Tipping the Hourglass

A bit about what this newsletter maybe might be, and the essay that made me want to do this in the first place

Hello friends, lovers, enemies, readers.

Like so many before me, I am joining the ranks of Substack newsletter writers. The desire to create one of these came simply because I had something to say and no other way to get it out. This essay, which you’ll read below, is about growing up in Qatar, feelings of foreignness, civic duty, and temporal distance. It didn’t seem like an essay that could be published anywhere else, and honestly, I don’t know if I want it published anywhere else.

I am exceptionally bad at naming things. I was so, so close to just calling this newsletter just my name, or my initials. But my dear friend Eleanor plucked “Splitting Hairs” out of the ether, inspired by a potentially maybe sort-of forthcoming project I’ve got in the works, and I’m sticking to it.

Please subscribe! I don’t know how much of a *thing* this will be yet, but I’m keen to find out. Hopefully there will be many more essays to come, but for now, here’s the one that started this all.

---

Tipping the Hourglass

The first memory that I’m certain of, that I’m sure didn’t appear from some daydream or as an artifact drawn out by my parents’ stories over the dinner table, is of exiting a plane. I was four years old, and as I turned from the aisle toward the airstairs I felt a soft pulse of the greatest heat I had ever known. The sun reflected the orange brown dust and sand being blown across the dark tarmac. And the ocean—I could smell it across the wind.

My family and I had touched down for the first time in Doha, Qatar. My father was newly employed by an oil company there and so we had left my native Canada for the Middle East’s desert sands. As most people in Doha do, we lived in compounds—a word that often elicits in North Americans confusion, horror and reactions such as, “like, prisons?” The one we lived in was 28 houses, ours being the 28th. And its name, “Al-Hitmi Compound,” named for the family that owned the property, was an endless source of giggles for my four-year-old self (“hit me!” “hit you?!”). My sister and I played with the Scottish girl in the house opposite ours, whose mum worked at the British primary school we went to; carpooled with the English boy around the corner whose parents were hospital workers. Our weekends were Friday and Saturday, so people could observe the holy day in Islam. We heard the call to prayer all the time, melodic, mindless background noise.

We were only supposed to be there for three years—the length of my dad’s original contract. But three years turned to six, then 12. We stayed through all my young milestones and all my schooling. I left before any of my family did, after fourteen years, to go to university.

For the longest time, those fourteen years have been an anchor and the central keystone in the architecture of my life. When people ask where I’m from, I’ve always said “most of my life was spent in Qatar” and joke that “if my life were a company, Qatar would hold the majority shareholder stake.”

But I turned 29 this January, and now that refrain has turned false. I see my life tilting on its fulcrum as the balance between “Qatar” and “not Qatar” shifts. I know it will never swing back. As I stare down the barrel of the years ahead I see my upbringing in the Middle East dwindling in relative importance against that elongating timeline, the distant and diminishing light of a dying star.

Thinking about this milestone has triggered in me more of an existential crisis than I had ever expected, and it’s ironic to me that I feel this way. Upon learning of my extensive residence there, people I meet often have similar questions: so are you from Qatar? But you’re not Middle Eastern? Do you have a Qatari passport? To each of these questions, I scoff a “no.” I’m not “from” Qatar, I’m definitely not Middle Eastern, and the question of a passport is ridiculous, I tell them. Qatar has the fourth longest residence requirement for naturalization in the world, behind only the Central African Republic, San Marino, and the United Arab Emirates. A Qatari passport is a rare bestowal reserved for exceptional athletes being recruited to a national sports team or those who can prove 25 years of continuous residence in the country and proficient Arabic. Only children of Qatari fathers get automatic birthright citizenship—children born in Qatar to a non-Qatari father, even if their mother is Qatari, are denied. While marrying into citizenship is possible, upon divorce that status is easily and fickly revoked.

We lived in Qatar, sure, but my parents stressed that we never belonged. We are Canadian and Korean, they’d say. Doha was mere place-setting, circumstantial. My parents taught us of the visa sponsorship system, whereby my sisters, mother and I were permitted to live in Qatar only through the sponsorship of my father, who in turn was only allowed there through the sponsorship of his state-owned employer. This place would never claim you, my mother explained. She told me of the friend who struggled to gain access to her family’s bank accounts when her husband quickly and tragically passed away, of families we knew who were mysteriously blacklisted from visa renewals. It didn’t matter that I was more comfortable in blazing heat than the cold, that I’d hardly ever seen rain, or that shaking sand out of my hair and shoes was a default part of my routine upon coming home. Even after a decade, my mom said, we shouldn’t get too comfortable.

“We’re going home!” I’d say after summer vacations away. “No,” my mother would correct me, “we’re going back to Qatar.”

But how could I not think of Doha as home? After all, I have no memories of life before it. And it was hard not to connect with the city with which I shared a mutual adolescence. I witnessed its metropolitan nascence as I myself developed personhood. Qatar’s very first towers stretched up to line the sky as the first pimples erupted from my skin. The first McDonalds, movie theater, and Starbucks moved into Doha along with my first crushes. Its first highways were paved and sports stadiums erected around when I got my first period. And as we grew and developed, Qatar and I both began to understand the foreignness implicit in our identities.

Yes I was a foreigner in Doha, but foreignness was default. There, we were all minorities among minorities. Depending on which source you cite, just 10 to 20 percent of all people in Qatar are Qatari. About half of the rest are “expats” from other Arab countries and “Western” nations, from places like the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, Europe—these tend to be your university professors, doctors, hoteliers, and (like my father) engineers. The remainder of the population is made up of “migrant workers” from “Eastern” nations like Bangladesh, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Nepal—people who typically become your construction workers, gas station attendants, nannies, housekeepers, waiters, and other types of service workers. In the British and American schools I attended, whiteness was still dominant and vestiges of Western racism and prejudice lingered. Yet to be any kind of foreign was normal, expected.

When my family arrived in the year 2000, we were among the first few East Asians to ever be in Doha and among the even fewer Asians who had come from North America. As a small child I felt a bit conspicuous, but I thought my experience common to all non-Qataris in Qatar. Today, though, I recall moments that feel bizarre in retrospect. When I was in middle and high school I was more than once mistaken for a shop attendant at the mall, by both Qataris and white expats alike. The first East Asian friends I made in Qatar were Chinese transracial adoptees to white American parents. I realized the limbo my family inhabited—we looked more like one type of foreigner, but behaved more like the other.

As an adult, understanding how “Eastern” workers in Qatar were living and laboring in some of the harshest and cruelest conditions while my family lived in comfort adds another hue to the hindsight. In a brief visit to San Francisco this past November I visited the city’s Museum of Modern Art, which happened to feature a sports exhibit including old Olympic posters and relics of iconic moments of sporting history. At the corner of one room was a collection of football (soccer) cards—except each displayed the name, face, and story of a migrant worker who lost their life during the construction of stadiums built for the 2022 FIFA men’s World Cup in Qatar. Nuruddin Echar Uddin from Bangladesh was 36 when an air conditioning system exploded in the kitchen where he worked; Lal Bin Tamang, 40, wanted to start a business when he returned to his native Nepal but was hit by a steel beam that fell from the 16th floor; when Abdul Majid, 54, died of a supposed heart attack his family in India received a body but no compensation—they were told Majid had taken out an advance on his salary to pay for his end-of-life intensive care. The 25 cards on display memorialize only a fraction of the death count. One Qatari official admitted to a death toll of “400 to 500”—The Guardian reported that it’s closer to 6,500.

Looking at those football cards in the MoMA I felt something akin to responsibility. I was there in 2010, when FIFA announced Qatar as future hosts. I remember the wild celebrations, the pride we all had in the country. Even back then I had, of course, an awareness of the country’s awful labor practices—when you’re punching up the air conditioning in the car on the way home from school, it’s hard to ignore the workers toiling in the sun outside your window. But among expats, especially as a kid, it felt sort of taboo to speak on the blatant disparities around us. None of us had any real power to effect change, which is part of the bargain of living in a place like Qatar—a term most people happily accept in exchange for escaping the plight of income tax. Some, like my mother, did what they felt they could, like handing out water bottles on particularly hot days.

When you feel you have no real power, in a country whose government has no regard for the voices of the majority of its inhabitants (nor any qualms about deportation), it feels easy—logical even—to ignore the injustices around you. Add in the feeling that this is not your country and therefore not a place for you to intervene, and it’s easy to resign yourself to the role of passive spectator.

As an adult looking at those football cards, I thought of the acquaintances who went back to attend and celebrate Qatar’s World Cup, the (relatively meager) campaigns to boycott the games. The faces of the workers on those cards began to blur with faces in my memory—of housemaids and gardeners and construction workers—to represent every worker in Qatar whose bodies and lives fed the foundation the country built (and still builds) itself on. Because the ugliest truth about living in Qatar is that the lives of migrant laborers have always subsidized everyone else’s, including my own. Surely I share in the country’s culpability, even if it has been more than a decade since I left. And what do I owe for that? Surely my indignation, at least.

*

In the lead up to the 2024 election I’d walk through parts of Brooklyn, where I live now, and see folks with clipboards and campaign pins. After any incidental eye contact but before they could start their spiel, I’d blurt out “sorry, I’m Canadian” and quickly walk away.

I am once again an alien in my country of residence, but this time a somewhat stealthier one. I speak native English with a pretty nondescript North American accent, and Koreans are a sizable presence in New York City. I joke that if anyone yelled, “Go back to your country!” I’d yell back, “That’s valid, but it’s not where you think!”

In Qatar I was understood to be a foreigner by default, but here in the US I’m assumed to be a different kind of foreign: an immigrant, or at least a child of immigrants. It’s uncomfortable, sometimes, to be assumed to be American. Being American, from a non-American vantage, has always insinuated brashness, ignorance, and foolhardy individualism. My prejudice aside, an American identity also necessitates an allegiance to the country, and the responsibility of knowing its history, its communities, and the civic issues that steer politics today—I can barely name 10 presidents. I can’t claim Americanness in any way, nor do I really want to.

But I sometimes wonder, despite the fact of my literal foreignness, why I insist on feeling like a foreigner here.

My mother’s adamancy against our belonging in Qatar was a measure of self-protection, a way to stay a little on guard, just in case something go awry. And it was not unjustified. But my current feeling of foreignness feels different. Part of it, definitely, is the simple fact that foreignness is essentially all I’ve ever known. It’s where and how I feel most comfortable, and intrinsic to my sense of self.

But there’s definitely more to it. In the five and a half years that I’ve lived in the US, I’ve felt an immovable overcast of dread as the country continually fails many of its most vulnerable and slides toward ideologies I frankly don’t want to get into. With each new shock of news my brain whispers, “not my country,” and so when I observe the horrors of its making I have, in theory, no obligation to feel anything except disgust and despair. As a foreigner, I don’t have to claim this country’s failures nor am I obligated to engage in the struggles to right them. Like my mother’s, my clutch on feeling foreign is somewhat self-preservatory, a way to help stay sane. But mine is also exculpatory. I’ve used my lack of belonging and therefore lack of power as a shield against civic duty, and as an excuse for not doing more in the fight for the causes I care about.

I left Doha more than a decade ago. The physical and temporal distance means I belong less and less to that country where I didn’t quite belong to begin with. If I couldn’t help the migrant workers then, I certainly can’t help them now—and I see the strength in my mom’s water-giving, even as I see its inadequacy. I don’t yet know what that can or should tangibly mean for my life now in the US, especially as the White House considers canceling the visas of foreign students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza, and as the future of the H1-B visa program remains in flux. But I still think the lesson is to attend to the people in front of you, regardless of allegiance, regardless of nationhood. The place you can best impact, I’m learning, is the one where you are now.

*

Qatar will continue to be the country where I've resided the longest until I'm almost 40, provided I spend all my years until then in the US or Canada. But at what point does that time become kind of irrelevant? For me and many of my expat/third culture kid friends, our contexts feel crucial. How can anyone know us without knowing the places that have held our lives? As my friend, an Egyptian American who lived in Doha for 9 years once put it, “What am I going to do, introduce myself at 50 like, ‘Hi, I’m Jebreel, I grew up in Qatar?’”

Meanwhile, as my time in Doha shrinks into a smaller and smaller minority of my life, and as I add to my years in the US, it feels like my connection to the desert is slipping away like sands shifting through an hourglass. While I’m not an American nor an American immigrant, I wonder—should I end up living in the US for 10 years, 20 years, the rest of my life…will all of this thinking be colored differently in hindsight? When do I have a shareholder stake?

I doubt I will ever go back to live in Doha. What I miss most about my time there is the people, almost all of whom have also since left. In the not-quite-a decade since I left, the city has developed exponentially, growing almost unrecognizably modern. But some things will stay constant. Recently, on my way to central Asia, I had a layover in Qatar. As I exited the plane and turned toward the airstair, the warm, heavy air billowed into my lungs and I could smell the nearby saltiness of the Persian Gulf. I had arrived only to leave again. All this felt like home.

---

Phew! If you made it this far, all I can say is thank you. I hope this essay resonated with you whether you’re a fellow expat, someone who just moved a lot as a kid, or a person thinking about civic responsibility. If you liked it, maybe send it to a friend?

Like I said up top, I have no clear idea of how often I’ll be posting more writing here, but subscribe anyway!

In the meantime here are other things I’ve been thinking about:

The displaced families in Gaza, the continued violence against them, and the still looming threat of ethnic cleansing. (Please consider donating to the Refaat Alareer Camp!)

Rose Matafeo’s most recent comedy special. Everything she does is great! She’s like if James Acaster was a Kiwi Gilmore Girl going through a manic episode. Plus she has amazing hair.

Adirondack Creamery’s Kashmiri Kahwa ice cream.

This EP:

I’m a big fan of BADBADNOTGOOD, but the texture and melancholy carried by Baby Rose’s vocals really make this something special. The slower tracks make me feel like I’m laying down on a bench in an almost empty train station.