine River Museum and half the image of the Wicked Witch of the West melting on a page of THE WIZARD OF OZ, a page which my mother was not allowed to turn in my presence. I am half the sketch of Mr. Tumus and the lamppost at the start of Narnia and half the Turkish Delight which lures Edmund to the White Witch. I am half the CAPITAL LETTERS with which Owen Meany speaks and the other half the CAPITAL LETTERS with which Harriet the Spy speaks.
Will you believe me when I say I am good at fractions?
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Some days I accept being both. Bothness makes me believe that being a Turk has made me a better American, and that being an American has made me a better Turk.
But when looking for an origin story, it can be hard to allow for the weaving of multiple strands.
Most days I don’t worry about it. Here I am. The everything-American. Why do I even want an origin story? What is it I am trying to figure out?
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I know I shouldn’t complain. I don’t look in the mirror and feel like parts of me are unrepresented and unseen. I have the big white head of my father and the exact features of my also white mother. Mixed for me is not much more than a split between my name and the body it doesn’t seem attached to.
And yet I can’t stop talking about it, my halfness.
I am not divided, I am not torn, but I am composed of two parts, each complete, that together make another whole.
My immigrant parent (father) loved Alfred Hitchcock, James Bond, and Steven Spielberg. My American parent (mother) insisted I do well in school, worried about my career in the arts, and suggested I go to business school.
I don’t fit stereotypes and neither do they.
I can be divided without being conflicted.
I had two parents whose curiosity for other cultures exceeded their love of their own.
I had two parents with borderless imaginations, who were drawn more to each other than to themselves—even though they fought all the time.
In the end, maybe I’ve made my home inside of what my parents could imagine. I am what my parents made. The blend that their marriage never really could be.
My brother is too.
Half mixed both everything.
Sort of.
For now.