Get In Where You Fit In … Or Don’t

I’m still thinking about the poem, “The Men Who Don’t Fit In” by Robert Service, which is the new credo at Expat Chronicles. Read it now if you haven’t.

I used to think about “fitting in” as a permanent, involuntary process. You either fit in or you don’t. Since discovering the poem, I see it in a new way. “Fitting in” is a recurring, deliberate act.

I count myself among the men who don’t fit in, but there are ways I actively fit in. Since moving to Philadelphia, I cheer for Philly sports teams. It gives me something to talk about with friends and neighbors. Occasionally I catch myself adopting the accent, pronouncing “wooder” for “water.” It’s not unconscious, but it’s not very deliberate either. I did the same in Peru and Colombia, changing from “Que tal, causa?” to “Q’hubo” or “Que mas?” It’s going with the flow.

But there is a limit to my fitting in. I probably won’t stay forever. I won’t try to become one of them. Philadelphia is still “strange and new,” but it won’t be forever. That’s when I’ll get bored and on to something else, strange and the new. Lately I’m enamored with Montreal, Quebec and learning French.

Looking back on my life, I’ve always done that.

I went to a typical suburban public school as depicted in Hollywood. There were jocks, nerds, burnouts, skaters – all the typical scenes from the teen movies. There were also black students, about 20% of the school. When I was young I found them very interesting. Different.

I hung around them more than most white students would. There were instances where I was the only white boy in a group playing basketball or riding around in a car smoking weed. I remember thinking on a few of those occasions, “What’s wrong with me?” I wish I could go back in time and tell my 18-year-old self that the men who don’t fit in aren’t bad.

In American high schools, most students study Spanish as their foreign-language requirement. I was always at the top of my class, not just because it came naturally. I would practice it with the Mexican immigrants. Where migrant laborers were invisible to most gringos, I would mix it up with them. Not just to practice, but to have a laugh. In college I worked at restaurants and made friends with the cooks. I spent a few nights with them at the Mexican dance club or at their house parties.

In grad school I made friends with a group of Polish and Lithuanians. I attended a couple all-Eastern European parties drinking vodka and Pilsner Urquell. Hanging around them is when I learned I didn’t want to speak a second language in a hyper-local street slang, like some did. Imagine a Polish laborer speaking in ebonics. It’s what he learned when he landed. I would want a clean, international accent, like one educated Lithuanian impressed me with.

I realized not fitting in and seeking out the strange and new have always been in me. I was always that weird white boy who was hanging around outside his kind. My big experiment with middle-class suburbanites was in joining a college fraternity, and that lasted three years. Many of those guys are still friends. But I could never see myself living like them, settling in my hometown and doing the same things forever. It’s not that I couldn’t. I just wouldn’t. Nothing strange, nothing new.

Not all gringos in Latin America are like me. Some have no problem fitting in. Christopher Kavanagh was a bird of a feather among the criminals and addicts of Dublin, before fitting right in with the equivalent in Bogota. He never left Colombia, almost never left Bogota. He got in where he fit in and made it his home.

But some of us are always on the hunt for the strange and new. The men who, by design and by choice, don’t fit in. Maybe it’s a little subconscious, a little genetic. But one can fit in if he needs to. We don’t want to.