how do you connect with your different cultures? — with Fiona

[00:00:00] This is a place where we talk about belonging. Welcome to the inbetweenish. I'm Beatriz Nour, your host, raised in three cultures, two religions and four languages. Trust me, I get the chaos.

[00:00:17] On the show, I chat with those who have lived that inbetweenish life, a foot here and a foot there, building bridges across cultures and of course, the age old quest to finding home. Today, I'm talking to Fiona Livingstone and she's joining me from London.

[00:00:35] She's a cross-cultural kid who has used her background and search for belonging to create her very own magazine. Fiona is the founder and editor of Foyer magazine, a literary and arts publication from the point of view of people from second generation, mixed heritage and third culture backgrounds.

[00:00:56] I highly recommend you get your hands on her magazine, as it's such a treat for the eyes and the mind. She also recently launched her very own podcast called Cultures Too, a guide through culture and identity through food.

[00:01:10] And it's fair to say that if you're a regular inbetweenish listener, this will definitely resonate with you. All links are provided in the show notes below. And now in her own words, let's turn the mic to Fiona. What is your ish? Yeah, so my ish is Dutch Scottish.

[00:01:29] My mother is from the Netherlands and my father is from Scotland. And I was born and brought up in England. I have the honor, I suppose, of being the only English person in my entire family. So I'm very much an ish for all of them as well.

[00:01:50] So yeah, so that's my sort of trio of combinations really that make up my ish. So your parents being Scottish and Dutch, how did they meet? So my dad worked for a big multinational company as a food scientist, no less.

[00:02:14] And the company that he worked for had a head office in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. And they decided that they wanted to send my dad there on a sort of secondment really for about three years. And so my dad, speaking no Dutch, knowing absolutely nothing about the

[00:02:32] Netherlands, having never been there before, went over to the Netherlands and started to work at the Dutch outpost really of his company. And my parents didn't meet immediately. But I think over the sort of months, my dad, because I suppose he was a busy person, sometimes

[00:02:54] had lunch delivered to him in his office, which I think sounds very grand. And my mum also worked for the same company. But she worked there as one of the sort of chefs. And she also was in charge of making sure that the very busy

[00:03:15] scientists who couldn't make it down to the lunch hall managed to get fed in their offices. So my mum actually presented my father with his lunch in his office. And that is how they met.

[00:03:28] And my mum would sort of on a weekly basis or a little bit more sometimes go and deliver my dad his lunches. And I think they just started up a conversation that way and just started to get to know each other.

[00:03:42] And then, yeah, the three years came to an end. And my dad was shipped back to England, to Bedfordshire. And very sweetly in the days before the internet and, you know, cheap long distance phone calls, my parents wrote to each other by letter, which is really sweet.

[00:04:04] And I think they sort of decided, you know, like, we really want to be together. And my mum came over and she was here for, oh, my goodness. 30 years, 35 years. She now lives back in the Netherlands. But yeah, she was here for a very long time.

[00:04:21] And, you know, that must have been really scary for her, actually. You know, there was no one. She didn't know anyone in England. She'd never been here before. She only knew my dad. And, you know, she didn't really speak the language. Was English your father's first language?

[00:04:38] Because, I mean, he's Scottish. So did he learn Gaelic first? Yeah, that's a good question. No, my dad is a native English speaker. He's from the lowlands of Scotland, so near the border with England. So there aren't a huge amount of Gaelic speakers there.

[00:04:59] They're more in the islands and really far up north. So I think if my father had come from that part of Scotland, then I think Gaelic would have presented itself much more strongly. But he doesn't speak any Gaelic at all, actually. He's very much an English speaker.

[00:05:13] But interestingly, in the lowlands of Scotland, there is a... I suppose you could call it a bit of a dialect called La Lans, which the poet Robert Burns used to write a lot in.

[00:05:26] He was the poet who wrote Old Lang Syne, which is sung at New Year's Eve. And he is from, I think, literally the next village from where my dad was born and grew up.

[00:05:40] So this La Lans dialect is something that my dad would very much speak in Scotland. And he uses words that even to this day, I have no idea what they mean. And he only uses them when he's in Scotland. It's so interesting.

[00:05:57] I mean, he lives back in Scotland now. And like I said, he started using vocabulary and words and sentence structures and sayings that my whole life, I've never heard him use before. But since he's gone back home, he's completely immersed himself again,

[00:06:11] back in his sort of native colloquial language and really reconnected with these words that even he told me he had completely forgotten. But no, so really, I only really ever heard my dad speak in English. But interestingly, I never heard his accent when I was growing up.

[00:06:34] I was going to ask you about that. Yeah, I never heard it. And the same for my mum as well. Like I never heard either of her accents to me. They both just sounded English. I never it sounds so strange, but I never even thought of them

[00:06:48] as not being English when I was very young. It was only really when friends would say to me, Oh, I didn't realize your dad was actually Scottish. He actually sounds Scottish. You know, it's not just like a Scottish heritage or a generational link.

[00:07:04] He actually is Scottish and he has this really strong accent. And I was like, Oh, really? Can't really hear it. It's only since, you know, I've moved away from home and and I speak to my parents on the phone that I actually get

[00:07:18] a bit more of an inkling of their accents now. It's interesting, you said at two different times, you said that like my mother moved back home now and that your father moved back home as well. Where did you grow up in England?

[00:07:36] Yes, so I grew up in South Endonsey in Essex in England, which is the southeast. So it's very coastal. It's actually probably about as close to the Netherlands as you can get from England, actually. And your mother in the Netherlands is from Rotterdam? She's yes.

[00:07:56] So she's actually from a little well, from a town next to Rotterdam called Vlaardingen. But not many people know about Vlaardingen. So we usually say that she's from Rotterdam, which is the biggest town in that area. It's sort of the Netherlands second city really after Amsterdam.

[00:08:15] I think I mean, this is how I know Rotterdam is it was one of the cities that was completely rebuilt after the war. So it's like one of the maybe the more modern looking cities. Yes, exactly. So the reason I was asking about your parents, like you said,

[00:08:34] they both moved back home each to their their own home countries. And I'm curious to know where you consider home for yourself. Yes, that's a very interesting question. And I also did find it quite amusing that both of my parents went back to where they were from.

[00:08:55] I have to admit, I never expected my dad to go back to Scotland. He hates the weather. He doesn't like the cold and the damp and the gray. But I think I asked him about it, and he told me that it was something that pulled him back,

[00:09:13] something that he couldn't really put his finger on. But something inside of him said, I think it's time to go home now. And he's been very happy there and loves it. And the same for my mum. She moved back.

[00:09:26] I mean, it's where all of my Dutch family are. Like they're all in the Netherlands. They're all in the same area. They're all in Vlaardingen or the little towns surrounding that area. So nobody's moved. My mum was the only one who left.

[00:09:40] And I think coming back for her was absolutely definitely coming home, but coming home to a different world, because when my mum left, you know, it was 1980 and, you know, she went back, you know, in, oh my goodness, like 2015 or something.

[00:09:58] And, you know, the world had changed in the Netherlands during that time. And there were so many words that she didn't even know in her own native language because they were so new. Like anything to do with technology.

[00:10:11] She didn't know what those words were, you know, like computer keyboard. She didn't even know the word for microwave in Dutch because she'd missed all of that development. And I think in many ways, like she had become very anglicized as well.

[00:10:27] Having been in the UK for so long, never meeting another Dutch person in the Netherlands, like where we live, though it there wasn't anyone there for her. So I think she really assimilated to become a sort of Brit, really.

[00:10:42] And then going back to the Netherlands, I think she had an adjustment period, for sure, to get used to the way things work again. The processes, the procedures, the language and just what's what's considered normal, I think for her was a big leap.

[00:10:59] And for me, yeah, it's it's interesting because, as I said earlier, I am the only English person in my family. I don't have any cousins here or I don't have any brothers or sisters. It's just me. So when my parents both moved back, I

[00:11:14] I felt a bit abandoned, actually, not in a resentful way, but just suddenly almost like an orphan. I really felt very alone and, oh, I don't have my family home anymore. Like that's gone. That's been sold. You know, I can't go back there again because, you know,

[00:11:35] even though I'd left home and gone to university in London and worked in London, you know, for the rest of my career so far, I would always go back home to where my parents' house was. The house was where home was more than the region or the area.

[00:11:52] It was the building that was my home. It was where everything that my parents had, it was where all the memories were. And I look back on it even now with a big sense of nostalgia and a sad nostalgia in some ways because it doesn't exist anymore.

[00:12:08] It's gone. Did you always grow up in that same house? Yes, yes, I was there my whole life until my parents sold it. So that really that house really rooted me and it rooted in a way my identity and the identity of my parents.

[00:12:24] It was our safety net where we could be who we wanted to be, you know, live in our culture the way that we wanted to be, you know, without judgment or criticism or questions. And, you know, the fact that that house is no longer my home,

[00:12:42] I find quite painful in some ways. I mean, I've not gone back since my parents sold it. I actually find it too painful to go back. I know what you mean. Yeah, I don't want to see somebody else living in my family home

[00:12:55] because there's just so many memories and those memories are mine. And, you know, I feel very protective over them. And again, I think because of that, I don't even really want to go back to the area that I'm from because so much of it is wrapped up in,

[00:13:10] you know, in childhood, in family and friends. And again, all of my school friends, none of them live in that area anymore. So there's no person to go back to. It would just be me almost in a way going on a pilgrimage

[00:13:24] to look at the place where I used to live, look at the beach that I used to go to, look at the ice cream shop, reminisce a bit, probably feel quite sad, actually, and then leave. And even though it's been so many years already,

[00:13:38] I don't feel ready to do that yet. I don't feel like enough time has passed or maybe that I've grown enough, actually, to be able to revisit that and feel positive about it, feel happy about it, because whenever I think about it,

[00:13:55] I do feel this sense of abandonment that, you know, I was left, you know, here, you know, not that that was done in any mean way at all by my parents. And I'm very happy that they, you know, they followed their paths

[00:14:09] and that they're both very happy back in their home countries. But it did leave me without a feeling of place. So I think for me, home is, in a sense, wherever I am, I make it my home. I don't hold

[00:14:26] that feeling of a building being my home anymore. I almost in a way don't want to relive that everywhere that I live. So I feel very much that I I make my home wherever I am.

[00:14:39] I make it comfortable for myself and, you know, I live with my sort of joint cultures as much as I would like to within my own home. So whether that's, you know, in London or whether that's somewhere where I live in the future, I don't know.

[00:14:55] But I do feel I must say living in London. I do feel that London is maybe where I found myself. And became myself as an individual rather than living through your sort of parental, familial relationship. I don't know if you know, but there's a beautiful word in German

[00:15:15] called Heimat. It literally means the place where I am from not my home, not where I'm living now, but where I am from, where where my roots are, where my family is. And that is something that I used to think about a lot was where is my Heimat?

[00:15:37] And I think probably my Heimat is Southend on Sea in Essex. That is the place where I'm from. It is the place where I grew up and I have many memories of being very happy there.

[00:15:51] But I'm not ready to go back yet, and I don't know if I ever will be. But the place that I call home would certainly be London. That's very interesting. I hadn't heard of that word before, but it seems very fitting

[00:16:05] for in-betweenish and people who are in between different cultures. I think that's a difficult question to answer. Yes. Like where home is. Yes. But it's interesting because just answering that question and even thinking on a bit more of it, it's so interesting

[00:16:21] because when I go and visit my parents, you know, I mean, they are no longer together now, but you know, that's fine. But, you know, when I go to Scotland to visit my dad, it's such a surreal experience because everything,

[00:16:36] well, not everything, but a lot of things that were from my family home are in my dad's home. And it's sort of like this very strange experience of seeing all of these very familiar objects in a different place and somehow their context changes

[00:16:56] and how I feel about those objects changes because they're in a different place. They're in a different country. They look different. The light is different. How I interact with these objects and things is totally different. It feels like my dad's home. It doesn't feel like my home.

[00:17:15] And I do feel a little bit like a guest when I'm there. And the same with my mum's home, too. My mum's home, you know, she has a beautiful house. She's done a lot to it. She's proud of it. But she really, in a way, started from scratch.

[00:17:29] She doesn't really have many objects from my childhood at home. I think my dad places more meaning to objects than my mum does. But my mum has hundreds of photographs, hundreds and hundreds of photographs of me or family.

[00:17:47] But again, when I go to her home, it's not my home. There's there's not really anything there that I recognise as being from my childhood either. So I feel that when I'm in my own home in London, that I try to make it as comfortable for me

[00:18:08] as possible, because in a way, I can't rely on other people to do that for me. You know, I can't rely on my parents to make me feel like their home is my home because it isn't.

[00:18:21] But I can do that in my home and I can make that make sense to me. So neither so you grew up in Essex? Yes. And is this is the town called South End on Sea? It is. Yes, exactly. Yes, South End on Sea.

[00:18:39] That's a very poetic name. Oh, really? Do you think so? Yeah, no, it's an interesting place. It's a very interesting place. But I find it interesting that neither of your parents were from there, you know, and they decided to settle there and live there for a long time,

[00:18:55] it seems. So what was it like for you as a child growing up there? I'm curious to know when you realised that your family was a bit different. Yeah, so I think it really hit me when I went to school.

[00:19:11] I would say that was the period of time where I think I started noticing that things were a little bit different and also that people around me started noticing that things were a bit different. I think it was more other people than me, actually,

[00:19:26] because I just accepted everything as normal. You know, growing up in Essex, you know, I looked the same as everybody else. You know, there was nothing visually about me that looked different. I sounded like I came from, you know, England and from Essex.

[00:19:41] You know, I didn't have a Dutch accent or a Scottish accent. So, you know, for all intents and purposes, to all of my friends and everybody at school, I was an English person from Essex. So for a long time, nobody really even asked anything.

[00:19:56] It was just assumed that I was the same as everyone else. And also, I suppose, to a certain extent, as a child, you want to be the same as everybody else. You don't want to be different. You don't want to have things that highlight you as maybe being,

[00:20:09] you know, odd or different, you know, that might make you a target for something, you know, maybe bullying or teasing or something. So I suppose in some ways I got off lightly. But when, you know, as you grow up and you start discovering your own personality

[00:20:26] and ways of doing things a bit more, you know, maybe around this junior school period of time, I think that was when things started to surface that, you know, other children would notice that my mum had this very strange accent.

[00:20:41] Nobody ever really asked my mum much about where she came from. And nobody really asked my dad anything either. It was just sort of like, oh, OK, you're from Scotland. You're from the Netherlands. Oh, fine. Let's just continue with our lives.

[00:20:55] Nobody had this sort of inquisitive nature about them to find out more. But it was more when I started doing things that I think people started to notice. So, for example, my parents made the decision not to speak Dutch to me when I was a child.

[00:21:13] I think this was something that was very prevalent in the 80s because I have some other friends who went through the same experience where the family doctor actually said to the parents, oh, no, you shouldn't teach your your child

[00:21:29] this other language at the same time that they're learning English. It will only confuse them and it will delay their speech development. And you don't want that happening, do you? They'll fall behind at school. So that obviously terrified my parents.

[00:21:43] So they would only speak to me in English. My mum would occasionally throw some Dutch words out there usually, again, to do with food. Everything in my life to do with the Netherlands is to do with food and some sort of celebratory events and things like that.

[00:22:03] But but I do think that because we would obviously go to the Netherlands a lot to visit my family, particularly my grandmother, I would hear Dutch a lot. So I feel very comforted being around the language. I feel I don't feel intimidated by it.

[00:22:20] It feels so familiar to me as a language. And I almost feel at many points that I could almost just jump in and be part of it. But my language skills aren't quite there because I've never learned to speak it.

[00:22:35] But I think there is some knowledge there, deep seated of understanding on a low level. And I feel this amazing warmth and comfort when I hear it. And it reminds me of family whenever I hear Dutch. I think of my aunts, you know, chattering around the table.

[00:22:53] I think of my grandmother. You know, it brings back so many warm memories for me whenever I hear the language. So for me, it's a great loss to not speak or be fluent in Dutch. I really feel it keenly, actually.

[00:23:07] But but I think what happened was even though I don't speak the language, there were some pronunciations that I picked up from my parents of words in English. That wouldn't be as you would pronounce them in English. So, for example, instead of saying vegetables,

[00:23:27] my mum would say Vegatables. So I would always say Vegatables at school because that's what my mum would always say. And I would also pick up some inflections from my dad as well, from his Scottish accent. You know, this in particular, this beautiful rolling of the Rs

[00:23:45] that he's able to do that I'm just physically not able to do. So when I try to pronounce certain words, how I've learnt how to pronounce them, I sound completely jumbled because I can't roll the R and I can't actually pronounce it in an English way

[00:24:01] because I've been so sort of computed to say things in a certain way. So a lot of people at school and even teachers thought that I had a speech impediment because I couldn't pronounce these words properly. And nobody had made the link that, well, Fiona's parents aren't English.

[00:24:19] She's picking up these pronunciations from her parents. So I think sort of these they're very small things. But to me, they were really big because these were things that were very important to me. You know, my parents language, our language at home,

[00:24:39] our pronunciations of things, food like these were so important to me that hearing those even in the slightest bit, criticised, put me on the defensive and made me want to bury them because I just wanted to be the same as everybody else. And I just wanted to assimilate.

[00:24:58] I didn't want to be different. I never talked about it. I never said to anyone, oh, by the way, you know, my mum's from the Netherlands or my dad's from Ayrshire in Scotland. I never said anything. I really it's not that I was ashamed of them.

[00:25:15] It just it just never led to any good conversations or a good outcome. It always led to kind of probing questions, which I didn't really want to answer and and felt were, you know, sometimes quite intrusive, actually. It was only really when I moved away from home

[00:25:34] and I moved to London, which is a far more multicultural place than where I grew up, that I met so many different people from different countries and from different multicultural and second generation backgrounds. That was when I started to open up.

[00:25:52] But even then, it took me years to say, oh, you know, by the way, I'm half Dutch. And they were shocked, absolutely shocked. And why haven't you told us? Why didn't you say this before? And then I'd say, well, you know, it never really came up.

[00:26:07] But for some reason, because I don't speak the language, I somehow don't qualify, you know, whether that's with Dutch people themselves, but also with other people who have nothing to do with the Netherlands. It's somehow this this wall that I'm not crossing

[00:26:25] because I don't speak Dutch, you know, and I've had lots of conversations with friends who are second generation. And some of them had really tough times, particularly at school, you know, assimilating because, you know, they either looked different or they actually spoke a completely different language at home

[00:26:41] and were learning English for the first time at school. You know, I never had that experience and I can only empathise. But that doesn't make my Dutchness any less than their second generation heritage. And then when you're rejected in a way or even silently rejected,

[00:27:01] which is in a way even worse, it's really painful. And that has happened to me quite a few times. Which has always quite shocked me. And I've sort of always thought, well, I'm clearly just not Dutch enough and having this very, very strong sense of being a fraud.

[00:27:19] And can I even claim, you know, to be a second generation Dutch person because I don't speak the language? And I think what I learned over the years and it took a long time was to not to compare my experiences with others, because I think that everybody's experience

[00:27:39] is unique to them, even though there might be many similarities. And I think by me comparing myself with someone who is totally fluent in the language of their parents, has a whole community in the country that they can go to, doesn't compare at all

[00:27:56] with my upbringing, where there was no Dutch community or Scottish community, where I didn't speak the language, you know. And it's not fair to me to be able to do that to myself. I find it really sad that doctors and

[00:28:13] paediatricians would say, you know, don't teach your children several languages. And some parents today continue with this mindset of, you know, not wanting to introduce their children, their young children to a second, third or fourth language

[00:28:28] to not confuse them or so that they can be fluent in one language. And I think it's such a disservice, because while language is certainly not the only way you can connect with the culture, it can be a great access point. Right.

[00:28:46] I guess I don't really understand when parents don't do that. But I also think it's important to remember that parents didn't not teach their children their own language out of selfishness. You know, they had the best of intentions.

[00:29:04] Obviously, if you think about it, a parent would want to be able to speak with their child in their mother tongue. But if they didn't teach them their mother tongue, it's because they were given guidance or they had these fears or they had these certain notions. Right.

[00:29:17] But language is not the only way to connect with a culture. Language is just a very visible layer of culture because, you know, you can speak it, you can read it, you can experience it. Oftentimes you can write it because, you know,

[00:29:36] not all languages are written, of course. But it's just one visible layer of culture. But the vast majority of culture lies beneath the surface. And there are things that we can't tangibly see, hold and easily point to.

[00:29:54] And those are like your beliefs and your values and your ideology and how different cultures handle emotions, for example. And these elements would have been passed down to you regardless of language. You're absolutely right. You know, things like values and ideology are things that

[00:30:15] absolutely my parents passed down to me from their cultures that are not English. You know, for my dad, something that is extremely important in Scotland, that there is a big honour sort of system in Scotland. You know, my word is my bond.

[00:30:34] This is very, very strong throughout Scottish culture. And if you say you're going to do something, you do it. And I was always absolutely brought up with if I say I'm going to do something or if I'm going to,

[00:30:49] you know, if something is secret, even, you know, whatever it is, if I've said that I will be part of it, I will do it, then that I am bonded to. And I still am very much like that today.

[00:31:01] That's so interesting, the conditioning that we learn as children and how that may stay with us for a very long time, you know? Absolutely. It sounds like growing up in a small town where everyone was from the same place kind of made you want to fit in more,

[00:31:20] even though in the safety of your home, you were aware of some of the differences. Tell me about your connection to your Dutch heritage in your home, in the comfort of your home. Yeah, I think in a way, I almost had like two versions of myself.

[00:31:40] I had the external outside of myself, Fiona. Which everybody around me would understand because I assimilated and fitted in. And then I would have my at home, Fiona, where I could lean into the individual cultures of my parents as much or as little as I wanted to

[00:32:00] and to feel completely at comfort with that. So I think I was able to cope with it because I sort of compartmentalized it in my own mind, as well as trying to fit into English culture, too. So I think at home,

[00:32:15] my Dutch heritage very much came out through my mum's cooking. My mum puts nutmeg on everything. In the Netherlands, you don't just use nutmeg on sweet dishes. You very much use them on savoury. So, for example, in the UK, if you have something really plain like potatoes,

[00:32:39] you might put black pepper on them. In the Netherlands, you sprinkle nutmeg on your potatoes. And that, for my school friends, was absolutely bizarre. Like, why on earth would you put nutmeg on anything savoury? It's for sweets. You know, you don't you don't do that.

[00:32:55] So I think my mum, in a way, communicated with me through food, with her heritage. There's a big crossover in the Netherlands with Indonesia and with Suriname. So there's a lot of crossover foods, sort of hybrid dishes and things like that.

[00:33:14] So my mum made my still to this day favourite dish, which is called bami goreng, which is an Indonesian dish with little bits of beef. So I loved these sort of fusion foods. It always made our kitchen smell a little bit different. Even when I smell something

[00:33:35] that's from like an Indonesian dish, it takes me straight back. It takes me straight back home to my mum's cooking. Even when I'm eating it, I just think of home. Those are such strong connectors for me. Because even though I have these connections,

[00:33:50] you know, in my own home of Scotland and the Netherlands, I had to balance that with being in England. And I think one of the ways that I sort of coped with it, apart from maybe compartmentalising, was that I almost created my own sense of self

[00:34:13] through my own terms and conditions. So what I mean is that I think I selected the things from my parents' cultures and from English culture that resonated with me, that meant something to me, that I wanted to embrace, laugh at, accept, to create my own personal culture.

[00:34:34] That means something to me that I am able to cope with, not feel in conflict with, or to feel constantly jarred with. And I think that is something that over the years has really helped me.

[00:34:49] You know, I think I also changed my own personal thinking around it as well. You know, from when I was a child, I just wanted to assimilate. I just wanted to be the same as everyone. I wanted to avoid any kind of conflicting questions

[00:35:02] that would highlight any differences. Whereas now I want to embrace those. I'm not saying that everything in my childhood was amazing. I mean, obviously it wasn't. It's life. But I think there are situations that I look back on. And I think I am a very nostalgic person.

[00:35:23] I do tend to look back at things through a very nostalgic eight millimetre film lens. But when I do look back on things, I try to look back on it with the benefit of hindsight. You know, I'm not going to criticise that eight year old child

[00:35:40] because what did they know? They didn't know any different. Whereas now I can have a conversation with an adult. So I think my perspective on things has changed and how I want to deal with questions has changed

[00:35:56] because I feel that I have over the years developed this sort of strong personal culture that I can always lean back into if I want it to give me that sense of support, sense of home, sense of connection with my parents' cultures.

[00:36:14] So I suppose in a way, I've kind of created my own pick and mix sweetie bag of the bits of the culture that I really love. And that really means something to me, even if there might be sad memories occasionally associated with some of those things.

[00:36:30] And I was actually thinking that there was a quote in a beautiful book that I was reading. I just finished it earlier this week. The book's called Wintering by Katherine May. There was a quote in there that I just thought was beautiful.

[00:36:43] And and it is we make and remake our stories, abandoning the ones that are no longer fit and trying new ones on the size. I think that is in a way how I have dealt with my combination cultural heritage, really.

[00:36:59] My my ish is that, you know, I've worked through the things that worked for me, the things that didn't work for me. And I've created something that resonates with me really deeply. And it's almost like a safety net, you know, in those times

[00:37:17] where I maybe feel like a fraud. But it's you know, it's me being able to lean back into this own sense of self and security within a culture that I have made for me, just for me and not for anybody else to to judge or conform to.

[00:37:37] I think when you said that when you smell or taste something, it takes you right back to these memories. You know, the sense of smell is actually the strongest sense of our five senses that is linked to memory. Yes, absolutely. And it really is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:37:55] Yeah, it really is. I can absolutely relate to that as well. You talk about all this about your ish and your cultural ish with so much maturity. And I think that's something that many in between ish people wish to get to. So it doesn't come without growing pains.

[00:38:15] I want to ask you about that that journey of a time where you weren't as comfortable with your heritage and where you come from and how you got to be in this place of,

[00:38:26] you know, this is my sense of self and it's not for anyone else to judge. I think it took place over many years. There were very hard times there when I just wanted to talk to somebody about my Dutch family.

[00:38:41] And I think that was something that I found very painful. Because it's such a big part of who I am and who I want to be, who I wish to be. And I think a lot of that stems from this disinterest that I experienced as a young person.

[00:38:59] And when I did ever say anything, it would be looked at as weird or odd or different, but not in a good way. Oh, why are you doing that? So whenever I did try and open that door, it got slammed straight back in my face.

[00:39:13] So I just retreated more and more to just not talking about it, just not embracing it externally to anybody. And I think it's still something that I do occasionally do think about in my quiet moments of the lost opportunities, actually, that you can't get back

[00:39:34] to have maybe connected with people in a different way as well. You know, maybe there were people that I was talking to who had wonderful connections to the Netherlands or to Scotland, who I could have shared wonderful memories with. But I didn't because I wasn't brave enough

[00:39:51] to open that door to talk about my cultural heritage for fear of disinterest or criticism. So I think for me, it was almost in a way a build up of too much suppression. It was almost like a volcano in a way.

[00:40:08] You know, the pressure was building and building and building with all of this stuff I really wanted to talk about and I really wanted to share, but never felt I could. And I felt that as the pressure was building up in a volcano,

[00:40:21] rather than just exploding, I was like, I need a framework for me. And I just thought, you know what, it's either going to sink me or it's just going to explode and it's not going to be helpful.

[00:40:34] So my way of dealing with it was to pick the things that I really loved about my parents' culture and to absolutely embrace them. I even made a list. I made a list of all the things that I loved

[00:40:49] and why I loved them and why they were important to me and how I wanted to explore those as well. You know, so even with my mum's cooking, as soon as I left home, I never made any of those meals again. Why can't I?

[00:41:04] And why can't I make them for friends who come round? And that can be a gateway to talking about these parts of my life that I've not mentioned before. And I think also I I try to become braver

[00:41:21] over the years, again, of actually being able to talk about my heritage. I would try and you know, if a moment in a in a nice chat with some friends or something came up, then I would introduce it.

[00:41:33] You know, if if friends were going on holiday to the Netherlands, I'd say, oh, I can help you because I've got family. Oh, you've got family there. Oh, how interesting. You know, and that would open the door to having a really constructive,

[00:41:46] positive, interesting conversation with people who wanted to learn. For me, it was about targeting people initially who were interested. But I feel more enabled to have those conversations now than I did a few years ago when I would have just not even talked about it.

[00:42:05] It wouldn't have even come up as a topic. Not everybody feels positively about people from mixed backgrounds. A lot of people in a lot of cultures, I don't know if it's I don't think that's the case in the Netherlands or

[00:42:21] or in Scotland, but like, correct me if I'm wrong. But in a lot of cultures, when you're mixed, you're kind of seen as and I hate saying this, half bred, you know, like you're not fully from here. You're kind of strange. You're this and that, you know.

[00:42:39] And then other people will find it amazing to have a mixed background and have a mixed heritage and speak different languages. Like the way people react to these things, I think oftentimes, I think has a lot more to do with them. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:42:55] So I try not to take it personally. It's really hard. Like, it's really hard where I grew up. I mean, it was a large town, but, you know, I was never directly picked on because I looked the same as everybody else.

[00:43:10] But I think some of the older people, interestingly, you know, people in their like 70s, you know, we're talking about when I was maybe a teenager and they, you know, maybe found out that I was half Dutch. There was a sort of a slight look of disappointment

[00:43:27] that I wasn't a full English in many ways. And oh, right. Oh, OK. No, nobody ever gave an explanation or anything like that. Just, oh, OK. Like, I just wasn't really part of the clan. I was some other, you know.

[00:43:51] But no, I think it is a big it is a big problem. And it's it's all a problem of perception. And and lack of understanding of, you know, what it is to be half of something. Well, I wanted to ask you something.

[00:44:04] You mentioned nostalgia and and you feel this nostalgic sense for something that you you may have not like necessarily experienced yourself sometimes. Where do you think the sense of nostalgia comes from for you? I think there's probably two answers to that.

[00:44:21] I think, first of all, I think it's probably something inherent within me as a person. I'm a very dreamy person. And I think when I think about the past, I do sort of see it through.

[00:44:34] I don't want to say rose tinted glasses because I do see it for what it was. But I do see it through a sort of slightly foggy filter. And I do tend to ride out that moment of

[00:44:47] understanding what that nostalgic moment is maybe trying to say to me in that particular moment in time. But also, I think I was influenced particularly by my dad. My dad is a very nostalgic person. He would talk for hours and hours about, you know,

[00:45:04] people in the family that I'd never heard of who died two hundred years ago. You know, and he knew everything. And he would he had a wonderful sort of raconteur style way of speaking. So when I think about my past and anything that triggers a memory,

[00:45:23] it is sort of jumping back into that and feeling that moment again, but almost like it's a story. It's like it's being played back to me as a film. In some respects, I know it was my life, but in some respects, it feels like I'm watching it

[00:45:43] as a different person. And I can interpret that situation differently with the benefit of hindsight. And I think also this nostalgic way of thinking about my cultural heritage and the past, I think, again, was a decision that I made very early on in my life.

[00:46:03] I think particularly when I was working my way through my personal culture list, when I was making my way through that list, I thought about everything in this nostalgic way. And it made me happy to talk about my past in that way.

[00:46:21] And I don't want to always be sad or, you know, depressed, etc., when I'm talking about my past, even if bad things did happen. You know, I want to be able to speak as them as they were. But being able to do it through the filter of nostalgia

[00:46:40] makes me, I suppose, not feel that pain in the same way that I did if it was a painful situation that I'm remembering. Or if it was something joyful, I can see it, lean back and smile at it.

[00:46:54] So I think for me, in a way, looking back through things with this nostalgic eye is like a safety net that I've developed for myself so that I don't have to relive everything at the same intensity all the time, because it's exhausting to do that.

[00:47:11] I suppose you could say it's like a coping mechanism, but it's something that really works for me because it allows me to revisit those memories as they were, to look at them in a contained way so that they feel a little bit distant

[00:47:26] because they do feel like they're in the past. It's interesting. I don't think I've ever heard of nostalgia described as a coping mechanism. It made sense when you were articulating that. I love that you sat down and made a physical list

[00:47:43] of your cultural heritage that you wanted to hold on to. Was it this list that led to the idea of your magazine? Was this a way for you to connect to your cultures? Do you know, that's such an interesting question,

[00:47:59] and I hadn't thought about that in such direct terms before. But, you know, I think it must have laid some seeds for sure or planted some seeds. I think it must have done because I think it was around that time

[00:48:14] that I really felt this strong desire to want to create a magazine. At that time, I didn't know exactly what I wanted it to be yet. But maybe somewhere in the back of my mind, that was already formulating. I think for me, the trigger actually with the magazine

[00:48:32] that I think pulled everything together was a trip I took last year to Albania, of all places. And I was in a taxi car and we picked up a guy off the side of the road, which is totally normal to do in Albania, to do hitchhiking.

[00:48:50] And he sat next to me and my friend in the back of the car. And he could hear that we were obviously talking English to each other. And he wanted to join in with us. And we said, yeah, of course, it'd be great to talk to you,

[00:49:01] find out about you, you know, you can tell us about Albania. And throughout this conversation was that it turned out that he was born in Albania, but he was of Greek extraction. So his parents had Greek citizenship, but had also been born in Albania.

[00:49:19] But there's, you know, the next door neighbors to each other, the countries. So there's a big proportion of Greek people and people of Greek descent in Albania. And he said that he always had this absolute conflict with his identity.

[00:49:35] He did not know whether he was Albanian or Greek. He absolutely did not know who he was. He said, I have an Albanian passport and I have a Greek ID card. But on my ID card is a stamp saying alien. Oh, literally. Literally said alien in Greek.

[00:49:54] And he said, so I'm an alien. Like, is that what I am? I'm an alien. You know, I was born in Albania, but I'm completely culturally heritage Greek, but to Greek authorities, I'm an alien. I can work in Greece, but I don't have a Greek passport

[00:50:13] because I will not. They will not allow me to be a citizen because I'm an alien. The level of pain in his voice when he spoke about this was really tangible in the air. It was just terrible.

[00:50:24] And that was a real light bulb moment for me, was my goodness. There are people everywhere dealing with these situations. And some people have come up with coping mechanisms or ways that they can deal with it and flourish. And other people are really struggling.

[00:50:42] Yeah. And they think they're alone. He really thought he was alone. And it was just terrible. And I just thought to myself, how can I in some way help other people like me, like him to share these stories,

[00:50:58] share these experiences, good and bad, so that we don't feel alone? And that really was the catalyst for me. We're sitting in the back of that taxi. As soon as he left, I said to my friend, I think I've just found the theme of my magazine.

[00:51:14] And that actually, when I got home from Albania, that was when I revisited the list of the things that made me who I am from my own personal culture perspective. And I looked at those and thought, you know, this is this is the bones of something here.

[00:51:31] You know, these could be avenues to explore. I wonder what other people do. Am I the only one with a list? You know, you know, I really want to I want to share and I want to learn.

[00:51:46] And I'm sure that there are so many other people out there who want to do the same. And that's what I hope to achieve with the magazine. It's like a physical treasure trove, really, of these experiences that people can relate to and look back to at any point

[00:52:00] and not feel alone. I wanted to ask you about an untranslatable word that you use that doesn't necessarily translate into English. But I know that you also want to share a word in English that doesn't translate well. So I'm very curious to hear what that is.

[00:52:22] Sure. Yes, I kind of feel that seeing as English is my mother tongue, I would be doing it a disservice if I didn't include at least at least one one English word. But I will start with a Dutch word. So my Dutch word is Gezelig.

[00:52:37] This is a word that is used so much in the Netherlands. And it's a wonderful word, which means all of these things in one word. So it means coziness, convivial, friendly, comfort, relaxing, warmth. It's really a word that is at the heart of Dutch culture.

[00:52:57] And I really feel that it could be said about a person, about a room, about a situation. It really is this this wonderful word, which rolls off the tongue beautifully, which means all of these different things in one word and is such a flexible word as well.

[00:53:14] I think that's why I really like it. It's not a very black and white word. And in Dutch, there aren't many gray words, as I will call this word. Dutch is a very black and white, very direct language.

[00:53:27] And I feel that cozelig is actually a very gray word and can be used in all of these multiple situations to convey this feeling. And it is an emotional feeling, this feeling of this coziness, relaxing, but also fun.

[00:53:45] And there's not many words that can mean relaxing and fun at the same time. I'm actually quite familiar with this word because Oh, perfect. There's a concept that I love, the Scandinavian, but often tied to Danish culture, hugge. Oh, yes, yes.

[00:54:03] I think the thing, I think the my difference with cozelig is that with hugge, I think hugge tends to be more around the home, whereas cozelig can be home and everywhere else. And it can be a person. Oh, it can be a person.

[00:54:23] Yes, you can describe a person as cozelig. Wow, what a dream to be described as that. I know, I know. So yes, I think they have the same essential meaning. But the application, I think, maybe with cozelig is maybe quite broad, actually.

[00:54:42] Shall I move on to my outlier in the English language now? Yes, please tell me. So my English word that I would like to submit for this is serendipity, which means happy accident. I love that. And it's such a beautiful word. It's a fairly new word.

[00:55:04] I mean, I say new, it's a few hundred years old, created by Horace Walpole. He created the word in 1754, no less. And yeah, anything like happy accident, unexpected discovery, fortunate chance. It means all of these different things.

[00:55:21] And I just think it's such a magical word that means a magical thing. And I don't as far as I'm aware, there isn't a word in other languages that means quite the same. So I think it has this beautiful resonance

[00:55:39] to it as well. I love the sound serendipity. It sort of sounds magical even in the word. But yeah, I love using that word and I try to drop it in anywhere that I can in conversation because it is beautiful.

[00:55:53] So I'm very happy that you let me share an English word on your podcast. Of course, I think you picked a wonderful word. I did know the history around the word, but I also love the word. Happy accidents. Yeah, you don't usually think of accidents as happy, right?

[00:56:12] No, no, exactly. Yeah, it doesn't have to be that way. So that's a wrap for today. If you've enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to hit subscribe to never miss an episode. The In-Between-ish Pod is created and hosted by Beatrice Noor.

[00:56:30] The behind the scenes magic is thanks to Habiba Rube. And original music is composed and produced by Malik and Masidi. I love hearing from our listeners, so feel free to reach out to me any time. Join us every other Tuesday and remember the quest for belonging

[00:56:47] never ends and you are not alone. Keep exploring, keep embracing and keep celebrating that In-Between-ish life.