The Foreign Service Journal, December 2005

90 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 5 S CHOOLS S UPPLEMENT experiences, “I have attended reunions of my school and class (1969) from the International School Bangkok. It’s affirming to see people who shared my peculiar childhood. We can speak about experiences that people in our stateside lives just don’t have a clue about. My attendance at reunions goes back to the late 1970s, when I attended one in the D.C. area. I got that invite via snail mail. E-mail has made communications so much easier … I got to see a number of folks from my class as well as the son of a friend of my dad who worked with him in Saigon during the war. It was really satisfying to talk with him about our fathers, both of whom had passed away by then. He is a person I would have never known in the States had we not had the common experience of living overseas. He is a farmer from Idaho or some far off place in the Midwest. What surpris- es me is how much the reunions seem to be the center of some peo- ple’s lives, as if the time spent in Bangkok was the best time of our lives. While it was a wonderful two years for me, it was not the best time.” Walteen expressed a common theme, that of having a shared experi- ence and therefore a bond with oth- erwise disparate people. She also said it helped her sense of identity to meet with others who were like her, at least in their experience of having lived some of their formative years abroad. She was surprised to find that now, as an adult, she found she had more in common with her class- mates than she did when they were in high school. Walteen was involved in many activities at her high school, including serving as editor of the yearbook. Yet she was not part of the party scene and as she says, “I didn’t get asked to the prom — because I was one of maybe two black girls in my class … There were so few blacks at ISB, I felt no racial tension, just isolation. Isolation was an element of being an American overseas; it was just particularly nuanced by race. I was treated as unique, one of a kind, voted most likely to succeed ... It was not a terrible way to be perceived, just not real helpful when I came back to the U.S. in 1969 to the racial climate here and the unfolding Continued from page 89 For the 50th anniversary celebrations, the school hosted a reunion in Bangkok.