I still remember the very first time I encountered an automatic faucet, right after moving to Italy in high school. As the daughter of an Indian diplomat, I was born in Japan, and had lived in a number of other countries, but they were all developing countries such as Vietnam, Ethiopia, and India, where all faucets were very much manually operated. I was 15, at a rest stop, and staring at this faucet in panic, unable to find anything resembling a knob, just willing it to turn on to save me the embarrassment of having to walk out without washing my hands. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you feel about it), Italy has a custom of restroom attendants, so this 70 year old Italian woman starting shouting “automatico” in my direction, and then finally walked over to show me how to work the faucet. The idea of waving my hand had never even occurred to me, as such a concept was simply not in my frame of reference.
I think back to that experience and often marvel at the fact that, there I was, the daughter of the Indian Consul General to Italy, having had some of the finest education in the world, and some of the most amazing experiences during my travels, but to this Italian bathroom attendant I must have just looked like some uneducated immigrant who’s never seen a faucet before!
That lack of understanding of how things work in modern societies is still part of my DNA. I am now an American citizen (having now lived here longer than any other country), have an MBA from Booth, but I still didn’t know how to place an order at a Potbelly the first time I encountered it. Although my life may now seem unremarkable and ordinary in many ways, sometimes a memory like the one above will come back to me, and I will smile at being reminded about what a bizarre and beautifully crazy life I’ve led, and how easy it is to forget that in the day-to-day. I’m also reminded that, much like the misconceptions that kind but confused Italian woman must have had about me, it’s too easy to judge a book by the cover. I try to remind myself to look for everyone’s crazy beautiful – the uniquely diverse experiences that make them who they are.
This story first appeared on Immigrant Voices, affiliated with Ask Ellis.
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