East West - The Asian American Lifestyle Magazine

By Kamala Kirk

            I stood at the entrance of the building, staring past the iron gates as dozens of non-smiling, uniformed students pushed past me in a rush to get to class on time. It was my first day at a Taiwanese junior high, and even though it wasn’t my first stint as the new kid at a foreign school, for some reason my uncertainty and nervous hesitation was intense. The first day of school is hard enough on its own, but going to a school in a foreign country where you don’t speak a single word of the language is beyond petrifying. All I wanted to do at that very moment was turn around, get back on the bus and return to the safety and security of our ninth floor high rise apartment in downtown Taipei.

            My parents felt that by sending me to a Taiwanese school they were helping with my assimilation into the local culture. They thought that I would be at a disadvantage if I went to the private expatriate school because what was the point in moving halfway across the globe if I never bothered to interact with the host culture? We knew too many individuals that had lived in Asia for years, yet they never learned a single word of the local dialect and always dined at McDonalds. My parents wanted me to be different; they wanted me to stand out. But standing out, at that moment in the schoolyard, was definitely not what I wanted.

            Taiwan was completely foreign to me. Chopsticks in lieu of silverware, turning down compliments instead of accepting them and bringing gifts to a person’s home every time you visited were just a few of the necessary adjustments. Over the course of a 14-hour plane ride, my life had changed in every possible way, and I unfortunately had little time to adapt.

            Walking across campus with every pair of eyes on you can be a daunting and intimidating experience, especially when you’re 13 years old. It didn’t help that I was already going through my own episode as a self-conscious adolescent. I looked around me in desperate search of a friendly face, a smile, anything. I was quite disappointed, to say the least. And I, in turn, felt somewhat foolish, walking across campus with a false smile plastered across my face. I was simply attempting to follow the advice my mother had given me years before: when things get awkward, smile. No matter where you are, a smile will always be understood. A smile is universal. At that very moment in time, however, I felt my mother’s advice had expired.

            On top of it all, my mind was racing with questions and concerns typical of any 13-year-old on the first day of school: where would I sit at lunch? Who would I talk to? Not to mention, how would I make friends when I didn’t even speak the language? My heartbeat quickened, and I felt a nervous sweat creep up on me. Still, I did my best to maintain a calm and poised exterior so as not to let my guard down and reveal to others just how scared I truly was.

            When the teacher introduced me to the class as the “American girl,” 10 sets of hands immediately shot up. Some students had questions, others wanted to practice their English with me. Because I didn’t speak much Chinese yet, I communicated with the other students via hand motions mixed in with broken English and Chinese. Despite the attention, I wasn’t sure how much of it was positive. It was almost as if they weren’t sure what to make of me and I was being examined. Then again, who could blame them? After all, I was the first American ever to attend the school. So essentially, we were all first timers. 

            Then, from across the room, a Taiwanese classmate suddenly smiled at me, and my nerves were instantly calmed. For a suspended moment in time we connected, and despite cultural and language barriers, we were sharing something in common. And as usual, my mother was right. A smile does make a difference. Perhaps Taiwan wasn’t going to be so bad after all. 

Kamala Kirk grew up accompanying her linguist father as his career took the family all across the world, and, by all definitions, Kirk was a Third Culture Kid—a child who has spent a significant amount of time in one or more cultures other than her own, mixing elements of those cultures and her own birth culture into a third culture. Today, she continues to experience global wanderlust and is currently working on a novel about the third culture experience.