Expat Life: Struggles of My New Turkish Home

I arrived in Istanbul with little knowledge of the country, its culture or language. Straight from the vacation in Japan with my boyfriend and his parents we came to Istanbul as a couple, no idea of what that really meant, but we would be living together and learning to navigate these new roles together. My boyfriend would learn about his relationships with his friends and family as he brought around this yabancı he picked up along his travels who could not speak a word of Turkish.

The first weeks went by in a blur of traveling to see this friend, meet with these people, see this place, it was a dizzying frenzy of traffic, pollution and immense beauty. The noise was deafening with all the yelling (really just talking loudly), honking and trucks, somehow it would all melt away as the call to prayers began. I remember being stuck in traffic getting on the bridge and hearing the ezan, rolling down my window so that I could block out everything else and just hear the prayer, I couldn’t (still can’t) understand it, but I could feel it, I could feel in my body that I needed this prayer, that something inside of me was changing and that prayer was something I could hold onto even if I wasn’t a muslim.

Dinner or a meeting with friends went one of two ways, the first, only one or two people who can speak English and we’d have a nice time as English would become the language of the evening and I could participate and laugh along with the jokes and stories. The second version was in larger groups, two and more, it didn’t matter if everyone could speak English, we were in Turkey and Turkish was the language of the evening. These early weeks were the loneliest. My boyfriend, excited to see friends he hadn’t seen for a while and having not dated a foreigner before, he was oblivious to the fact that sitting at a lively table not understanding a thing was a terrible experience. I remember on several occasions sitting at a table and thinking I should just get up and go to the bar, order a stiff drink and surely someone will speak English with me, someone will see me and realize that I had value enough to converse about something, anything. I never did try it, although in my mind I’d daydream about me storming up and out calling them all rude as I walked away. This led to a great many discussions with my boyfriend of what in the world I was doing in Turkey, no one acknowledges me, I couldn’t do anything, and for an independent American woman who had been on her own for many years the lack of freedom and communication was insurmountable.

In the grocery store I needed my boyfriend to help with brands, translations, checking out procedures. The simplest of tasks were no longer possible for me to do on my own. At Beyaz Fırın I went up to order two glasses of tea, I didn’t know how to say two, but I knew to say çay, so I held up two fingers and said “two çay”, this was already a humiliation, having to hold up my fingers as if I was in fact two years old. My tea came, one tea. I again held up my two fingers and said two. He then responded something to the effect of my having said “Türk çay” not two, so I went back to pay for my second tea and again waited for my order.

At home I told my boyfriend I was going to make coffee, a task I had been able to master since childhood, it was the best way to get my parents going on a day there was something we kids wanted to do. I didn’t realize that he had cleaned the interior of the machine and parts were not replaced until the coffee was brewing everywhere, over the countertop and onto the floor. In a scene much like “I love Lucy” I began scrambling to clean up the mess as the machine continued to spurt out coffee everywhere. My boyfriend came in to find me in tears totally deflated that nothing was possible for me to do anymore. He should break up with me and send me home at once. Surely a Turkish girl would be a lot less trouble. Thankfully, he was rational, patient and suggested that we work on my independence so that I would feel more like me again. Slowly I would regain my confidence.

We were at the airport with another couple friend heading out for Bayram holidays. Starbucks is a pretty simple process and the same worldwide, so my boyfriend told me how to order my drink and a drink for himself, so this should be a cakewalk I thought to myself. When the barista asked for my name I said “Elizabeth” in my typical American manner. He asked again and we repeated this process a few times before he just scribbled something and went to the next customer. I gave my boyfriend his drink (it was wrong, and I nicely told him to go up and fix it himself) and then took a sip of my chai tea latte, thankfully no translation needed. My husband’s friend starts laughing and says, “Nezibe, who’s Nezibe?”. I rotate my cup to see that my name had been replaced with Nezibe, a name that to me sounded awful, like Maude or Gertrude, surely this barista was being a jerk. They all laughed and I wanted to cry, my mood shrank and surely everyone was laughing at me and this just wasn’t what I pictured my life to look like.

After we returned to Istanbul it became quite clear that I needed lessons, I couldn’t go on anymore and I needed to have some basic Turkish skills to feel like a person again. I took lessons off and on over the next couple of years, I’d take a class, see some growth and then play for a few months before deciding I needed some more growth. Slowly I came to see my world was much different than those first days. When we became engaged we joked about taking Nezibe to be my Muslim name and then later that it’d be the name of our daughter.

The friends from those early days, some are still with us, some faded away and some new ones arrived. Another expat wife and I shared our stories of our early days in Turkey and laughed about how we were “ghosts”. We could sit at the tables, go to events and be unseen the entire time. If we did not cling to the sides of our husbands/boyfriends we would be trapped in a silent foreign film without a translation. Our partners had to take a step back from the fun to support us as translators, an action that solidified our partnership. My friend’s husband reply was that we were not ghosts, but angels and only those very special people can recognize an angel in their presence. Thankfully those days are behind me, a taxi driver called me abla the other day, so I guess I’ve survived the transition, although I’m still keeping my eyes out for other angels out there in need of recognition.

This article was originally published on October 24, 2017, by Elizabeth Akarslan Bondaruk.