Where are you from?

Some people see it as another way to say hello, but I dread the question. For as long as I can remember, I have turned conversational cartwheels to avoid it. Once people hear my answer, they usually don’t know what to do. Either they brush it aside or it dominates the conversation.

I am from Turkey. Well, America, technically. I wasn’t born in Turkey; I moved there when I was one. We moved because God called my parents there as missionaries. Growing up in Turkey laid the foundation for how I approach my American and Turkish identities, as well as my everyday relationships and my relationship with God.

I knew who Jesus was from a very young age. He was the reason why my parents were in Turkey, so of course he was a big deal to me and the rest of the family. I remember in preschool one day repeating the name of Jesus to my teacher.

“İsa.” I’d say.

“İsa kim?” Who’s Jesus? 

“İsa.” Jesus.

Back and forth, the same question and the same response. I was too shy to say more and probably didn’t have the vocabulary at the time to tell her who Jesus was.

There was more to Turkey than just Jesus though.

As a kid, I remember waking up and tearing up a flight of stairs to our terrace at the top of our house. Both my dad and I were early risers, and sure enough, I found him reading his Bible on the IKEA porch swing. The CDs we hung from our roof to keep the pigeons away shimmered in the rising sun. The spherical rainbows didn’t stop the pigeons from their collective cooing, though, as the light inched its way up the hill by our house. If we stayed there long enough, we would hear the call to prayer echo down the streets as Ürgüp came to life, each mosque crier half a beat off from the one before. I miss that hill by our house. And I miss the pigeons, funnily enough.

I remember my Turkish elementary classroom well. It was big with plastered walls; the top half was painted white, and the bottom half was painted yellow. The windows were in big holes in the wall, with a metal grate covering the outside. In jest, we once tried to lock one of our classmates in the space in between the grate and the glass pane.
His last name was Akıllı, meaning “smart” in English. One day in math class, the teacher yelled at him that it was a shame he didn’t live up to his last name. Her last name was Tokat. Tokat means “punch.” Unfortunate last name, but she was a great teacher.

Images like these are small, but I keep them close to my heart. They are the substance of my past. Even though I can imagine a childhood on the outskirts of Minneapolis, where my mom grew up, or in small-town North
Dakota where my dad is from, the childhood that the Lord chose to give me consisted of Turkish classrooms and sunrises ushered in by the Arabic call to prayer.

My Turkish friends and I lived the same lives: Late summer nights were spent playing hide and seek or joining in the occasional wedding that would blast ear-splitting music down our street. When I entered fourth grade, however, I was the only student who opted out of religion class at my parents’ request. While all my classmates learned how to pronounce the Bismillah, I sat in the computer lab and read my book about an American Christian teenager.

“You know, if you’re not Muslim, you’re going to hell…” I remember my best friend from class telling me as we were walking back together from school one day. “But maybe Allah will let you into heaven because you speak Turkish,” she concluded simply. To this day, I know that she meant no harm. I find her comment rather hilarious and a testament to how much we saw our own humanity in each other, despite our differences in faith and nationality.

I knew I was American; my family made furlough trips every four years to my parents’ home states to visit family and to raise support from churches. These trips meant weeks of church-hopping. To every congregation, we were “the Mosses who were back from Turkey.” I was asked questions about Turkey: “What was it like?” and “How
did you like living there?” Chock-full weekends of grilling hot dogs and hamburgers at supporters’ homes blurred together, and every church sanctuary started to look the same. I was usually excited to go back home to Turkey.

The first time I truly became cognizant of my non-ethnically Turkish identity was right before high school. I had put a few years between my last experience in a Turkish classroom and was attending a Christian Turkish summer camp. On the last day of camp, one of the campers approached me and complimented me on my Turkish. I told her thank you, but inwardly I was reeling. I wasn’t Turkish to her.

Since I passed as Turkish and spoke Turkish without an American accent, people were usually surprised to hear English come out of my mouth, not the other way around. The terrible realization sunk in that I had become a yabancı (foreigner). Yabancı—I shuddered at the word. That word was for tourists who got ripped off buying small clay souvenirs, not me. Not for a yerli—not for a local! But I had nothing to say, since I was not ethnically Turkish. I had always known I was American, but I benefited from that aspect of my identity as a sort of party trick I could pull out. It had never rivaled my Turkish identity. But now I saw that it had, and my American identity had come out on top. It was an ugly victory.

I felt like I was in an arena watching my Americanness and my Turkishness fight for primacy. The referee was my immediate community: I wore a sign that said “Turkish” with Americans and “American” with my community in Turkey. This is the TCK’s dilemma. I had internalized a false dichotomy that I had to be either one or the other. It felt like there was no room to be both. I could no longer go back to feeling fully Turkish after that moment at camp, so I felt resigned to my American identity. I went through the end of high school nursing a grudge against a people I felt alienated from, yet, in the back of my mind, knew I was supposed to belong to. I moved to America when I was 18 to study Communication. I was entering what would be a time of reconciling with my American identity as well as the missionary background in which I had grown up.

I wanted to continue growing in my faith when I moved away from home but found myself repeatedly disappointed by the churches I attended. I was especially discouraged at their times of communal worship. The intense, reverent way of worshiping I was familiar with seemed more “authentic” to me. The dissonance I felt in comparing American church services to those in Turkey led me to mistakenly believe that God was less present in America than he was in Turkey. I had been building a wall of judgment not only against Americans and American culture, but against the American church as well.

God moves differently among different people groups at different times, but he is always moving them toward himself. A few major experiences I had in college helped me to see how God was and is moving in America, the first of which was hearing his assurance of his presence. I was worshiping on campus with some friends late one night during my junior year. As we were singing, memories of my time in Turkey began populating my mind out of nowhere. I was suddenly walking down the streets of Ürgüp and watching the sunrise. I was in my classroom, joking around with my classmates—I soaked it all in, memory after memory. “I am here,” I felt the Lord saying. “Not only in your memories but in this country—in this very room.” Doubts of God’s active presence in America have not returned since that night.

I attended Urbana during college, which was another confirmation that the God I followed was present and working in and outside of America. Urbana is a global missions conference that takes place every three years put on by InterVarsity. It showed me that the American church cared about his global work. I left Urbana steeped in thoughts of international missions and ministry. What I had thought was primarily a thing of my past was suddenly a part of my life again. I saw the Lord’s faithfulness through my conversations at this conference and with the missions student group on my campus when I got back. Americans—some my age even!—saw the importance of global missions. Our hearts beat with the same longing to see restored relationships between all of creation and its Creator. I couldn’t quite put words to it, but they had a similar mindset that was drawn to the same hunger to see our own humanity in each other, including our differences in culture and nationality.

I saw the importance of my international experience through my encounters with an international God. I know from growing up in Turkey and having friends from around the globe that God cherishes the defining characteristics of his children that make them unique. I saw this love in America when I talked with believers who also cared about these characteristics enough to want to see Jesus’s healing and glory at those intersections. These realizations over time were the key to understanding that there was room for me to be both American and Turkish without one identity compromising the other. This was not an arena. There were no ugly victories, no referees, just the compassionate arms of a Father who loved me.

My American and Turkish identities exhibit themselves in big things, like speaking English or Turkish depending on the context. But they can also be small things, like making Turkish food when I’m sad or feeling unashamed to wear sweatpants at the grocery store. My coworkers welcomed the Turkish flag that I brought to decorate my desk. I began to see that I could make space to express and hold both identities in tension and tandem.

I am still figuring out what exactly it looks like to be a Turkish American TCK adult, but I carry the knowledge that God cares about this intersection of my life. My life in Turkey brought me to eye-opening, intercultural friendships, as well as the pain of having to say goodbye to such sweet friends. My life in America has brought me face to face with my own prejudices. It has also opened doors to see the Lord working in ways that I might not have witnessed had I stayed in Turkey. I continue to fall in love every day with the God who gave me my childhood in Turkey to see his heart for the intersection of cultures. Praise him, the Father of lights, who is the giver of every good and perfect gift!