Personal Experience In Orhan Pamuk's 'Hüzün'

It’s a complicated feeling shared amongst the population of Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk introduces his readers to the term ‘Hüzün’. A feeling of pride in loss that can be closely related to melancholy and understood only by the natives of Istanbul, proposing that insiders and outsiders experience the city differently. Outsiders might not share similar feelings as the natives due to differences in experiences and lack of cultural and social knowledge to their shared environment, as did I. Recalling my personal experience of moving from India to starting a new way of life in USA helped me realize that I, too, shared a different perceptive to my new environment when compared to the natives. Differences in the educational system, lack of fluency in the
Although I was being trained to learn four different languages (Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, and English) during my education in India, I was not proficient in any language at the age of seven and did not speak English very well. I was a foreigner to this country, lacking social and cultural knowledge that would’ve helped me to engage in conversations with my peers and teachers. As a result, I was unable to exchange opinions with my peers and teachers that would’ve helped me to understand the feelings of the natives. Consequently, I would often find myself not being able to elicit similar emotions as my peers to certain situations. A common incidence that I can never seem to forget is how my peers in elementary school were deadly afraid of bees and would often have a horrified look on their faces upon an encounter with a bee. I, on the other hand, never found myself having such a response to a bee and instead of running away while screaming, like my peers would, I would simply go on about my business. My peers would be surprised by my lack of fear and decision to not run away, similarly, I would be surprised by their strong reaction a bee. Reflecting back on this particular incidence and numerous others, I can now understand that although the lack of communication due to the language barrier between me and my peers contributed to such vast differences in our emotions, other factors also played a role. For instance, my past experiences with bees were very different from my peers. Growing up in India, I was never stung by a bee and in fact, I wasn’t even aware that one could even by stung by a bee. Surely if I had managed to communicate with my peers and exchanged our past experiences, I might have been able to understand this social fear amongst my