Two Chairs

As the kids are getting older and we’re getting deeper and deeper into this bi-or multilingualism thing and seek out more German cultural events than we ever did before we had kids, I often find myself wondering about who or what I am and how I feel about it.

I am bilingual and biliterate in both German and English. I also think of myself as bicultural, in as much as it means that I have internalized two cultures and can easily operate in those two cultures. And I’m comfortable with it, as it’s my normal state of being.

But how does identity fit in with this?

Am I (still) German? Or have I become Canadian at some point along the way? Or maybe I am German-Canadian, forever or temporarily hyphenated like 14% of the rest of the population if you can believe the latest census from 2006 (where ‘Canadian’ wasn’t even an option until 1996)?

Who or what defines what I am?

How I feel? Depending on how much time I’ve spent in each country? My citizenship or whatever the government thinks, which, to confuse matters even more, is rather different between Canada and Germany? My ethnic background, in which case you can add Polish-Italian and possibly French to the mix if you go back a few generations? My place of birth? Wherever I’ve spent more time?

I just don’t know anymore.

- I live here, but can’t vote.
- My English is more or less on par with my German, though I make mistakes in both. I still have an accent, yet am often mistaken for a Canadian from some far-flung place that is known to speak a bit of a dialect (if not mistaken for a native of some other country that may or may not have English as a first language). Only rarely am I immediately identified as German, something that makes me quite proud ‘cause lets face it, the German accent is not all that charming :)
- I feel like a visitor when we travel to Germany and notice how much things have changed, and how much it no longer is home.
- I’m not sure I’d be able to get a job there, if I tried, given that all my higher education and work experience are from here and not there.
- Most of my friends are here.
- I know my way around town better here than I ever did in my hometown.
- I participate in all Canadian traditions, and we mainly eat local foods, i.e. we don’t often make a special effort to cook German foods (this only goes out the window around Christmas time when I bake German cookies and even Stollen, and not much else).
- Most Germans I know miss Germany and its way of life much more than I do.
- I’ve brought over German traditions for my little family, at least those I have fond memories of from when I was a kid.
- I am amazed that some, maybe even many, new immigrants to this country immediately upon arrival identify themselves as Canadian or something hyphenated-Canadian. Something I still don’t do after many years here.
- I still have my German passport.

In many ways, I feel like I’m sitting on two chairs, halfway here and halfway there, though not at all torn between where I want to be. Maybe this is exactly as it should be, now that my life has been pretty equally divided between Germany and Canada?

I came here, feeling entirely German, but somewhere along the line that certainty got lost. I now feel more at home here, and have for a while. Maybe because I spent all my adulthood here, but definitely more so since I got married, inherited a bunch of Canadian relatives, and had kids. Kids whom I think of as Canadian more than German (probably because they are growing up here and speak English better than German), but who themselves might feel like they are sitting on two chairs. S, for example, often refers to herself as a German child (and this started before world cup fever ever hit our house), although I bet she doesn’t spend her days thinking about cultural and individual identity or the impact of being raised bilingual. More likely, at this point it is just a demonstration of self-awareness - she speaks two languages and does some things that are different from what her non-German friends do. But it’ll be interesting to see what she thinks and feels when she gets older.

And maybe it doesn’t matter whether we sit on two chairs, as long as we’re comfortable with where we’re sitting.

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This post is part of the Raising Bilingual Children Carnival, this time hosted by Bringing Up Baby Bilingual.