Can you belong to someone else’s country?

By Maria Boghiu

On the last day of the writing workshop, after reading my short story, the gentleman sitting on my right looked at me as if I’d just appeared out of thin air. How old was I when I moved to Britain, and had I learned English growing up, and how old was I when I first started learning the language, he wanted to know. After a week we had failed to move beyond the topics of Romanian cuisine or how often I visited my parents. Hence his sincere astonishment felt more validating to me than anything anyone had ever said about my writing. As a lifelong neurotic, my strategy for belonging has always been to fit in so well that it would never occur to anyone to wonder whether or not I’m supposed to be there. I’ll take ‘how did you learn English so well,’ over ‘where are you from,’ any day. 

Language is the immigrant’s first battleground. The goal is to make your new language as habitable to your experience as your previous one, but that comes later. First, there’s repeating ‘drink-drank-drunk’ and ‘see-saw-seen’ and ‘lie-lay-lain’ and filling in the past participle in ‘John had ___ that place before’ over and over again, until your teeth hurt. Next comes composition, and getting a B for a single mis-conjugated irregular verb in a thousand word essay—a fact which twenty-two years on I am evidently still sour about. Finally there’s taking to idioms like a duck to... phrases with non literal meanings. And all that makes you merely fluent. The language is yours only when you can call someone a wanker without feeling nauseated with fear that you might be ridiculed for trying to pass as someone you’re not. Swear in slang and you’re one of the gang. 

Accents are one level up from that. A boyfriend once mocked me when I tried to use the English pronunciation of tomato for the first time. It was actually the /əʊ/ vowel sound in /təˈmɑːtəʊ/ that I stumbled on, a diphthong I still wince at in recordings of myself. It’s the sound in road, toe, and grow, which in British English requires a mid vowel shifting of the shape of the mouth, that caused me actual facial pain until the required muscles developed. But it was not the boyfriend’s fault. The social reflex is to mock phoniness, deception, inauthenticity. And by attempting an accent I wanted more than to be speaking English—I wanted to be English. Accents are about identity and  belonging, because identity is shaped by what we belong to. What we can belong to. What we can get away with seeming like we belong to: what we can pass ourselves off as. If you do not feel the urge to sound like the people in your new country, you are not an immigrant: you are an expat. 

I am not alone in thinking that belonging means fitting in. Amin Maalouf, a Lebanese French writer, says the immigrant’s first reflex is to try and pass unnoticed, flaunting his difference only when the first strategy fails. 

The secret dream of most migrants is to be taken for ‘natives’. Their first temptation is to imitate their hosts, and sometimes they succeed in doing so. But more often they fail. They haven't got the right accent, the right shade of skin, the right first name, the right family name or the proper papers, so they are soon found out. A lot of them know it's no use even trying, and out of pride or bravado make themselves out to be more different than they really are. 

Bravado requires psychological resources I do not possess, such as low neuroticism and a strong sense of self. Besides which I am blessed with an uncanny affinity for hopeless strategies, so fitting in was always going to be my first choice. 

Imagine my dismay when I learned that belonging and fitting in are mutually exclusive. According to psychologist Brené Brown, belonging is being somewhere where you want to be among  people who  actively want you;  fitting in is being somewhere where you want to be, but with  people who  don’t care one way or the other. My favourite definition comes from the schoolchildren in one of Dr Brown’s experiments:  

Belonging is being accepted for being you. 

Fitting in is being accepted for being like everyone else.  

Snap! I considered this with that mixture of awe and peevishness I always feel on hearing home truths from people two decades too young to offer them, but  I had to concede there was a karmically satisfying something to this idea. If you are willing to lose yourself in order to gain acceptance, you will manage only to lose yourself, but without gaining acceptance.

I chose London as my home on two occasions. On neither of those occasions would I describe the people of Britain’s attitude towards East Europeans as ‘glad to have us there,’ or even ‘do not care one way or another’. In September 2006, when I first moved to London, was the year before Romania and Bulgaria joined the free movement of people in the EU. And in February 2016 was the year of Brexit, when David Cameron announced the Brexit referendum and I had to move back from America before home became a place I could only visit on a visa. Better to keep a low profile in those days, for the purpose of relaxed conversation. 

I don’t know if this is a problem for all immigrants, or just those of us with a sense of self like Schrödinger's cat, but even these days telling people I’m from Romania often means instantly feeling myself become whatever notion of a person my interlocutor appears able to assemble from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, his au-pair, and that pork and polenta dish his neighbour’s nephew once told him about, which leaves me scrambling to remember what it is that makes me a person that isn’t those things. Which is hard. Because who even am I besides a fog of unmet needs and death anxiety? This is why, much as I love being regularly interviewed about sightseeing in Romania and Romania’s national cuisine and what Romania is like and what it was like growing up in Romania, I prefer to blend in to the point where people feel safe to assume that we have more in common for a conversation than the fact that we are both people with countries. 

Speaking near-native English has the added benefit of letting you move on to the next level of fitting in. Accents, especially in Britain, conjure up the surface of the speaker’s childhood kitchen table, the type of sport they played at school, whether their toaster was purchased at Argos, IKEA, or John Lewis. If they don’t glottalize their t’s and the diphthong /əʊ/ is pronounced as a monophthong, it’s always John Lewis. And since humans like to organise ourselves in layers, like a wedding cake, any interaction is indistinguishable from assessing one other’s placement in that hierarchy. A good accent, if you can manage it, is simple shorthand for letting your interlocutor know there is no need for them to mention their cleaners or au-pairs, or patio-expansion contractors, or their beauticians, local shop assistants or nannies, in response to your saying you’re from Romania, because you’re both going to Green Man Festival this year. You too can commiserate over mortgage rates and working from home’s impact on work-life-balance, and it’s your God-given middle-class birthright not to deal with the tedium of having to signal all this in conversation explicitly. I’m not saying I don’t want to talk about sarmale and răcitură every single time, I’m just saying I came to this country so I would never have to think about pork in gelatine again until the day I die. 

But I only joke about it because I find it awkward. The awkwardness comes from the fact that many migrants aren’t trying to gain social status so much as to maintain it. The downside of our human habit of making status a pillar of identity, is that once you have been brought up to understand your worth mostly in terms of where you stand relative to others, maintaining status becomes a matter of sanity and keeping existential chaos at bay. According to research, a loss of social status is one of the major risks of depressive illness (across all species) and migration often causes a loss in social status. Amin Maalouf says: 

Every individual is a meeting ground for many different allegiances. (…) People often see themselves in terms of whichever one of their allegiances is most under attack. 

My problem with being taken for a cleaner, of course, was that I was one. During the year when most of my scholarship went towards paying for tuition and before I learned how to avoid drinking in rounds, an unlucky family in West London had to put up with my insisting on vacuuming the underside of their sofa even though I was running over time. The British attitude towards deep cleaning is what I can only describe as that of a country whose last case of cholera was in 1893.

But competing over social status signals an insufficiency of social status which itself lowers social status, which means everyone has to compete covertly, wrapping our neediness in thick layers of feigned nonchalance. Except nonchalance is rather easier to feign when you already have a place in the hierarchy and you don’t have to personally study Watching the English by Kate Fox to understand that the way to befriend the English middle-classes is not to mention that you have read the complete works of Tolstoy, but to go along with an hour-long rally of ever more outlandish whippet-themed puns. This, believe me, is hard to do when it takes you half the conversation just to work out that a whippet is a British breed of medium-sized hound and not a kitchen appliance for making pancakes.

Throughout this journey, London kept me sane. Public spaces are the one thing you don’t need other people’s approval to belong to, and London’s openness is on full display in its public spaces. There are parks and libraries and museums and music halls and canals and gardens and waterfronts and cafes on streets with wide pavements where you can blend into the crowd without giving any accounts of yourself. Walk from King’s Cross south through Bloomsbury past the British Museum and Covent Garden until you reach Somerset House and join the Thames Walk southside and follow the river west until you reach Battersea Power Station - then carry on. Have a pint at the pub on the boat, pass the wall of hearts at the bridge, and St Thomas’ Hospital. Cross Albert Bridge and enjoy staring at people’s houses in Chelsea, rejoin the river at Putney Bridge and then keep walking: the path goes as far as Chiswick, Barnes Bridge, Kew Gardens, Richmond Park: you can go as far as Hampton Court if your feet will take you. Walking is how you make the city yours.

I received my British citizenship in 2022. I was too embarrassed to cry at the ceremony, so I went with what seventeen years of fitting in with British norms of behaviour had taught me was appropriate in the situation: I repressed my strong emotion by means of undetectable sarcasm, quips regarding the oath of allegiance, and a bunch of Home Office-themed puns. Secretly, though, I had goosebumps. British citizenship ceremonies are not ceremonial: citizenship is only granted once the attendance sheets reach the Home Office, meaning the ceremony is legally and thus literally transmutative. Mine remains the only rite I have undergone as an adult. But even with a passport, telling people I am British still feels vaguely fraudulent. According to a 2022 poll from the National Centre for Social Research, 46% of Britons still believe that being born in Britain is necessary to be ‘truly British’. Plus I still struggle with the diphthong /əʊ/. But at least someone I met the other day told me there is no need to use ‘where are you from’ as a conversation-starter. The question he asks—and you should too—is so much better: where is home?

Maria is a London-based therapist and writer. In her blog Mystic Catcraft & Other Hacks, she writes essays about existential angst and what can be done about it. In Chicken for the Soul, she writes about good books, bad feelings, and abstract ideas with practical applications. She's previously been a software engineer at Microsoft and on the founding team of Spill, a startup trying to make therapy universally accessible. She's lived in Romania (where she's from), Ireland and the United States—but most of her adult life was spent in Britain.