When you’re six, new to a country, morphed into this thing called “foreigner,” you don’t know what culture is, just that everything you do is wrong and everything that was once so easy and comfortable only brings pain and embarrassment. At birth, culture is family (mine was one of indulgent love). Then you’re uprooted and there’s the schoolyard, of teachers who mostly don’t care, of children who have no skills at compassion—they’re trying so hard themselves, to understand, to fit in. In school—that’s when I begin to fall more and more into an anxious state of observation.