Driver's Side

I walk out of the automatic doors of the hospital and walk to the van.  I go to open the door and realize I’ve done it again: gone to the wrong side.  It’s the left side, but I’m supposed to be on the right side, the driver’s side. I climb aboard our generously loaned to us, right-side-drive vehicle, which is, for the record, the wrong side of the vehicle for Canada.  I turn on the van and drive off, reminding myself that I indeed must stick to the rules of the road here, which feels awkward. 

As I drive back home, behind me go the lights of the police officer and my stomach rises in my throat.  Was I speeding?  This scene is more than familiar.  How many times did I get pulled over in Malawi?  I was never sure if the fines I faced were because of real crimes or imagined crimes.  Was I being pulled over because I was white, and therefore wealthy, and therefore could afford to be pulled over for hard cash?  Would the officer ask for a chicken-foot bribe like he did that one time, and wouldn’t let me pass?  Would he ask for coca-cola or some other soda, like that group of officers we met?  Would I have to try to use my Chichewa or humour to butter him up so I would get a pass?  I used to think that they were just picking on me because of my gender, because of my foreign-ness.  But sometimes I think it was because they were really hungry.  There was a whole life behind their eyes and a whole reality behind this situation that I could not possibly know. It’s not hard to imagine them using their position of power to fight against that which they are powerless against: a living wage so low that their kids still go hungry. This is not beyond my imagination, I know that my sons, spending 1 hour in our wealthy white neighbourhood in Canada, sorting through recycling to take to the depot, make more money in an hour than most day wage earners in Malawi earn in 4 days. 

I was never sure the reasons behind my pull-overs but the scene of being pulled over was often enough that I wondered about corruption, about racial targeting, about all the things I didn’t understand and we’re still all trying to understand.  And here I was, on the other side of the ocean, on the other side of the vehicle, with a white officer at my window this time.

I hear the short raps across my window.  I am searching for my driver’s license as I fidget with the window.  I am flustered, that much is clear.  The window is now down and I wait for the verdict.  “Did you know you were driving without your lights on?”  I’m so surprised by the mild reprimand that I don’t know how to answer.  “Oh, just, I’m um, I just got off work.  I am still not sure which flicker thing is for lights and turn signals, and [nervous chuckle] because I’m not used to being on this side of the car, shoot, sorry!”  He kindly, or at least I assume kindly because I can’t see his face behind the mask, gives me a pass and lets me on my way.  And I drive off, after spending a few minutes wrestling with back window windshield wipers until I find the right lights.  Of course, I hit the windshield wipers every time I need a turn signal on the way home, as usual, without fail.

The variety of layers in this situation is not lost on me.  The mask, the wrong side of the car, the different country, the white person behind the wheel, and the thousand of questions roaring through my mind.  I don’t forget that it took me months to feel comfortable driving in Malawi.  I had never driven stick-shift before and was mostly terrified.  I was on the opposite side of the car, on the opposite side of the road, fighting pedestrians for the few inches of concrete, narrowly avoiding people and anxiety attacks.  Navigating in a foreign culture is like that.  Everything is different and so you fight against the constant embarrassment to make your way, where nothing is familiar. 

Then just like that, just as I started to get used to it all, just a bit, we are back ‘here.’  Where quickly I had to switch to the opposite side of the car, the opposite side of the road again, to be back ‘here.’  It’s taking an enormous amount of emotional energy and concentration again, to just do what is unconscious for everyone else.  What way am I looking?  Which should I check behind?  Which way do I enter the round-about?   

And then, because God likes to keep us guessing or something, the car we have been borrowing ends up being a right-side drive Japanese vehicle.  The irony is not lost on me.  I am greeted with Japanese when we enter the car.  This is a cosmic comedy, or maybe an allegory?  Now we are driving, on the right side of the road, in our right-side drive.  Are you confused yet?  I am.  My worlds collide so that I can feel as awkward about driving as possible.

But really, it IS a picture of what will forever be true of me as a person and us as a family.  We don’t fit in and we cannot un-see what we have seen and un-know what we have now opened our eyes to know.  This van we are borrowing is like us.  We are now and forever driving on the opposite side of the vehicle so to speak.  Sure, we can get on this cultural road, and drive in the cultural direction of the here, but we will forever see it from a different vantage point, on the other side of the vehicle.  The driver’s around us are mostly unaware but behind the wheel, just like behind our eyes, there is a different perspective we carry.

Hold on, this whole story is about our cultural adaptation, not about the police situation in the US. But there are layers here. There is so much roaring around us all right now like a hurricane.  We can’t unknow this experience of COVID.  We can’t go back to how it once was, because we are different and the landscape of our world is different.  We can’t go back to ignorance about racial divide and privilege and we certainly can’t pretend any of these things swirling around us aren’t actually happening.  It’s like being healthy your whole life and then going through a near-death experience, you can’t go back to being callous about pain, or immune to the fragility of life, or impenetrable to others’ suffering.  You are altered.  So are we.

So I keep trying this whole right-side-drive, and failing but thankfully not catastrophically so.  I’m daily reminded of my discomfort as I straddle two worlds and two realities that are each not less real than the other.  And I have to remain flexible to switch driver’s sides when need be. Just as I have to be flexible to challenge and re-think my assumptions and figure out how to give voice to two realities that are worlds apart from each other which mostly means that I don’t ever fit in to either.   And I feel awkward and clunky but I am trying. Maybe we could all be willing to risk the discomfort and awkwardness to understand what it means to move our vantage point. Maybe movement is what is required to adjust. Movement from one continent to another, from one culture to another, from one position on the poverty line to another, from a place of not knowing to wanting to know. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing for us all try to drive from the other side.