Who you callin' immigrant?!

After I posted a link to this blog on Facebook (an addiction from which I am slowly recovering) I got a few short notes on my wall from friends also dwelling in foreign lands. It might sound odd to some but, having lived in Helsinki now for as long as I lived in Toronto, and not having lived in my hometown outside Edmonton for more than 10 years, it is difficult to really say where I'm "from" any more. Add that to the mountain of paperwork involved in moving home with my foreign man and I start to feel like an immigrant to my own country.

True, I could come home any time I wanted, no questions asked, if I were alone. But since I'm not, coming home is actually rather complex -- and not just bureaucratically. Anyone who's ever lived abroad for any period of time knows how it feels to find yourself wholly out of context, without the family, friends, job, language, etc. that define you -- a definition that you don't even really realize until it's gone -- and what sort of task it is to rebuild your identity from the ground up. To use a violent metaphor, it's like growing a new skin. Until it's completed, you feel uncomfortable often and sometimes intensely so. I am an invisible minority here, since I look "typically Finnish" (ie. white, blonde) but, at least in the beginning, as soon as I opened my mouth my outside-ness was revealed. (Now I can hold off for 20 mins or so before running out of words.) I still don't read Hesari (although I do use the slang name for it) and I can't follow a lot of politics because the vocabulary is still inscrutable to me. But I can follow a conversation among friends and I've lost all fear of making an ass of myself in public - one of the 12 steps for any adult language learner.

Now coming back, I expect that both Mr. O and I will go through the same process all over again; definitely for Mr. O, who has spent time in TO but never lived there, but also for me, if in a muted measure. I wonder how Toronto will feel, old and new again, what neighborhood will appeal to us now, in 2007, compared to where I liked to hang out as a 21-year-old in 2000. The last few times we visited I was flushing mad to lose my bearings in TTC stations and even on Bloor Street -- humiliating for a girl who took pride in knowing all the best bike lanes (all the way down St. George -- no lights!) and afterhours on offer in the late 90s. And I know my immigrant experience here has certainly changed my outlook on how nationality and language as well as appearance influence identity. My husband has a name mostly unpronounceable by English-speakers, and if and when we ever have kids their names will likely strike some kind of compromise between the vowel-heavy phonetics of Finnish and the wooden Anglo tongue. Does that make me an immigrant? When do you start belonging to the place where you live, and stop belonging to the place where you were born?