Vanessa Fabiano, author of Chinese on the Beach, has long explored what it means to belong, and not belong, across shifting cultural landscapes. In her fiction, she captures the tensions of expats, locals, and returnees caught in the whirlwind of China’s transformation in the 1990s and early 2000s. In this essay, Being a Stranger: China versus Spain, she turns that same sharp eye on her own life, reflecting on how cultural displacement can feel more disorienting in the familiar than in the foreign.
Being a stranger: China versus Spain
Vanessa Fabiano
I’ve never had a mother tongue and no culture to call home. Born to Italian-Spanish immigrant parents in the Swiss-German part of Switzerland, I grew up with four languages. My parents between them spoke French, their lingua franca, and we watched French news and films featuring French stars like Catherine Deneuve. Though we spoke Italian at the dinner table, my brother and I always spoke to each other in Swiss German. Spanish was present to some degree, my mother and visiting relatives would speak it, but eventually it was displaced by Italian for practical reasons. My mother felt we had to cut down on the number of languages, to ensure nothing distracted us from acquiring the fluent, accentless (Swiss) German that would lift us children above immigrant status – at least linguistically.
It was only in school, approximately aged fifteen, that I re-learned Spanish, this time with proper vocabulary and syntax. And decades later, I came to live in Madrid with my Danish husband and Ethiopian-born daughter, settling in my mother’s culture for the first time. My expectation was that this would be relatively easy. I expected it to be much easier than my stint in China, where I had lived in the early 2000s, in the mega-cities of Beijing and Shanghai. Spain was more familiar, it was in my “blood”, I had been exposed to the language and culture since birth. I looked Spanish, whereas in China my physiognomy marked me as foreign.
Spain, trickier to figure out
As it turned out, Spain was in many ways trickier for me to figure out. The fact that there was no transparent boundary marking me as foreign, was part of the challenge. I looked Spanish, spoke the language fluently, hence people classified me as native. I was, understandably, expected to grasp the social cues, the manifold implicit rules that make up a culture. When I blundered – because I wasn’t well-versed in Spanish culture – the reaction veered from aggrieved to confused. In China there was no such ambiguity about my status and no expectation that I grasp the nuances of Chinese social etiquette. The fact that I spoke Mandarin came almost as a shock in the early 1990s – there were few foreigners back then and fewer still who spoke Chinese. Any attempt at mastering the language, no matter how rudimentary the results, earned you local respect.
In many ways, Spain confounded me more than China. There was the spontaneity that co-existed with what struck me as an arbitrary adherence to rules. An undercurrent of chauvinism alongside a nagging embarrassment at trailing the rest of Europe in economic development, digitization, and standard of living (this was in the early 2010s). There was the buoyant street life that belied an intense privacy around home life. It could take years to be invited into someone’s house or apartment, or their life off the street. In a similar discretionary vein, conversations steered clear of inquiries about one’s occupation, perhaps a reflexive habit developed during the years of dictatorship. I loved living in Spain, but I struggled to make sense of Spanish culture, despite my Spanish roots. Whereas the China of the early 2000s, in pursuit of all-consuming economic growth, was – for a while at least – easier to grasp. People were driven by an accelerating pragmatism, an existential pursuit of a better life. Whatever cultural complexities lay beneath, they were momentarily suppressed in service of that goal.
Irony of cultural displacement
Perhaps the deepest irony of cultural displacement is that familiarity can be more disorienting than foreignness. My experience in Spain reminded me of the Chinese Americans I had met in China, who looked the part but were culturally adrift – expected by locals to understand social codes and customs they were never fully taught, just as I was expected to navigate Spanish cultural nuances I had absorbed only secondhand. On the upside, after ten years in Spain, I came to a deeper and satisfying kinship with the country – except for the late lunch and dinner. I never got used to that.
Discover Chinese on the Beach, by Vanessa Fabiano, available now from Ybernia. Visit Ybernia’s website to explore more titles:
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