The Yellow Uniform Shirt
‘Girls, we’re moving back to England.’
They’d threatened us once before, but this time, it was for real. Packing up our house and saying goodbye to friends and people who had become more like family than our blood relatives ever would be was more jarring than we could have ever imagined, even though we were going back to the rainy island that was ‘home’, at last.
The culture shock began as we emerged from the Channel Tunnel on the wrong side of the road.
All the number plates were yellow; not white, like ours. Looking out the window, I wondered how my dog would adjust to this new land⸺he was born in South Germany, our host country, and the only home he'd ever known.
To make it seem like we were part of the decision, our parents had let us choose which school to go to. The choice was between a private and a public state school. Not knowing any better, we chose the latter, based on some superficial detail revealed during a tour of the school. For two kids coming from private education, this soon turned out to be the wrong decision.
In our last school, we could wear whatever we wanted, so the concept of a uniform was brand new to us. We drove to a depressing suburb of London to collect the urine-colored blouse, scratchy navy polyester blazer and pleated skirt, which all seemed too big even though they were my size. With our house on the market back in Bavaria, we rented a house on a street with a ludicrous and alarming name: Burnt House Lane. The interior looked and smelt like other people; it didn’t feel like ours. Suddenly paranoid about crime, my parents refused to allow me to even walk my dog around the streets unchaperoned.
On the first day of school, I donned the uniform and my beaming mother took a photo of me in the garden. I felt like I was playing dress-up for somebody else’s life.
To compensate for the unflattering outfit (not many people can pull off a yellow blouse), I rouged my cheeks, wore a pair of gold studs and a pair of pumps that were slightly too high. My form teacher peered over his spectacles at me like I was an exotic bird and gestured for me to take a seat.
By chance, I ended up sitting with the popular kids, who took me under their wing. But they’d lived here all their lives, and sounded like it, too. I was nothing like them and so chose my own tribe: the misfits and the few other international kids. But I never ceased being ‘the new kid’ during my two years of high school, and latched onto every exchange student passing through. A concerned teacher told my mother at parents’ evening “she only ever sits with the new students”. Maybe because they understood me?
Even better, I became invisible. Like a turtle, I withdrew into my shell and watched from the shadows, observing how to speak and how to behave. But I never lost my transatlantic accent, and on ‘non-uniform day’ I wore my normal clothes, revealing my true skin. Other kids called me ‘quiet’ and teasingly asked if I was alright. I retreated to the safety of the art room, where you could be as weird as you liked, or the kitchen, pouring my angst into baked goods, which didn’t judge me either. I would have liked to burn off steam on the sports field, but the games I knew and loved were not on offer, at least not for girls. Instead of baseball, we played rounders. Instead of basketball, we played netball. I didn’t know the rules of either.
When it rained, I was put on a trampoline and expected to perform gymnastic leaps and twists. I bobbed about like an idiot as the P.E. teacher barked orders at me. The experience made me question whether I was good at sports at all.
I continued to get good marks in English, even though I spelt everything the American way and was called out for it. My sister and I passed each other in the hallway, but were too embarrassed to talk for long. She could see I had been fed to the sharks, but was powerless to do anything to help me.
At home, we pleaded with our parents to take us back to Munich, and we talked about our life there all the time as if this new one was not real; we hadn’t chosen it and we didn’t own it. I cried hot tears of shame into my dog’s fur and drowned out the pain with loud rock music that deafened my ears.
I just wanted to go home.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve learnt to be proud of my mixed identity and not to try to hide it so much (though being a TCK has made me a natural chameleon!) and also to accept the fact that some people will never get it, and that’s ok. You don’t have to choose between two cultures, you can have both and be both. Moving to another country and culture doesn’t mean you lose the old one, which lives inside you forever. It’s important to stay in touch with it, even if the people you knew there have moved away. Change is inevitable, but you can always go back and visit and experience the things you know and love and hopefully be welcomed with open arms, like I was.
- Edited by Unu Bae