Final Destination
What a surreal moment to be sitting in front of someone that I once knew very well and talking about such an intimate topic — that of identity and being a weird culture kid. The last time we really hung out was almost two decades ago, when we were both kids growing up in Hanoi, Vietnam. Now, fifteen plus years later, we were sitting face to face as late-twenties adults, acting as if we just said our goodbyes to each other the previous week.
It hit me, almost like a surprise, that he was very much alive and breathing and interacting in this weird space between us that we called the ‘virtual world’. This instance transported me into the land of Yahoo and MSN messenger that we once experienced together as little children.
It felt awkwardly casual.
The interview started straight away after we exchanged some pleasantries and polite conversations. Donatien Sardin was my friend in elementary school, from age six to twelve. We both attended the international French school in Hanoi and, just like many other expat kids who were in Vietnam transiently, his family moved away when he was twelve because his dad had gotten a new job there. As Facebook happened only at a later stage — around our respective high school years — we never really stayed in touch, if only to politely wish each other a happy birthday. And even so, it happened intermittenly.
Throughout the interview, we didn’t talk much about our time in Vietnam, perhaps for fear of falling too deeply into the land of nostalgia, which wasn’t the point of our call. Perhaps even for fear of getting hurt, again and again, while reliving those moments that were taken away from us, moments that had long passed. I noticed from the beginning his reluctance to bring the past into the conversation — the Vietnamese past, that is— and I accepted it. So I let him talk to me about his post-Vietnam life, the one in Cairo instead, while allowing my wild imagination to mentally place pharaohs and other Egyptian clichés anywhere that I possibly could within that six-year span of his life.
There was a lot of affection in the way he spoke about his Egyptian experience and the friends he made there — friends who moved to France with him after their high school graduation and with whom he still remained friends today. They were a group of people like him, he claimed. People who didn’t really fit into any one specific culture or country — sometimes, even nationality— due to their privilege upbringing and their status of being expats’ kids.
In Donatien’s experience as a weird culture kid, one of the hardest things for him to come to terms with was his way of processing time. He explained to me, methodically and almost scientifically, how his life was broken into four different episodes with each one corresponded to a specific period of his life. The first episode would be his first six years in France where he was born and lived like any other regular French kid. Then, his life took a different dimension when he arrived to Vietnam where he was living out his boyhood in an international environment from the age of six to twelve. This international life and environment continued in Cairo, Egypt, the place where he landed after leaving Vietnam.
It was in this North African country where he spent his most formative years, from the age of twelve to eighteen, and where he shaped the person that he was becoming. He talked to me about his first drinking experience or his rebellious moments where he broke into empty buildings to hang out with his friends. Apparently it was something that expats’ kids did quite regularly in Cairo — partly because they were just being kids (the regular kind), but also partly because they simply could do whatever they wanted to do (the expat kind). He explained to me in details the weird feeling of living in a host culture, while never actively being a part of it but rather just as an audience member. They were kids who lived and grew up in a society that wasn’t theirs and this awareness made them realize that the local rules, customs and expectations did not apply to them. They had their own little world of international kids who hung out together and spent time watching MTV and Cartoon Network because that was their world’s norms.
Anything outside of it didn’t concern them, for they were not part of that bigger world. Just yet.
After his high school graduation, Donatien returned — is this even the correct verb?— to his motherland to attend university in Paris. Ever since, the French capital had taken him in, slowly but surely. And Paris was where he found himself today, living out the fourth episode of his life. The way Donatien’s mind processed it, he had lived three different lives prior to his current Parisian one. I gave him a weird look, as if to show him my difference in opinion, although there was nothing to disagree with — he was just describing his own experience. He affirmed that this was a subjective method that he had built for himself in order to not only move on from the previous places that he once called ‘home’, but also to encourage himself to be fully present in the new ‘home’ that he had consciously chosen.
“It was not just the external world, to be honest, because I also had to change internally and say goodbye to the person I once was in the previous places,” he offered.
“Why couldn’t you continue being who you were?” I asked him while wondering internally whether this statement meant that I was, in fact, just interviewing a total stranger over Google Meet.
“For me, continuity only made sense if I was not the only remaining element of the life I once lived. But unfortunately, I was. So I needed to change. I needed to adapt and to fit in,” he asserted in a voice filled with field expertise, that of someone who had studied the subject of ‘change’ passionately, not necessarily because he was interested in the subject, but because he was interested in saving himself from the inevitable pain that was the by-product of his expat life.
How brutal life could be for supposedly the most privileged kids, I thought to myself. I paused for a while to gather my thoughts. I felt grateful for his willingness to share these intimate experiences, many of which I could already mirror in my own growing-up experiences. He helped me out before words came back to me.
“That was why I didn’t get in touch with people in my past lives — I needed to let go to move on and be happy again,” Donatien admitted in a half-guilty, half-explanatory voice. Was that his way of apologizing for never getting in touch with his friends from Vietnam? I immediately let this thought go because, suddenly, I caught myself being very envious of his ability to have his several lives nicely packed into different boxes. I imagined different colored shelves where these boxes sat neatly, one next to the other, each with its own carefully written label. Each with its own specific tag and time period.
I imagined that each of these boxes corresponded with a step of his journey— his different lives, as he called them— that had brought him all the way to this exact moment where he was now sitting in front of his computer and speaking to someone who belonged to one of the first boxes of his life. I imagined that it must have felt, for him, like he was just going through an old photo album in his parents’ attic on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Except that this photo was more recent and it wasn’t static.
It felt awkwardly comfortable.
I paused my imagination and came back to my rational mind. I wanted to disagree with him completely about his time-processing technique and compartmentalization process. I wanted to throw at him accusatory questions like “how can you be whole, when you are only living parts of your life while letting go of everything that came before that?” or “where do you even start to humanly or emotionally compartmentalize these years into boxes?” And most importantly, “where exactly did you bury them?”
Of course, I didn’t verbalise any of those questions and managed to snap out of my internal mindset almost immediately. I noticed that I was actually really envious of where he was right now — a place of complete acceptance that I had yet to discover. I felt hopeful because he had shown me what it could potentially look like from the other side of wherever I was, internally. He confessed that his method, coupled with time (what felt like an eternity of time), had worked rather well for him. If only it could be a generic formula, I thought, because from my view, he looked genuinely whole and happy. And who didn’t want to be genuinely whole and happy?
I smiled, not really knowing how to react to his comment, for I wasn’t sure how I felt about his decade-long silence. He continued in explaining that the interesting and maybe most special element of his compartmentalization strategy was his ability to remember many details of every single one of his previous lives. Even though I initially found his statement to be conflictive — how can you let go completely while still having vivid memories?—, I admitted this to be true because he had previously spoken about memories that I had completely forgotten about. Memories we shared together that my mind had reduced to mere moments, while taking its magical flare away and deprived them of their rightful status as memories. As a very forgetful person, I wondered whether, contrary to him, I had chosen to forget as my own way to cope with change, while growing up as a weird culture kid.
As I rewatched our interview for the umpteenth time to write this chapter, something within me finally clicked. Little did he know, Donatien had taught me a very important lesson through his observation that day. Yes, my childhood friend had taught me — though fifteen years late— something that I wished I had learned a lot sooner.
He showed me the difference between letting go (what he had gloriously achieved) and forgetting (what I erroneously tricked myself into achieving).
In fact, letting go was never about forgetting but it was about the ability to stop carrying one’s past experiences into one’s present ones. Letting go was never about forgetting but it was about a person’s courage to stop constantly comparing the present moment with his previous ones. Letting go was never about forgetting but it was about surrender to the present moment and accept it wholeheartedly.
He was still the same person I used to know, I realized. His essence, I felt, was still there. He was no longer just a French student living in a foreign country and enrolled in an international school system because his reality had changed. And that didn’t make him any less of a weird culture kid that he once was.
We quickly wrapped up our interview session and said our goodbyes. Almost like magic, I clicked the red button to end the call and released him back into his current life while wishing him a lifetime — and all the future lives that he may live— of happiness.