Until I moved to
Turkey in 1999, I didn’t fully realize that a person could have more than one
home, more than one country, more than one culture. That we don’t have
to choose. Having a personal connection to
multiple cultures is the best way we’ll learn to get along with each other on
this planet.
Living
in Istanbul, we all know the cliche about this city and the country
of Turkey being a bridge between East and West. For the year of 2010, to
celebrate Istanbul’s status as a European Capital of Culture, there’ve been big
banners on the Galata Bridge in Turkish and English proclaiming that Istanbul is
“building bridges between the cultures.”
I’m working to bridge cultures creatively, a
passion that I’ve long had, but which has only recently come fully into focus.
And largely thanks to that ambiguous, magical catalyst called Istanbul.
The
bridge metaphor makes sense to me. But I also like how my friend Tara Agacayak
talked about the indefinable Turkey in her
post on Turquoise Poppy:
The cliché about
Turkey is that it is east and
it is west. It is old and new.
It is modern and ancient. Europe and Asia. Religious and secular. The juxtapositions are
numerous but they demonstrate something. They show that a place can be both, it just depends
on where you choose to draw the line.
She
goes on to write that line is imaginary – we can draw it anywhere we chose. And
in 2010, I chose to draw it in Istanbul, where all my passions intersect. I can
create a life that combines them all: creativity, culture, fiber arts,
language, community and of course, love.
The
tagline on Tara’s blog is Bloom Where
You’re Planted. I’m a late bloomer because it wasn’t until I moved to
Turkey in 1999 that I really challenged myself well across all lines, proved to
myself that being a hybrid of multiple cultures can only make me stronger. Let
me tell you how I got here.
I
grew up in a California beach town, Santa Barbara, before it was overrun with
celebrities from Hollywood. It was a lovely environment, with whitewashed, red
tiled buildings that were required by code to reflect the Moorish, Islamic
decorative architecture of Andalusian Spain. But the residents were a little
homogenous, a mostly white population, though at least 30% of the residents
were of Mexican ancestry. I identified with that Hispanic culture, never
thinking it was a separate culture from my own.
When
I went off to Los Angeles to study textile and clothing design, I got a taste
of what it was really like to live in a multicultural city. My third job as a
clothing designer in my mid-twenties launched me headfirst into global business
travel, when the president of the company I’d just joined publicly fired the
head designer at the first sales meeting I attended, then announced to me and
the audience of maybe 100 that I’d be going to Hong Kong in the morning to head
up the young menswear division.
Working
in the clothing industry was a great lesson in trial-by-fire living, a constant
test to prove myself since I was only as good as the success of my latest
collection. A designer must constantly reinvent herself, be able to turn trends
into something that reflects her customer. Learning that the only thing constant is change
truly prepared me for expat life, for living in a global world.
10
years on, after living in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland Oregon,
working in about 20 countries and traveling for pleasure to at least 25 more, I
returned to UCLA to study interior design and architecture. These fields still allowed me to work with my
three favorite design elements: color, texture and pattern. Those three
elements form a universal language to me, whether you’re creating embroideries,
mosaic tiles, carpets or stair railings. Understand the language they speak,
and you can design almost anything.
But
I also learned that just designing something was not enough. You had to know
how to build it. The loveliest of environments could live in my head, but if I
did not have the skills to make it real, it was only a dream. While I was
successful in creating items and environments that suited the needs of my
buyers and clients, I’d yet to create a life for myself outside of business
that truly suited me. It took a random
trip back to Istanbul in 1998 for me to realize that I could create any kind of
life I wanted. A life whose seeds were planted in Turkey a decade ago. A life coming into full bloom the spring of
2011.
