If you feel hated for being a foreigner, here’s what to do.
Admit that everyone is born foreign.
It’s normal to be a foreigner. I try to say this to myself every time I wake in Switzerland, hearing the rooster crow from the farmer’s house across the way, watching a dinosaur-sized stork whiz by, listening to the church bells over the lake, absorbing every tune of bird song into my tired body. Birth is living. It is waking to one more possibility of saying or doing something fine in the big sky we all share overhead. Every day we’re new, breathing in an hour that smells and tastes a little different if we decelerate our spinning minds enough to observe. And so it seems in this way we are always foreigners.
Yet some people say they want foreigners to go home. Like many of my “foreign” friends in Switzerland who hail from all over the world, this sentiment feels nothing like the good bird and bell kind of foreign. It simply feels bad like an unwanted weed or an invasive hedge. We try to ignore it on most days as we learn a new language or try a new way of eating warm cheese. We try to act as if we belong. Being hated for being foreign is a little like being hated for being — at all. It is a bridge burning over the idyllic lake beside which we all live, work, dream, and breathe.
By late morning on many spring weekends, I hear the laughter of a community comprised of several people who would prefer an American activist, talkative woman like me, with kids like mine— would go home. I know this fact because of the barbecues we aren’t invited to, the glares, stares, silence, the deep laughter, and of course the exclusion. I know it by some of the incidences that have happened that are too specific to write here because I have zero desire to make someone else feel shame or more hate as I’ve felt. Someone must already feel bad to hate foreigners I tell my kids. They must. They must have a story that got them to that place, too.
I wish I had the chance to tell the people who hate ‘‘foreigners’’ that many of us, even outside Switzerland, are living in different countries or towns or villages hoping to build bridges not burn them. I have wanted foreign friends for all my life. Not only in the national sense of the word, but I’ve wanted them in the way that I’ve wanted to know people who believe in a God I might not see…