expating is hard

but diaspora is harder

Hello, this is Diana from Baur Studio, a newsletter about European life and style - art, ceramics, design, food, wine and gardening and stories - from the Black Forest of southern Germany and the northern Italian wine hills of Piemonte.

If you’re new here, welcome! I’d love it if you’d subscribe and take a look around.

Feedback is so important. I read and respond to comments and love the dialog with my readers. Hitting the 🧡 or sharing/restacking helps the post be read by as many people as possible. Thank you so much.

life on the balcony in the Black Forest | baur studio

It’s two weeks since returning from Italy. Life here at the Black Forest’s edge is completely different than in the wine country south of the Alps. I’ve re-engaged with my garden, planting out the raised beds, laying our stone-mosaic back patio, and doing all the other earthy things that make this place nest-like. My body and spirit need an energetic break after the intense social and emotional experience that is Italy. I come back and do different work than I do there.

There’s a change of mood and other colours here. Interactions with people are not the same. I say different things to German people than I say to Italians, always trying to synchronise my words and phrasing to what might be expected, reading the cultural room before actually talking. All of this is now habit, my Americanness tucked down into a fold in my heart that no one can see unless they ask about the my Americanness and how much it still informs everything about me. Even after 30 years of not living there.

You never quite belong when you’re an expat. There’s nothing about that that’s easy. I’ve watched expats - many of them - whittle away to fit into a culture they found themselves in by chance or by choice. But there’s a downside to that, because you can lose your footing when you don’t remember who you are or where you came from and lead from that place.

It’s not a bad thing, that not belonging. It’s just reality. You cannot become what you never were. You are who you are. There’s strength in just being you, a strength that you should never have to whittle away at, ever.

What you can do is integrate. Learn the language, try the local culture on for size. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it, and it makes the whole experience so much richer when you can communicate with people in their language. Integrating and belonging are two separate things. I’m fully integrated both in Italy and in Germany. My sense of really belonging, or home, is a more complicated and deeper question, one that I grappled with long before leaving my country in the first place.

There are edges and off-key tones of expat life that scrape the soul like falling off a bike on a gravel road. It’s challenging to stay balanced. There’s the sudden craving for walking by the river where I grew up, talking to people in English, being validated with a head-nodding I know what you mean.

The desire for things to be easy and without effort. That’s a big one.

Emilia Romagna, 1916-1924. All four of my grandparents left between those years.

I wonder if they ever had these thoughts, if they ever craved a sunset from the castle in Bardi or a walk along the Taro River in Berceto, while they scrubbed floors in other people’s houses or mended other people’s clothes or cooked in hot New York City kitchens. How was that, with no phones and no Steve Jobs, just waiting for and receiving handwritten letters, hoping that no letters arrived with the ominous black stripe which meant someone had died. Letters that took weeks to arrive, via boat, and how it was for them never to have seen their parents again alive, after leaving on big, dirty, rat infested ships from Genoa?

How was it for my mother’s mother, who, born in New York and brought back to Italy as a child by Italian parents who did not want to stay, left Berceto via Genoa to go back to New York, this time newly married and pregnant, to board a ship, ride “steerage” in the lower decks and arrive in New York? Spouses were not granted automatic American citizenship, so my grandfather boarded a ship illegally, landed in New Orleans, and made his way to Canada by foot, where he applied for a visa to come to the USA. By the time they let him in, my grandmother had a one year old daughter named Mary.

How was it to think you’d never see your people again? To leave and know you’d probably never, ever get back? How did it feel, Nonna, with a baby in your belly on a boat by yourself? I wish I could just hold you and comfort you and let you rest.

How was it for my father’s father, a horse trainer in Bardi, in the mountains of Emilia Romagna, to come to America, to find the only work was to become a kitchen runner, then cook, then sous chef, making sauces and living in 500 square feet with his wife and three children, looking out a window on all the other tenement apartments of all the other Italians from the North? I was five when he died. I remember him being loving, but he seemed broken and sad.

How was it to have sweat in a kitchen, when you just wanted to be in the country on a horse with the wind in your face? To come home to hungry mouths to feed, all crowded around you, every single day? I wish I could take you away to a place where you could ride free with me, Nonno.

Working in kitchens, checking coats and mending clothes. Was it worth it? The enormous trauma and pain? Did you have any clue about how brave you were?

I am the product of these people and carry the genetic code of giants. I am the second generation after the Italian diaspora. My grandparents were four of the four million Italians fleeing abject poverty and hunger for the filthy and dangerous streets of Manhattan, Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco, fighting for jobs with other diaspora from Ireland and Germany.

And to think that only hurdle to my satisfying the momentary craving for something familiar is a plane ticket.

I get in the car, a new one for me, with all of the things, talk to Siri and hit German country roads, blasting It’s My Life and Don’t Stop Believing and various other 70s rock anthems, like I did on the back roads in Pennsylvania a million years ago. I sing loudly and my long hair is free like a freak flag and the window is down. My car reminds me that there is wind drag and I should close the window. I tell my new car to fuck off, because it’s my life, Jon Bon Jovi just told me so, and this is what it takes to remember who I am.

I owe it to them, those people who ultimately made sure I could live a wild-hearted life, to be strong. So I stay strong and think, how lucky am I, to have the chance to challenge myself in new cultures because I have that choice, not because I’m starving.

I came back, Nonna and Nonno. I came back and Italy is a different place.

The world has changed seismically since they left everything they knew for the constant and traumatic strangeness that was America. Americans like me now see places like Italy as the destination for living a calm and quality life, and choosing it, not out of hunger and poverty, but out of the abundance of wealth that facilitates such choices. There are a million ways to communicate, and my sister in Philadelphia and I receive our news at exactly the same moment, prompting did you hear…? and OMG yes I did WhatsApp messages to each other. Steve Jobs has come and gone and everyone around the globe knows what a Prime package looks like.

Expating is hard, but it’s not diaspora. Expating is challenging, but not like learning German because there’s a war where you’re from. Expating can be lonely, but not like coming by yourself because your family was killed in your home country. You never quite belong when you’re an expat, but technology and airplanes take the sting out of it.

I am privileged to live this complex, multi-layered expat life, and I’ll never forget that, never for one day, or a minute, or even for a second.