Btown

my feeling towards my second home

By Patawee Promsen

April 5^th, 2019

This old lady smiled at me today when she saw me taking photos of the dumpsters. I smiled back at her while still shooting. She walked so slow that even after I took several more shots, she was still within my reach. We walked to the same direction and along the way she said hi to a guy she walked past.

Besides being a college town, Bloomington is also home to many local residents. Some are middle-age adults, many are the elders, living on their own. Some are nice and kind to me--like this lady, many aren't.

One thing I could think of when doing a fieldwork project at the bus terminal this morning: this town is now my second home, a place where many good memories are stored. Yet it is still a strange town, haunting me day by day by its predominantly white population, its unfamiliarity, and its coldness both physical and symbolic.

While doing a project in a town I now call home, I feel so strange. At the bus terminal I'm the only colored person, let alone the word Asian. I should observe people, but people also observe me. I can't help thinking that my existence in and feeling towards a place like this is not that different from what Malinowski encountered in the Trobriand Islands: strangeness, lonesome, exhaustion... and many which could have been noted alongside my academic voyage here.