I don't know if it's because I'm the daughter of exiles, but as a child I never had a physical place that I could really call "mine." I grew up with the feeling of being a wandering soul that only finds its home in the hearts of the people it loves. It was not always like this, but over time I have been reconciling with this destiny.
Despite this, I have always carried with me a tenuous bond, hardly a hope of belonging to a land that I do not know, but that I feel a little mine. And it is that at home we were born with a Mongolian stain, a bluish shadow on the buttock that slowly disappeared after the first months of life. A doctor from Washington, where one of my sisters was born, explained that it was the mark of the descendants of Genghis Khan, the nomadic Mongols who live between China and Russia.
When I heard that explanation, which seemed perfectly acceptable to me at the age of six, I felt that this distant land was not strange to me.
I've been told so many times that I look Asian! The Mongols' slanted eyes and love of nature made me feel right at home. Later, when I was a mother and my first son was born with that same Mongolian stain, I was glad that he arrived twinned, although the link is more poetic than real, with that mysterious land. And as soon as he could understand what I was saying, I explained to him that perhaps in his genes there was a memory of vast lands, of wild horses and of ancient customs.