Going Home
- By: Julia Nejedlo
- Created on: 09/21/2008
- Rated By 0 Users
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The plane was huge, but felt small as we landed in the country of my birth. It was a place that I had left fourteen years earlier, just days short of my second birthday, obviously not able to make the decision whether to stay or leave. That decision was made for me by my Indian birthmother and my American parents. Now I was returning to India as an American teen. I was excited to be seeing my brother, who had been studying abroad in the city of my birth, Madras, and city of my orphanage, Madurai. However, what was different about me from other American teens was that I was finally going to look like other people on the street. I was thinking about the differences that I would experience in the culture of my birth from the culture I grew up in. The questions swirled: Would I remember anything? Would I decide I missed India? Would I want to stay?
As we got off the plane I was anxious to see Joey. I wanted to sneak and blend, for the first time in my life, into a group of Indians just so I could go quickly through their fast-moving line. I couldn’t think about anything except seeing Joey and being the first one to give him a hug.
Then, there in a doorway, was my six-foot-tall brother, towering behind all of the shorter Indian men! He came up to us wearing a skirt (lungi) and carrying a green, patterned bag! My brother had gone to a third-world country where he didn’t speak anything close to English, didn’t use toilet paper, ate with his hands, and wore a "skirt "and "purse"!
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