Identity Crisis

I’m sure many of the students at ASL have moved around the world due to their parent’s job and have had to adjust to their new surroundings and culture. I have been moving to different places around the world since I was a baby and I can definitely say that moving is never easy. It sucks having to leave one place to another, saying goodbye to your family and friends, and leaving behind the good old memories and making new ones. Personally, the hardest thing for me when I moved from New York to Tokyo was finding my identity.

One of the toughest questions to answer is when people ask me where I am from. I lived in Indonesia for the first four years of my life, then moved back to Tokyo and spent three years, then moved to New York and spent seven years, then back to Tokyo for two years, and then here to London. It seems like a simple question but what’s the proper answer to that question?

Upon moving back to Tokyo from New York, I felt like a complete foreigner. I didn’t feel comfortable being in this new surrounding, I felt like I stood out from the crowd, and I didn’t feel like I blended in with the rest of the people. Attending an international school made it even harder for me to feel comfortable in the country where I was born and at times I felt like I was dishonouring my family because I would tell people that I was from New York, which to me back then seemed to be my home.

But when I moved to Europe in 2009, I was amazed to observe a melting pot of different ethnic groups: a sea of cultures ebbing and flowing through the city of London. This was the first time I felt comfortable with my identity because a few months after I moved to London, I began to miss everything about Japan and that’s when I realized my close attachment to Japan.

This identity crisis is something I share with the main character, Jasmine. Getting married young and being separated from her family at such a young age, she struggled with her thoughts about her identity. She was Jyoti to Hasnapur and Mataji but she soon became Jasmine to Prakash. But later when Hasnapur and Prakash died, she didn’t know who she was or what her purpose in life was.