The Label That Does Not Exist: On Identity When You Belong to More Than One World
Yesterday we walked to a stupa not far from where we live. It was a weekend afternoon, the kind where local families come out and the paths fill with young people talking and taking photographs. My friend was with me, another foreign woman who has lived in Nepal for years. We were walking in the way you walk in a place you know well, without paying particular attention to anything specific.
Several times, young people called out to us as we passed. Welcome to Nepal.
They meant it warmly. They were being friendly, in the way Nepali young people often are with foreigners they assume are visitors. They looked at us and saw tourists. Women passing through. People who had arrived recently and would leave again soon.
I have lived here for eleven years. My husband is Nepali. My daughter is half Nepali and goes to a local school. My in-laws live nearby. This country is not a place I am visiting. It is a place I am living in, in the full and daily and unglamorous sense of that word.
Welcome to Nepal.
I smiled and said thank you, as you do. But I walked away carrying something that is difficult to name precisely. Not offence. Not even frustration, exactly. More a quiet reminder of a question I have never found a satisfactory answer to.
What am I here?
The labels that do not fit
When people ask where I am from and how long I am staying, I have learned to answer quickly. I am Belgian. My husband is Nepali. My daughter is half Nepali. We live here.
I do this deliberately. Not because I owe anyone an explanation, but because those few words change the conversation immediately. The questions that follow are different. The way the person looks at me is different. Something shifts when they understand that I am not a tourist or a temporary resident but a woman who has made a life here in a specific and rooted way.
But the quick disclosure is also a response to a discomfort. The discomfort of being placed in a category that does not fit.
Expat is the word most people would use for someone like me. And it does not fit. The expat experience, as I have observed it in the people I have known over the years, is a particular one. It tends to involve a certain kind of distance from the country you are living in. Expensive houses in areas where foreigners cluster. Staff. A social world largely composed of other foreigners or people from your own country. An understanding of the local culture that is real but remains, at its core, observational rather than participatory. A timeline that is always, in the background, temporary.
That is not my life. I live modestly, in a neighbourhood of Nepali families. There are no other foreigners nearby. I navigate the same systems, at roughly the same level, as the people around me. I have family here. I have been here through things that visitors do not stay for. I am not observing Nepal from a comfortable distance. I am inside it, in the imperfect and complicated way that belonging to a place actually works.
Immigrant is the other word that gets applied to people in situations like mine. And it is more accurate in some ways, in that it acknowledges a permanence and a rootedness that expat does not. But it carries its own set of associations that do not quite fit either. Immigrant implies a certain kind of struggle that is not my primary experience. It implies a direction of movement, from a harder place toward a better one, that does not describe what brought me here or what keeps me here.
The truth is that neither word fits. And the absence of a word that does fit is itself a small but persistent discomfort.
The distance from other foreigners
Over the years I have had many expat friends. Most of them I met through the international school my daughter attended for a time, before I moved her to a local Nepali school. They were good people, interesting people, people who had chosen an international life for reasons I understood and respected.
But I noticed, over time, a gap between how they experienced Nepal and how I experienced it. It was not a gap in intelligence or sensitivity. It was a gap in position.
They lived in the Nepal that is available to people who have the resources to insulate themselves from its more difficult aspects. Comfortable houses in areas where infrastructure is reliable. Drivers, helpers, and staff who manage the daily friction of life in a developing country. Social lives that were largely self-contained, conducted mostly with other foreigners or with English-speaking Nepalis who moved easily between worlds. A relationship to the country that was genuine and appreciative but remained, at its core, the relationship of a well-treated guest.
This is not a criticism. It is simply what the expat experience often looks like, and there is nothing wrong with it.
But it is not my experience. And the difference matters, because it means that when expat friends talked about Nepal, about what was difficult and what was beautiful and what was confusing, I often found myself listening from a slightly different place. Understanding what they were describing but recognising that my relationship to the same things was shaped by a different kind of proximity.
The cultural misunderstandings that frustrated them were ones I had largely learned to navigate, not because I am more capable but because I had more reason to. I had adjusted further, in more directions, over more years, with more at stake. My daily life did not have the cushioning that makes some of those adjustments optional.
And yet I was not Nepali. I was still, in every room I entered, visibly foreign. Still welcomed to Nepal by people who had no reason to imagine I had been here longer than them.
What it means to belong partially
There is a specific kind of belonging that comes from having local family. It is different from the belonging that comes from living in a place for a long time, or from speaking the language, or from understanding the culture well. It is more intimate and more complicated than any of those.
My in-laws are Nepali. My daughter is half Nepali. The family I have built here is not foreign in the way that I am foreign. It has roots here that mine do not. And being part of that family gives me a connection to Nepal that most foreigners who live here do not have access to, a connection that is not earned through effort or learning but simply exists, through relationship and through time.
And yet even this does not resolve the question of what I am. I am part of a Nepali family without being Nepali. I am connected to this country through my husband and my daughter in ways that go deeper than most expats but do not reach as deep as belonging to a place from birth.
This is what partial belonging actually feels like from the inside. Not a comfortable middle ground but a genuinely in-between position. Not fully one thing and not fully the other, in a way that no existing label captures.
I have come to think that the discomfort of this position is not something to be resolved by finding the right word. The right word may not exist, because the experience it would need to describe is genuinely new. The category of woman who has lived in a country for over a decade, married to a local, raising a bicultural child, adjusted far beyond the expat norm but never quite crossing into local, does not have an established name.
Perhaps that is appropriate. Perhaps the experience of living between cultures for long enough, and in the specific way that genuine local connection makes possible, produces something that is genuinely its own category. Not expat. Not immigrant. Not local. Something that sits between all three, carrying something from each without fully belonging to any of them.
What you might recognise in this
If you are living between cultures and married to or deeply connected with someone from the country where you live, you may recognise something in this.
The way the quick disclosure changes a conversation. The relief of being seen, even briefly, as someone with roots here rather than someone passing through. The quiet gap you feel from other foreigners whose experience of the country is so different from yours that the shared label of expat does not quite hold you together.
You may also recognise the particular complexity of having local family. The way it gives you access to a depth of connection that most foreigners do not have, while simultaneously making the differences between you and your local family more visible, not less. The way it places you inside the culture in a way that makes it impossible to remain a comfortable observer, while never quite making you a full participant either.
None of this is a problem to be solved. It is a position to be understood.
The absence of a label for what you are is not a gap in your identity. It is evidence that your identity has grown into something that the available categories were not designed to hold. That is uncomfortable. It is also, in a quiet way, something worth recognising as genuinely your own.
You are not an expat who never quite integrated. You are not an immigrant who arrived for economic reasons. You are not a local who happens to have a foreign passport. You are something that does not have a name yet. And that is not a failure of belonging. It is what belonging looks like when it grows across more than one world.
A closing thought
We walked back from the stupa in the late afternoon light. My friend and I talked about the welcome to Nepal moment, as we have talked about similar moments before. We laughed about it, as you do when something is both funny and not quite funny.
Eleven years. A Nepali husband. Nepali in-laws. A daughter who switches between languages in the middle of a sentence and does not notice.
Welcome to Nepal.
Maybe the young people at the stupa were right in a way they did not intend. Maybe arriving is not something you do once, at the beginning. Maybe it is something you keep doing, in different ways, for as long as you are here. And maybe that is not such a bad thing to keep being welcomed into.
| Reflection questions
What label do you use for yourself when people ask what you are doing in the country where you live? Does it fit, and if not, what would fit better? If you are in a relationship with or deeply connected to someone from your adopted country, how has that connection changed your relationship to the country itself? What does it give you access to that you would not have otherwise? Have you noticed a gap between your experience of living in your adopted country and the experience of other foreigners there? What creates that gap, and how do you navigate it? Is there a moment when you felt most fully yourself in the country where you live, beyond any label or category? What made that moment feel different? |
