The Migrant Gaze
About the perspective we get when we are never fully inside a culture, but also no longer entirely outside of it either.
I'm Monica, and I navigate life as a multi-country expat, surrounded by books and writing. My mind is modeled by the 5 languages I speak (almost) daily.
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I’ve recently spent two weeks in Romania, my country of birth. It’s been many, many years since I’ve spent so long there. I don’t remember the last time that was, frankly. Without a doubt, I felt like an outsider looking in. I kept being startled by people speaking Romanian on the streets and then remembering, Oh yes! I’m in Cluj. Or, Oh, right, I am in Romania.
Two weeks was long enough to start having small routines, such as going for a second and third coffee at a newly found cafe, remembering the aisle where they sold my favorite Romanian spread, zacusca, at the local shop (also dubbed ‘vegetable caviar’ for you, vegans).
But two weeks was definitely too short for me to stop having a migrant gaze and feel ‘at home’ again.
The migrant gaze is a kind of double vision: a way of looking at the world that’s shaped not only by where we are but also by where we’ve been.
When you've lived in four countries, as I have until now, you start to carry cultural references from all of them, like the layers in your skin. The migrant gaze takes shape from this layering. It’s the perspective of someone who is never fully inside a culture, but also no longer entirely outside of it. It’s somewhere between curiosity and familiarity.
The migrant gaze is not something you talk about out loud at dinner parties with locals. But it's always humming in the background of your mind.
It’s also not something you learn all at once. It creeps in slowly, quietly, until you realize you no longer look at your surroundings the way you used to. You begin to notice the subtle rhythm of everyday life — how people greet each other, how they pause in conversations or speak over one another, how laughter sounds in different languages.
You notice what others have stopped seeing or never perceived as anything more than ‘normal’.
The migrant gaze is a kind of double vision: a way of looking at the world that’s shaped not only by where we are but also by where we’ve been.
For the past twenty years, each time I arrived in a new city or town, my senses sharpened. The experience branded my mind so much that I still haven’t forgotten the first day in each place. Everything feels amplified — the colors of the grass along the highway, the smells of the inside of buildings, the pitch of the voices in a certain language.
As a traveller, I used to walk around, phone in hand, capturing every building, every pretty corner, every unfamiliar dish.
Take Barcelona, Spain, for example. I first visited it when I was 21 years old. I took photos of all the places that impressed me, especially because they were so exotic, so different from what I had seen back home. I couldn’t get enough of taking pictures of palm trees and the boardwalk by the port. I wanted to capture it all on camera because it felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be there.
When we visit a new place, we have this tendency to think we’ll never make it there again. That we’ll never see exactly the same street corners, or how the light falls on a church tower at sunset. We’re focused on not just visiting, but capturing and keeping a beautiful moment for later, for when we go back home.
But then, when I went back for a second time to Barcelona, eight years later, it was to stay. I was moving there this time around. Even though I was just as excited as when I had first visited, something shifted in my mind. I wasn’t motivated to take photos anymore.
I remember the exact moment when that shift happened. I was just out of the Drassanes metro stop and walking down La Rambla, the main street chock-full of tourists. I felt like a tourist myself, as it was just my second day in town. But my heart was bursting out of my chest, thinking: I made it. I got to live in the city of my dreams.
I reached for my phone as usual, ready to photograph some Modernist colorful building or some display of exotic fruits at the local market turned tourist hotspot — but then I paused. I didn’t take the photo.
Not because the views weren’t beautiful, but because, for the first time, I didn’t feel the urgency to preserve them. I didn’t need to capture them as if they were fleeting. I realized I could go back the next day. And the day after that. I wasn’t visiting anymore. I was staying.
The migrant gaze makes us realize that the things we once thought were universal are not.
That moment was quick but essential. That is why it stayed with me all these years.
I was morphing my gaze from that of an all-out tourist, towards a migrant gaze. A shift from passing through to settling in. I was never going to be a complete local, but I was not a tourist anymore. My perspective was a kaleidoscope of colors from the past homes blended with this new one.
That’s the strange gift of migrant life — this in-between vision we carry. We see things others might miss, simply because we’ve seen so many ways of living. We hold multiple perspectives at once — comparing, contrasting, absorbing. We carry old cultural reflexes into new places. We ask questions that others stopped asking long ago.
And sometimes, this gaze feels heavy.
We’re never fully of a place, even if we live there for years. We live in the gaps — between languages, between customs, between selves. We learn to translate our own feelings, to soften our edges, to adapt without erasing. Just like the Chinese narrator of the book A Lover’s Discourse when she emigrated to London.
But other times, it feels like a superpower.
It’s what lets us see beauty in the mundane, notice what others walk past. Feel the poetry in a plaza filled with orange trees with ripened fruit heavy on the branches. It’s what makes us hold on to small rituals from other countries — a way of making the bed, the spices we keep in our kitchen, the way we greet or say goodbye.
Living between cultures has taught me that there’s more than one way to live a life. It has made me more curious, more deeply aware of how many homes a person can have — and how many versions of oneself can coexist.
The migrant gaze makes us realize that the things we once thought were universal are not. That even eye contact, tone of voice, personal space, and how people say ‘sorry’ depend on the culture.
It’s noticing ourselves, too — the way we shift slightly in tone or posture depending on the context. The way we sometimes hesitate before speaking, wondering which version of ourselves to present.
So I keep walking in my adoptive home. Sometimes still reaching for my camera, but often not. Because the most meaningful part of this journey is not the photo I didn’t take — it’s the realization that I finally felt I belonged enough not to need it.
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I kept nodding along. I love the slipping into different roles of myself in different places and the way I observe things. Of course not always easy but somehow also freeing. Unless it’s around family, then it gets confusing
As an aside, the title of your post here made me wonder if it was going to be about how we view immigrants — a source of contention in this country and others. But what you wrote about was a lot more interesting and thoughtful!