I am wearing my best tennis whites and nervously picking at the strings on my wooden Wilson racket. The new grip my coach helped me wrap around the handle the night before has that fresh, just-out-of-the-package smell. I am about to compete in my first tournament.
The contest is in a small seaside town in Montenegro, a couple of hours away from my Croatian hometown.
I am a walking blob of sweat and sunburn, but it doesn’t matter. I win the match easily. My luck ends in the next round, but I still bask in the glory of that first triumph. Eager to keep practicing, I want to get back home.
I was 11 then. I was born in Serbia and grew up in Dubrovnik, a seaside Croatian town called “the Pearl of the Adriatic” and later made famous as the set of King’s Landing in “Game of Thrones.”
We lived on a bay surrounded by dark blue waters and the smells of lavender, rosemary and cypress. The tennis courts were less than 10 minutes away, by foot, from our house. My father grew up playing the sport and so did my older sister, so my twin sister and I naturally followed their path.
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When we were not in school or practicing, we went fishing with our father on the wooden deck below our house, fed turtles on our stone terrace and climbed palm trees in our mother’s garden. Our dinners often consisted of fish we caught in the morning, then tossed on the grill before sprinkling local sea salt and our friend’s homemade olive oil. We walked to the courts, our school, the grocery store and the kiosk where we picked up the daily newspaper.
“Politika za Jaksic,” we’d say, naming the newspaper, Politics, and giving our family name.
When we had enough change, we bought Dubble Bubble gum and Cedevita orange candy.
I was a competitive kid who lost many more matches than I won, and I loved all things tennis. I met my friends, enemies and crushes on that orange clay. I admired Steffi Graf and was thrilled when I got an Adidas T-shirt just like hers as a gift.
I imitated her sweeping forehand and how she tossed the ball extra-high when she served. My diary was a mini tennis hall of fame: magazine cutouts of favorite players, tournament draws and results, musings about why my coach didn’t promote me to the more advanced group.
And then, my tennis days in the Balkans abruptly ended, and so did my idyllic childhood.
We were in Slovenia for an under-14 tournament when I first heard my parents talk about fighting near the border. A few days later, they told my sisters and I we would leave Yugoslavia soon.
“We are going to Canada for a year so you can learn English,” they said.
I had never been to Canada and felt confused. I was sad about leaving Dubrovnik, but traveling to North America sounded cool. Later that week, we were on the first of three flights to Toronto. I didn’t have time to say goodbye to all my tennis buddies.
“Politika!” I sometimes heard my mother say, shaking her head. She was not referring to the newspaper.
I was 13 when we immigrated to Canada. The next time I saw Dubrovnik was on CNN months later, black smoke swallowing the town’s famous red-tiled rooftops. Bombs were dropping on my hometown, and my country was breaking into pieces. While I was on the brink of teenage life, Yugoslavia was on the brink of war. The political tension my parents had been discussing had spun into a series of brutal conflicts.
That first summer in Canada, I took two buses to E.S.L. classes in the mornings and watched “Full House” reruns in the afternoons to get rid of my accent. I was regularly embarrassed about not knowing the words of the Canadian national anthem when we sang it in English and French each morning.
Once, I told my class that “I rot” instead of “I wrote,” causing me to sink deeper into my chair with every laugh. I just wanted to talk like my peers did and fit in.
My family left everything behind: our language, our Barbies, our familiar culture. But my tennis skills crossed the Atlantic with me. In the harsh weather of the Great White North, where tennis wasn’t so popular, this awkward immigrant transformed into a confident athlete — who actually won.
Our high school peers called my sister and I “the tennis twins” and “Croatian sensations.” The Toronto Star interviewed us, and a local TV crew filmed a segment about us. I cracked the province of Ontario’s top 10 ranking and accumulated so many trophies that my parents installed a case for them in the basement.
In the continuing struggle with the otherness that comes with being an immigrant, tennis was my secret weapon. Put a Wilson in my hand and I was in my comfort zone, regardless of which country I landed in. King’s Landing was an ocean away, but I was queen of the court.
I sometimes felt the need to explain that I was winning in Canada only because the sport was not as competitive as it was in Croatia, where we played outside year-round. Still, I took pleasure knowing there was finally something about me that my peers found impressive instead of embarrassing.
In Croatia, tennis often left me defeated. In Canada, it lifted me. After high school, I moved to the United States for a college tennis scholarship. Tennis helped again, as it eased my immigrant family’s financial burden.
I stayed in the United States to look for work, filling out applications that never had the correct pull-down menu option for me. There is no box for a Croat born in Serbia while it was Yugoslavia, who has a Canadian passport but lives in the United States. I don’t fit in — in a box or a country.
There is a term in tennis to describe the part of the court between the service line and the baseline, where a player is most vulnerable: “no man’s land.” I have often felt like no land’s woman. Yugoslavia was my home, but then it vanished. It has been erased from maps and geography books, its name disappeared from passports.
At this point, I have lived in North America for twice as long as I did in Yugoslavia. I don’t remember the last time I picked up a racket.
Often I pass by tennis courts in my neighborhood. Recently, I slowed down and stood behind the fence. I thought about how tennis turned out to be about more than just fun for me. The courts were my comfort zone, my refuge, my transition into teenage life and immigrant life.
I saw a young woman playing, sweat glistening on her cheeks, farmer’s tan visible on her muscular legs. The smell of new tennis balls and the satisfying sound of her racket striking the ball spurred my memory. I saw that nervous 11-year-old girl on orange clay.
Maybe she’ll always be no land’s woman. But thanks to that forehand, she’ll be O.K.
Vesna Jaksic Lowe, a writer and communications consultant in New York, is a former N.C.A.A. Division 1 tennis player who still stores her trophies in her parents’ basement in Canada.
