Immigrant Diaries: Tales from a girl in Copenhagen

Immigrant Diaries is a new category at Magpie Girl. Here you will find our adventures in Denmark. We move to Copenhagen with the New Year.

In thinking about our move I found myself saying “But we won’t be immigrants there, not really.” Then I was struck by the implicit racism in my own thinking – I had only been categorizing people of colors as ‘immigrants.’ Everyone else had some sort of special ‘I belong’ status in my mind. But we will, in fact, be seen as immigrants in our new home, our whiteness for the first time not granting us the immediate status of belonging. I’m curious as to what that will be like, so here I will record that story.
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On the quest to have one’s own identity while still pursuing cultural harmony:

I could tell right away they were not Danes. Most obvious, of course, was that they had dark skin – a rarity in this platinum blonde nation. She was ‘eating American,’ that is, picking up pieces of her too-chewy cinnamon bun with her fingers. He was pouring ketchup on his eggs. Neither had rye bread, cold sausage, or cheese on their plates. When they spoke British accents emerged, confirming my suspicions.

This is how people see me here. Small tell-tale habits give away my otherness, even when my mouth stays silent. I will never truly fit in.

And why should that be my goal? True, I want to shed my ‘ugly American-ness,’ but I still want to celebrate my unique otherness—as should we all.

Being here has made me aware of how much time I do spend trying to fit in. I’d like to think it is because I want to avoid giving offense. But the truth is I do it at home too, so I know it is not really about deferring to an unknown culture.

This morning I queued to the right on the stairs, ate my pastry with a fork, thought about growing my hair out long – maybe even ceasing to dye it red. Then I realized; I was in immediate danger of losing myself to a false image. I made a conscious decision to be gleeful, but polite, about not fitting in.

“Please don’t let me be ordinary,” my mother used to sing to me from The Fantasticks. It is true that from a young age I have never wanted to be ordinary, have never felt like one of the group. My intutive pull has always been towards the other, the fringe, the outsider.

Still, I’ve always wanted my uniqueness to be from clever choice, not from alien necessity. Here, where one of the national values is “equality through conformity,” I am nervous of being “the immigrant”—of sticking out due to my ignorance of the social norms—this social awkwardness feeling very different from my state-side approach of making a conscious choice to subvert the commercial monotony of the crowd. I don’t want to be different here out of mere social awkwardness. But then again, even moving here will be from choice, from some vaguely daring internal sense of adventure. So I guess on days when my ego needs the tiniest bit of a boost, I can chalked my cultural awkwardness up to cunning personal choice. When I need a shot in the arm to get out and get past all of the unknowns, I can look at my choice to dwell abroad, to be the cultural other, and say like Peter Pan, “Oh, for the cleverness of me.”

Posted in Immigrant Diaries
Tags: denmark, Immigrant Diaries |