The Bubble Theory of Life

Last weekend, I made a guilty confession to my husband.

“Lately I’ve been having a really hard time being in Finland.”

After two years here, the “honeymoon period” of life in a new place is completely behind me. I am well past the stage of traipsing happily through the Helsinki market square nibbling on fresh Karelian pies, and wowing myself with my ability to say “Kiitos”. Lately, I no longer feel ok about speaking English with shop assistants and with the teachers at my daughters’ schools.

I’m no longer comfortable being the Unassimilated Foreigner.

Lately, I’ve been knuckling down and trying harder to take on board the Finnish language and culture. As a result, I’ve started feeling the full weight of that challenge. I’m starting to understand how long it might take me to feel even reasonably proficient at living life in Finnish and among Finns. The language is difficult, but lately I’ve felt that mastering basic cultural norms is even harder. It is like playing a new board game that hasn’t come with any rules. My fellow players are experts who don’t always understand why I’m struggling. They are usually at a loss to identify or explain particular rules that have always been second nature to them - rules like “don’t get involved” and “don’t say ‘thank you’ too much”.

At the moment, I feel like much more of a foreigner here in Finland than I did in Japan. I might never have mastered Japanese to native level or lived a truly Japanese life, but thanks to years spent in the company of Japanese host families, friends and colleagues, in the vast majority of social situations I understood the rules, and even if I broke them sometimes, I usually did it knowingly.

Here in Finland, I still regularly make social faux pas and breach basic tenets of the social code, but without having a clue that I’m doing it - not until I see other people looking uncomfortable. By then it’s too late.

I am not a Finn and have no illusions that I will ever be truly a “local” here, but I do have a strong desire to integrate to the best of my ability, as a mark of respect for the country that has been kind enough to accept me as a resident.

And I’ve never enjoyed being on the outer. I crave acceptance now as much as I ever did as a nerdy teenager with bad skin.

I told my husband all this, in a big emotional rush, and finally I paused for breath. He took a moment to digest it all. I was keen to hear his thoughts. After all, he has spent longer outside his home country than I have outside mine. Before coming back here two years ago, he lived outside Finland for twelve consecutive years, and – something that always astounded me – he always seemed quite at peace living abroad, and never really homesick.

He finally said, “Well, I see things a bit differently.”

And so it was that I heard, for the first time, his Bubble Theory of Life.

“Wherever you go in the world, you should make your own bubble that contains your home and those who are closest to you.”

What? So people who move to another country don’t need to make any effort to assimilate?

“No, no! Whenever you move to another place, of course you have to build your bubble with what you find there. You have to obey local laws. You should try to follow basic social norms and learn the language. You shouldn’t do these things out of some sense of pressure or obligation, though. You should do them for yourself and the people in your bubble. The more knowledgeable you are about your surroundings and the more in harmony you are with them, the better quality of life you’ll have there.

If you’re looking to get encouragement and acceptance from the locals, you are going for the wrong goal. You might get positive feedback sometimes. Enjoy it when you get it, but don’t ever expect it. It was your choice to move to this new place, and people in your host country have no obligation to encourage you, to help you, or to make you feel at home. It’s up to you to do that for yourself. Remember that the only place where it’s important to work for acceptance is inside your own bubble.

If you don’t ever want to change yourself, then you shouldn’t ever move away from your own hometown. It’s totally unreasonable to expect that you could live exactly the same life in a different place.

On the other hand, when you build your bubble you still have to hold on to who you really are and what is important to you. It can be difficult to know what you should and shouldn’t change – what to hang onto and what to leave behind - but you will figure it out in time.

If you find that you can’t be at peace with your environment and also at peace with yourself, or if you find yourself constantly looking to places far away for elements that you feel are missing, then you are probably in the wrong place and should think twice about being there. 

Just remember, though, that there’s no need to be just like a local. You need to be polite and respectful and a nice person, but you can be all those things without being exactly the same as everyone else.”

But if you’re different from everyone else, wouldn’t you always feel like an outsider? Wouldn’t that make you feel sad?

“In my case? Perhaps sometimes, but never for long.

What matters to me is my own bubble and the people inside it. I absolutely need their love and acceptance.

As long as I have that, I’ll never be an outsider, no matter where I live.”

Here’s to spending less time fretting about correct Finnish grammar and social acceptance by people I barely know, and more time enjoying and investing in the people I love most in this world.

And here’s to my wise and loving husband and our well-travelled bubble. 

The Family Car

From the time I was in primary school until I was well into my 20s, my dad owned the same car. He was devoted to its health and well-being. It was unique and irreplaceable. 

Photo credit

It was a white Holden Kingswood.

Until I was about 10, I saw this vehicle through my Dad’s rose-tinted lens. I enjoyed its enormousness – the back seat that we once proved was big enough for 5, the boot that could hold an implausible number of bikes and scooters, the ridiculously abundant leg-room. I loved that in summer we would wind down all the windows and let the warm breeze rush into our faces and ears. The car was affectionately nicknamed “Bertha”.

Then, one day, sometime in primary school, I suddenly noticed my friends’ parents’ cars. Mighty Mitsubishi Pajeros. Zippy little Hondas. Gleaming Mercs. They had a lovely newness and a modern sleekness about them. In one of those painful coming-of-age moments, my young mind realised that (like proper Speedos instead of el-cheapo bathers from Woolworths, and like Popper juice boxes rather than daggy re-usable drink bottles) these cars represented Fitting In.

I realised with horror that Bertha was the mark of a family that didn’t have the money for something better.

Things got worse when I was a teenager, and my parents sent me to a private girls’ high school that was known for its high academic standards. Unsurprisingly, it was filled with girls from privileged families who owned luxury cars. In hindsight, I was lucky enough to be able to attend this excellent school only because my parents, with humble jobs as a public servant and a teacher, chose to invest in my education, and not in new cars. As a teenager, however, I could not see past my own confused angst and self-pity. I would take two different buses to get home rather than be seen in that car. I would cringe when friends came over and saw it parked in the driveway.

In my view, it was the family car from hell. It stood for everything that was wrong with my self-image.

My loathing continued in force for some years, until, at age 17, I was desperate to learn how to drive. My dad was actually willing to teach me, but he and Bertha were a package deal. Having to be seen in Bertha was an evil I would have to live with if I wanted that coveted driver’s license.

Bertha was like no other car I’ve driven since. Forget automatic transmission and power steering – Bertha had a classic “three on the tree” stick shift, and steering so heavy you could feel it in your triceps as you tried to get around tight corners. There were only three forward gears, but you could comfortably do 80 kmph in Bertha’s mighty second gear. Engaging the clutch required considerable lower-body strength. While steering required some level of brute force, at the same time you had to be a bit careful – in the wake of a dodgy repair executed by my dad, the steering wheel was strangely wobbly, and in fact, a few years later, it actually came off in my younger brother’s hands while the car was in motion. [When he told me about it, I was shocked and asked, “But what did you do?” and he said, calmly, “I put it back on again!”] The left indicator didn’t work, or rather, it did, but for reasons Dad was never able to ascertain, turning it on caused the horn to blare loudly. The radio antenna had been snapped off by vandals, so Dad had ingeniously made a new one out of wire that he’d sticky-taped around the inside perimeter of the windscreen.

But against all odds, thanks to (or in spite of) Bertha I passed my driving test on the first try! After that, when Dad had weekend errands to run, he would ask me to come with him, and handing me the key to his beloved car, would say, “Go on – you drive!”

I like to think this was his way of saying, “I love you, and I’m proud of you.”

And by my 20s, my feelings about Bertha had mellowed. She was like an elderly relative – full of flaws and quaint little idiosyncrasies, but a lovable fixture nevertheless. Bertha came to symbolize something important in my life. She represented humility, living within one’s means, and the need to work hard for material gain. She reminded me of my parents’ love, and their determination to send their children to the best schools they could possibly afford, even if that meant living on a tight budget and cheerfully driving the same old car for almost two decades. She taught me not to be ashamed of having fewer and less nice material things than others, because in the end I had all the things that were truly important.

It was around this time that my younger brother was driving Bertha when he was involved in a car crash. He walked out of it without a scratch. Bertha was so badly damaged that she was written off.

It was her time to go, I thought. By this stage, my parents were no longer strapped for cash. They could go out and buy a newer, better-quality car.

But Dad, somewhat devastated at his loss, wasn’t ready to give up on Bertha. Unbelievably and to my mother's horror, he went out and bought two scrapped Holden Kingswoods, deposited them in the front yard, and started, piece by piece, trying to rebuild Bertha. We tried to dissuade him from this task, convinced this would be a prolonged but ultimately futile attempt at resuscitation (“It’s all over, Dad. You did your best. Let her go now.”)   

But he actually managed to summon a pulse. He succeeded in rebuilding that damn car. The new Bertha was pretty rough around the edges where Dad had tried his hand at DIY panel-beating, but she was back on the road, and Dad was thrilled.

It was somehow shocking and just plain unfair when, one night not long after that, Bertha was (no kidding) STOLEN, never to be recovered. Dad suspected joyriders. Even we who had driven that joyless car were kind enough not to laugh.

Dad gave in and bought a soulless but reliable Camry. It doesn't have a name.