Goshdarnit, I'm from the Midwest

Fact: I was born in Brooklyn and grew up in New York City.
Fact: My father is an Indian immigrant and my mother's side of the family is of Irish/German heritage.
Fact: I lived in Ecuador for a year and speak Spanish.

After spending four years earning my undergraduate degree in South Bend and a year-long stint teaching in Ecuador, I was excited about returning to New York. Given the three facts above, I though that I would be in my element in Brooklyn and I would feel like I was home more than ever; it would be a homecoming to my place of birth and the city I belong in.

But before I talk more about the present, I want to take it back to '06 when I started college. I enjoyed my time in Indiana and I made some of my best friends out there, but like anyone from a major coastal city, I've always viewed the Midwest through a derision-tinted lens. My first-year roommate at Notre Dame was from Ohio, and after we had become good friends I can remember him telling me that the summer before school started, when he read the name of his roommate assignment ("Krishna Swamy Surasi") out loud, his mother responded with, "Oh my gosh, does he speak English?"

It was comical experiences like this that led me to believe that I was much more cultured than the typical Midwesterner simply because I was from the coast, and I was proud to be readily identified by my pronunciation of the word "water" as a native Northeasterner.

When I finished up with school in '10, I found a job as an ESL teacher in Ecuador as something to do while I applied to medical school. I lived with an Ecuadorian family and traveled almost every weekend, and with that experience under my belt I couldn't wait for med school orientation.

In the same way that I astounded the citizens of our nation's landlocked states with the mere mention of my "ethnic" name, I would too impress my fellow classmates by being the most interesting member of the class for having lived abroad for a year and by being able to speak Spanish. My one year in between college and medical school had surely given me profound insight into human nature and the harsh realities of the real world, and my peers would look up to me as a veritable mine of knowledge from experience.

Sadly, what I found out as orientation began and I started to meet my classmates was that, in comparison to the rest of my class, my background and experiences are largely unremarkable.

To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, I'll list below the stats from an informal survey taken in one of our classes with nearly the entire first-year present:

• Students who entered medical school straight out of college: 36%
• Students born outside the U.S.: 23%
• Students who don't speak English as a first language: 32%

These numbers came as an absolute shock to me. I had always heard that the average age of matriculating medical students is 24, but I never really believed that a majority of med students took time off between college and matriculation. The class of young and impressionable recent college grads I was expecting to mentor with the help of my "adult perspective" gained in one gap year turned out to only be about a third of the total class. Every other student has been out for at least a year, a lot for more than one year, and some for as many as 10 (I think the oldest student in our class is 36).

I was also surprised that so many students were born outside the U.S. and don't speak English as a first language. Spanish is arguably the least impressive second language a native English speaker can learn, so how the hell am I supposed to impress my classmates with cómo estás when there are people who control languages like Mandarin and Russian as well as their English? I knew I should have went to Brazil instead of Ecuador and learned Portuguese.

My first week at school I was also thrown by the open diversity of religion and sexual orientation of my peers. There are quite a few Jewish and Muslim students at Downstate that are easily recognizable either by their dress, eating restrictions, or both. At Notre Dame I only knew one Jewish student and one Muslim student and they were never really taken into consideration during student events, so I was impressed at how accommodating the orientation events here at Downstate were by always having Kosher food and Halal dining options.

I may not think that diet restrictions based on religious beliefs are a good idea, but if I am going to live in a place with as much religious diversity as Brooklyn I'd better at least be aware that some people feel very strongly about issues like this.

Even the vending machines here are culturally competent

I also can't say that I met too many openly gay students at Notre Dame (there's a reason why we were ranked 6th by the Princeton Review in the list of "Least LGBT friendly colleges"), but Brooklyn seems to be much more accepting and people are accordingly more open. I've been cool with gay people for a long time, but the fact is I still haven't met too many openly gay people in my life. Consequently, I was caught way off guard when one of my female peers introduced me to her girlfriend at a party and I had to try to not look surprised because I didn't want my expression to be mistaken for disapproval.

The neighborhood I live in, East Flatbush, is made up of mostly West Indian residents. The other day I had to walk to a nearby Modell's that my dad somehow calculated as being 1.1 miles away. On the way back I realized that, save for one Asian woman, I was the only non-black person I saw the entire 2.2 mile round-trip walk. When I started paying attention to the fact that I stuck out from everyone around me, I was struck with a sense of displacement that I only ever feel when I go to the weight room and realize that I'm the only one using 10lbs dumbbells.

So now that I am "back home" in Brooklyn I'm asking myself, what the hell happened to me!? Judging by the facts I listed at the top of this article, I should be very comfortable with my new surroundings and should not have to adapt. Upon further inspection, however, I realize that those facts need to be qualified slightly.

Fact: I was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Staten Island.
Fact: My father is an Indian immigrant and I've only been there once and don't speak the language. Likewise, my Irish identity is defined by my eating of corned beef on St. Patrick's Day and having attended Notre Dame.
Fact: I lived in Ecuador, a very conservative and Catholic country, for a year.

What I am learning about myself now that I am in Brooklyn is that I really haven't been exposed to as much as I thought I have. Staten Island can hardly be called a diverse borough, and growing up I was largely surrounded by Italian-Americans who went to Catholic churches. College was a similar story, except under the dome it was mostly Irish Catholics.

I thought living in Ecuador would be a truly displacing experience for me, but that country is also conservative and Catholic. Furthermore, I spoke Spanish before I got there and I actually passed for Ecuadorian more often than not, so I never felt the kind of displacement I do here where the majority of my neighbors look very different from me and are part of a culture I know nothing about.

Some of the sights at the West Indian Day parade confirmed that there are some major cultural differences between me and the people in my neighborhood that I will have to adjust to.

What happened to me was that during my life I developed the sense that I had seen everything only because the people around me had been exposed to slightly less than I had. It seems that in the big picture, compared to people who actually grew up in the diverse neighborhoods of NYC I'm just as new to the scene as someone from the Midwest. And as much as I hate to admit it, over the summer when I looked at the names of some of the students who would be in my class, I said to myself, "God, do they speak English?"

Looks like I've got a lot to learn in the next four years before I can reclaim my Brooklynhood.