Ahmad Al-Mallahi Faculty, Agriculture I knew that as my country and suddenly it was not anymore. I experienced a displacement myself when I moved from Kuwait to Jordan in 1991. I did not experience any war because we were on summer vacation in Jordan when the Iraqis invaded Kuwait. My father had experiences with this, and he said, 'No, this is a war-zone, we are not going back, we are staying here.' So suddenly I found myself going to school in Jordan. All of a sudden, it turned from vacation to living there. We did not even have a house there, we were just visiting my aunt and then suddenly it became our place of residence. I was 13 at that time. It was shocking. We, for example, had this soccer team in Kuwait with the neighbors. Soccer was my favorite hobby, and I spent the weekends watching different matches. I had the social life in Kuwait. I had my friends playing soccer and meeting up, but it was not in a structured way. We had so much fun and our social life there. Everything was well established and although I am Palestinian, it was my hometown. I was born and raised there. I knew that as my country and suddenly it was not anymore. Long before moving to Canada, I got a scholarship to study in Japan by the Japanese government. I went for my masters in the beginning. I really liked the country, it’s very organized. Public life is very easy going in Japan, but socializing with Japanese is a bit hard. One thing in Japan is that you really have to speak Japanese to socialize with the people, which is really difficult to figure out as an adult. Although for us, since it was a government scholarship, we had the privilege of studying Japanese for free in the beginning as an intensive course. After that, you can continue studying this, which I took full advantage of. I had a six-year scholarship, so I knew I would stay there for six years. So why not take full advantage of that? It was an investment. I did not think I would end up living in Japan for 15 years, but I wanted to spend the first three years to invest in my Japanese and use this in my PhD. I did my masters presentation, for example, in English and my PhD defense in Japanese. That was my plan. For me personally, I did not want to leave Japan without knowing Japanese. I would not have felt good saying that I lived in Japan for 15 years but cannot speak the language. It’s funny being a foreigner in Japan, we always say, there is this foreigner bubble, the Japanese call it ‘gaijan.’ This word is kind of rude and it means that you are an outsider. There is this bubble where all of these foreigners get together and live in their own society within the Japanese society. Japanese are usually objective driven when it comes to socializing. Even at gatherings, people simply don’t gather because they are friends; there is always something else in common that puts them together. The first thing is, my family is Palestinian and I was born in Kuwait. Not all of my family was in Jordan, even though we are related. After 1948, they left Palestine and ended up in different countries, even when we were the same family. The way they settled, they ended up having different passports. So, I had this image from a very young age that my family lives in different countries. I have three children — 6, 4 and 2. The way we manage the languages — we studied this a bit before we had the children. The most important thing to do is to keep yourself as a model for your child. I speak nothing but Arabic to my children, my wife does the same with Portuguese (she’s from Brazil) and Japanese in the school that is how we managed it before we came here. It went well, they do not mix, almost. The most important thing in a culture is the language. You relate to the people who speak the same language as you, right? ← Nimisha ↑ Home Jocelyn →
