Hey, :)
I'm an international student, and this is my essay for a UMich prompt:
Prompt- Everyone belongs to many different communities and/or groups defined by (among other things) shared geography, religion, ethnicity, income, cuisine, interest, race, ideology, or intellectual heritage. Choose one of the communities to which you belong, and describe that community and your place within it.
Essay:
It was twenty years ago that a young graduate in dentistry, from the south Indian state of Kerala, boarded a plane to the middle-eastern country Kuwait. The dentist, my father, became a part of the "Kerala Gulf diaspora" - the migration boom of Keralites to oil-rich Arab countries in search of employment.
Now, I am seventeen and have lived primarily in Kuwait for every year of my life.
Apart from my wheatish complexion, I often feel that I have nothing in common with those born and brought up in Kerala itself. Even though my parents taught me to read, write and speak in Malayalam (the language used in Kerala), I have always found it hard to converse to other Keralites, be it even small talk with shopkeepers. My Malayalam is muddled, and I often mix it up with English.
There is a reason for this: my friends are from all over India, a very diverse land, and the only language that unites us is English. So I almost always conversed in English, and was alien to my mother tongue. When I would visit Kerala, all my interactions with the locals were awkward, and my fashion sense was different from what they followed. Earlier, this made me very insecure. How could I, a boy who recognized himself as a Keralite, not understand his own culture?
That's when I started considering my ambiguity as diversity, and identified myself among the "expatriate" Keralites community rather than the "regular" Keralites. My circumstances were different from those who were raised in Kerala itself. So, I had no reason to associate with them.
I share this feeling with many of the 120,000 Keralites currently in Kuwait. I now find it easier to account for my identity: I am an Indian, and specifically, an expatriate Keralite.