Hospital to Uni

The morning at the hospital with my teenage daughter for her serious illness check-up left me feeling crushed and depleted. Even though her health is fine these days and we just went in for observations, as soon as I entered the hospital I felt that I lost all control as a parent, as a writer, as a human being. I handed over my inner power and strength to the clerical staff, the medical staff and even the cleaners. I found the atmoshpere emotionally draining, even just to watch so many sick children and adults exhausted me.

In the afternoon I attended a university seminar on 'Immigrant Transnationalism' and my self-esteeem was revived. I found my true identity. I was in a world that made sense to me - a world of writers trying to come to grips with idealistic concepts and hypotheticals. A mother sat in one corner breast feeding her baby with another teenage daughter beside her. I wondered what they were doing in the university. It must be hard for a young mother to do a uni thesis.

The speaker was searching for a term to describe the postwar migrants who felt the anxieties of exile. Exilic anxiety she called it - a term she made up. I offered the term 'accidental immigrant.' She wrote it down and I wondered if she would use it. It was a new label she hadn't yet come across. I was going to use it my thesis. I borrowed it from my recent book about an 'accidental pastry-cook'. I liked the term. I felt like an accidental writer. A combination of chance and necessity caused people to fall into a role by accident. I knew an aquaintance, a married man who became an accidental adulterer. He said he was driven by that perfect combination of the two conditions and if he had only one of them in his life he wouldn't have done it. Should I believe him?