XIV. On Being a Foreigner – Connections

I don’t mind being a foreigner at all – in fact, I find it very disconcerting to be in the company of people with whom I may share a superficial resemblance but whose worldviews usually diverge drastically from mine. This kind of dissonance strikes to the core of my being. Whether it concerns fundamental scientific understanding about how things work or a realization that other cultural perspectives (including those of different scientific cultures) might help to solve a problem, I have an aversive response to arrogance born of ignorance. On my first trip to Asia I commonly met people who measured their time away from their native countries in integer years; some for periods as long as thirty years. So, I found it comforting to know that being exposed to other viewpoints and being away from the “comforts of home” for so long was possible.

In the two years that I lived here in South India, from 1978 to 1980, events were playing out that have changed the world and have reshaped my life in fundamental ways. In 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the US began its misguided support of enemies of that regime that would lead to the rise of the Taliban and its oppression of free-thinking people of any gender and age (but especially young women) and support of despotic regimes in countries of the region whose only recommendation was that they were enemies of our enemy (or so they said). What began as our overthrow of democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and our subsequent installation of the regime of Mohammed Reza Pahleva as Shah of Iran ended with a coup that replaced that form of oppression with a fundamentalist theocracy 25 years later. That, in turn, set the stage for the empowerment of Saddam Hussein who received billions of dollars in military aid from the US back in the early 1980s when it was expedient to manipulate Iraq against Iran. Over the years I have met many casualties from that conflict. Africa had become a battleground of proxy wars, primarily for European powers and their vassal states in the Middle East, and one of these, in Uganda, was playing out for my mentor, Cole Dodge, and me.

When I left India to return to the States in the middle of 1980 after being here for a couple of years, I had this strange, paradoxical feeling that I was too comfortable being an ex-patriot. I modified my GTR (government travel request) so that I could ease back home through East Africa, Egypt, and Europe. In retrospect, this was a wonderful idea. Still, I had never before, nor have ever since, experienced the deep culture shock of returning to live in the U.S. in 1980. What got me through it were the very remarkable people (mainly other doctoral students and postdocs) that I met in Boston and at Harvard during that time. Many have remained close friends and one, in particular, has shared her experiences through 27 years of marriage.