FEBRUARY 26, SUNDAY

MISH KID SYNDROME

During my junior year at Woodstock my family had their every seven year furlough, a return for a year to the United States. It took so long before the 1950’s to travel from the United States to India and then return that missionaries only returned home once every seven years: 10 Days across the Atlantic by boat and a brief stop in Europe and two weeks by steamer through the Mediterranean and through the Suez Canal to Bombay and the two days by train to Allahabad. This was about to change. Already it was only five days across the Atlantic, and while flights were still too expensive, flying was just about to replace steamships. Until now India was very far away with no chance of returning once you left, but it was suddenly about to become much, much closer, only a very long day away. But until the 1950’s six years in India and one on furlough, where missionaries were expected to visit churches and raise money from churches for their mission work, was still the expectation.

We lived for a year in the Missionary Apartments in Princeton, New Jersey and I attended Princeton High School. Two things surprised me as we arrived in the United States. One was thick grass along the side of the road, all grazed away in India. And the second was white men doing the menial jobs of tying up the ship to the dock and moving baggage.

The year at Princeton High was a blank one for me. I was placed at the wrong level in my classes. No one seemed interested in learning a thing. I made no friends. Instead I filled my time, 4 hours every morning, delivering newspapers before school. During this year my mother‘s illness meant that we couldn‘t return to India, but I persuaded my father to send me back to Woodstock for my senior year, which he did.

This was a year of alienation. By the time I graduated from Woodstock in 1954 my father had a two year job doing a survey of Latin American agriculture and was away from home ten months a year so it was agreed that when I returned I would stay with my mother and younger brother and sister as the man of the house. It was another blank year. I knew no one in Princeton and at 17 I was too young to get a real job and had a series of part time jobs between months of joblessness. I mention this because I have always wondered why I have always felt disconnected in the United States.

It could be simply that these first two years back were so filled with alienation that I never recovered. I had heard about American missionary children suffering a kind of lostness when they returned to the United States, especially when they have felt so at home at Woodstock, and assumed that I was going through the same thing. But as I look back on it now I think something else was going on and want to wonder about it. What was this missionary kid malaise that I had heard about and continued to hear about at Woodstock reunions?

Because for me something else seemed to be going on. Those two years of alienation are understandable simply as the lostness you feel when you are suddenly shifted to a new place where you don‘t fit in or know anyone. Many American children are shifted from town to town, from a school system where they have friends to a new one where they know no one. They manage all right after a few months.

But a second form of disconnectedness has stayed with me all my life, and it is different from that alienated feeling. It is almost the feeling of the impermanence or the artificialness of any cultural conventions. It is closer to Kundera’s, the unbearable lightness of being. It is more a floating feeling in which things are actual enough and very real, but at the same time they are simply dreamed up conventions or the chance process of evolution, actual but impermanent, one possibility among endless possibilities.

American cultural conventions seemed absolutely real to my fellow Americans who had grown up within them, whether they shifted from school to school or not. American tradtional values were absolutely real, even universal, for them while for me they seemed oddly unreal. It was to me as if Americans were walking single file following each other between invisible wires, conventions that to me were invisible. The line would turn left and then right, always staying within invisible wires, I could get in line and turn whenever the others did or venture along on my own, constantly bumping painfully into invisible barriers. Everyone knew what to do and how to do it except me.

That image has stayed with me for years. I soon learned to fit in and do what everyone else did. But it never seemed real, it always seemed artificial, and it separated me from my fellow Americans.

But looking back on my missionary upbringing and my life at Woodstock this seems like a natural outcome of living in a country with completely different conventions where my American conventions were obviously artificial and out of place. And living with classmates from all over the world I never had the feeling that my way was the correct way and theirs were the wrong way. We all connected and accepted each other without judgment. Even the differences between the evangelical missionaries and mainline missionaries simply seemed to be two different ways of believing with neither one being right or better. The experience of growing up in a very different land made us open to all kinds of possibilities without judgment. I think it is this openness and acceptance which finally turned, for me, any kind of conventions into the incredible lightness of being. Nothing is fixed and nothing is right or correct.

This seems similar to me to the tension between conservatism and liberalism. Conservatives want to hold on to the most valuable parts of culture and to protect those things that are important to our identity. Liberals are open to new possibilities and differences and anticipate doing things in new ways. These two perspectives are in tension with each other as we see in polarized America.

My solution to this tension for myself, very likely not a missionary kid syndrome solution for others, is to realize that the India and Woodstock experience opened me up and made me accepting of all kinds of people and ways of doing things. It made me into a liberal through experience rather than conviction.

It is also probably, in a way, why I am on this three month trip around north India and northern Europe at 85. Every two years American cultural patterns become too much for me and feel constraining, both immobilizing and suffocating, and I have to break out into a world in which all conventions seem artificial and dreamed up. For three months I can float along unconstrained by any cultural conventions, almost like floating through Alice’s wonderland with nothing absolutely fundamental or real. Somehow super serious Hindu fundamentalism seems faintly comic to me, as does Christian fundamentalism or Islamic fundamentalism or all forms of patriotism. In a world of so many possibilities and such wide varieties of belief how can anyone assert that only they are right? It seems nuts.

So in this way my liberalizing Woodstock experience seems very freeing for me. But the price of secularism or acceptance of all possibilities is what I consider to be the missionary syndrome of being unable to fit in totally to American ways (or any other ways) of doing things. You never feel quite at home, never feel you completely belong, never feel a full member of any tribe including one of the American political tribes.

I can’t have it both ways, I can’t enjoy being an open outsider and at the same time fit in completely. I just have to accept my floating along and live with it.