the world belongs to the brave

I recently had the pleasure of meeting a friend’s visiting mother. The circumstances of our two encounters were such that we had quite a bit of time to talk between ourselves, while everyone around us was wrapped up in their own conversations. After a while we were discussing things that strangers normally wouldn’t talk about. We connected, as much as strangers in a chance encounter can, woman to woman, half a world and one generation apart. Our talks, though comparatively brief, were incredibly rewarding to me. Disproportionately rewarding even, considering the circumstances.

The thing is that at the age of 20 when I left my homeland, I had barely just stepped upon the threshold of adulthood. Having thrown myself into the unknown, I had to find out on my own who I was (and it was not who I thought I was), how to take responsibility, how to make the puzzle pieces of every day life fit together, how to be an adult. At that, in a country like China, light years away from the cultural context I grew up in.

In some ways, I think the road I took forced me to grow up faster. When you have no one to back you up, you simply have got to make it work any way you can. On the other hand, the path I chose meant a longer search for stability. I’ve sometimes been lost in the fog without a light to guide the way. I’ve stumbled and fallen on my face more than just once or twice. I’ve had periods of raging regression and by some miracle, every time I’m back in Stockholm I turn into a teenager again. None the less, all things considered, I’ve done a good job and I’ve turned into a (mostly) well-functioning young adult. I’ve learned how to deal with whatever comes, to not despair over confusion, to not be scared of not being in control, to get by and how to pick myself up off the ground when I trip and fall.

My path is hardly unique and I am far from the only one. The majority of my friends and acquaintances now, live or have lived under similar conditions. We left when we were young, we’ve lived abroad for a certain amount of time, and we’ve had to figure things out on our own. Moreover, most of the time we’re surrounded by people in our own demographic.

We’re maturing into adulthood without role models. When we substitute ourselves as our own advisors, we have to go back in memory to draw wisdom shared to us by the older generation as we grew up.

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Role Models and Mothers

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Because of that, when I occasionally have the opportunity to have a conversation that goes deeper than shallow small talk with someone of my parents’ age, I treasure those moments. It’s a different perspective, a mature point of view backed up by 30 odd years more experience than I have had time to accumulate, and it is important for me to be allowed to share it. Maybe this particular role model is just temporary. Maybe it’s for a few months, or weeks, or just hours. But I will pick something up, and perhaps sometime in the future this specific conversation is what I will fish out of my memory and use as a reference when I’m calling on myself for advice.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the older generations have all the answers. I’m certainly not saying they, or anyone else, have the answers that would fit me, or you. We don’t have to do as they say. We shouldn’t do as they do. We all need to figure out what the questions are, and then find our own answers to them, regardless of our age, or where or how we live our lives. But the older generations do have the benefit of experience, and young adults benefit from if not getting the answers served to us, at least getting an example for how you can solve the problem.

Even though I have learned to live in the absence of a role model close at hand, I still have them on a distance. My mother is my greatest inspiration to how to do it, and admittedly sometimes an example of how to not do it. When I lived in Germany my ex-boyfriend’s mother was always a source of comfort and advice, and she have continued being my “German Mummy”. Even though I haven’t seen her for a year and a half I still miss her a lot and often imagine asking her for advice and trying to picture her answer. The most recent representative of my parents’ generation is my boyfriend’s father, who lives in Shanghai and whom I’ve had the chance to get to know quite well during my many visits to the city. He also happens to be the only older person I know who lives like I do, on the move, but has been at it for 25 years longer than I have.

No wo/man is an island. Young adults, reach out for your parents’ generation, they may not know how to send a MMS, but they have a lot to share. Mature adults, understand that, like a light house, sharing your experiences helps us to find our way, even when we chose a different path than you did.

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◊ Alex