I grew up going to commune-like public alternative schools, where children were allowed to chair school meetings and maintain a conviction that they were dinosaurs, and I used to wonder why my classmates were so much more homogeneous than the children I met in the park. We were mostly white kids whose families had been living in Canada for several generations.

I feel like being a foreigner in Chile is giving me a better understanding of the (obviously complex) reasons that my alternative schools were so lacking in diversity. You see, I haven’t worn my favourite coat since arriving in Chile. My favourite coat is bright red, with floral blue fabric quilted onto the front and an oversized hood. I bought it at a Buddhist temple rummage sale around the corner from my parents’ house; wearing it makes me feel a little like a manga-style Little Red Riding Hood. I confess that it probably qualifies as “quirky”.

In Toronto, I love romping around in this coat, getting glances from the denizens of my neighbourhood. In fact, I generally enjoy dressing and acting in a slightly unusual way. I like it when people read me as “alternative” or take note of me on the street. However, I think much of my enjoyment comes from the power I have in these interactions. Living in Santiago has taught me that it was almost always my choice to be inconspicuous.

As a foreigner, I no longer have that choice. It’s fitting that the Spanish word for foreigner (extranjera) nearly contains the word for strange (extraño). Most of my clothing choices are unusual here. My hair and skin colour make people notice me in the street. I stand out because I look confused all the time (usually because I am) and, whenever I open my mouth to speak, my terrible accent makes it obvious that I’m not from here. It’s a privilege to be able to choose to stand out and I’ve had that privilege without really appreciating it for most of my life.

I sometimes want to be private, to wander the streets of Santiago without turning heads, but I can’t change my confusion or my accent. I can change my wardrobe and, thus, I’ve folded up my favourite coat and put it away in my closet. It’s just not that much fun to wear weird clothes when people are already staring. I’d also guess that it’s not that much fun, in general, to make “alternative” choices- e.g. sending your children to alternative schools- when you’re already forced onto the fringe because of your accent or your heritage or your skin colour. I know there are probably many other factors that contributed to my homogeneous primary education, but I wanted to share this bit of new empathy.

Reposting from two years ago in Chile, this time with an illustration.

It took me some time to find my voice during my exchange to Chile in 2013. I decided during my first week in Santiago that I’d try to speak as little English as possible, forcing me to improve my Spanish. The consequence of my choice was that I often spoke hardly at all.

In English, I’m chatty to a fault. I have a prepunderance for cheesy wordplay and often interrupt people. In Spanish, by the time I connect my thoughts to the words that express them, the conversation has often leapt past me and onto a new topic. I was grateful for the patience of my Chilean friends, for their generous efforts to tease meaning from my garbled sentences.

I often explored Santiago in a drifting, introspective way. If I didn’t apply an extra mental push to bring form to the words spoken around me, I could exist in white noise. Then a scrap of English- Robin Thicke on the radio, subtitled reruns of Friends on TV- would slice through, remind me of how easy and inescapable understanding can be.

I think English is a uniquely inescapable language. In the seminar sessions of my physiology course, we had to present scientific papers to the class. All of the papers were in English. For a moment, I thought my classmates might secretly speak my language, but no. They just accepted that part of their science education required that they parse sentences about “the effects of maternal melatonin on gene expression in the fetal primate suprachiasmatic nucleus” in a foreign language. I tried to imagine a professor at Waterloo assigning readings in French to a second-year biology class; I doubt it would go well.

As the weeks of my exchange washed by, I felt less nostalgic for the ease of English. My voice in Spanish grew more confident. New phrases rose out of the city’s white noise. I jumped into conversations with my friends in time to earn a laugh. I can’t say that I feel fluent in Spanish, though. I still feel like a different person when expressed with its limitations, someone more quiet and less clever. Yet, what a privilege to have learned about this other person I can be.

I wrote this for my school’s blog after they requested something about exchanges, but they never posted it, so I’m putting it here instead!

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