I want to pick up the thread of my response to Aviya Kushner's article (see below). As a fellow immigrant, dual-citizen, expatriate what-have-you, I find it interesting to learn of other foreigners' interpretations of America. Some remind me of myself.
For most of my life I defaulted to deriding the cultures around me; perhaps because I thought that to be an immigrant was to be permanently defensive. I balked against the "stiffness" of Londoners, laughed at the Filipino fervor for America, and chafed at the unsophisticated tones of my South Asian family. But I also did strange things to adapt. I modified my accent from Indian to British to American and back to British, always aware of the choice between assimilation and being an outsider. As a 9 year old in London I was mocked for my thick, lilting Indian accent--and to this day I remember the precise moment when I imitated a classmate's pronunciation, and the laughter finally stopped. As of that moment my verbal performance was permanent.
As an adolescent relocated to America, the social pressures changed. I came at a time when "diversity" was still a catchphrase in the suburbs, when my private school celebrated a club called "Students of Color," and the admissions representative praised my "different background" as an asset to the student body. I look back and often wonder how I bore up under this designation.
I appreciate where Kushner is coming from when she talks about ethnicity gone "lite." She's right, but she neglects to account for the fact that ethnicity gets modulated only when it's seen as a burden. An immigrant from Korea expects to be treated - and often is - differently than an immigrant from France. The Korean prepares to sand down the rough edges of their abandoned culture: the unfamiliar accent, cuisine, codes of social behavior. The Frenchman arrives, knowing that to be 'European' connotes urbanity and sophistication, that it is an aspiration for many Americans. Which immigrant do you think goes "lite"??
There is one final point I'd like to address about Kushner's piece. I'll leave aside the fact that I agree - strongly and admiringly - with her stance on the need for more translation, for greater and more immediate access to the wealth of cultures around America. She gets it right when she notes that publishers are limited by the weak appetite of the American reading public for the work of foreign writers.
But what I want to talk about is her comment on American students abroad, which struck me as astonishingly accurate. I'd like to quote what she says so that it's fresh on the page:
<< It is not that Americans lack curiosity of any kind—but that we seem to lack the right kind. Europe is overrun with young American tourists. Unfortunately, these college students tend to pack a dozen countries into a month or less. They often tote guides such as Let’s Go, which highlight the greatest hits and cheapest places and are written by, you guessed it, other American college students. That’s how we seem to read international literature as well. Let’s go, we might say, but let’s go easy. And cheap.
I remember taking the placement exam for foreign students at the Sorbonne in 1994. The registration desk was staffed by several well-coiffed Frenchwomen. The giant exam room was crammed with very thin European students: Italians, Swiss, Germans, some British, and only a handful of Americans. Yet plenty of American college students were studying in Paris. There were entire dormitories full of them. These students went to all-American programs, often run by prestigious universities. They went to French class, sure, but their classmates were American; they lived with other Americans, and so missed out on bathroom French, kitchen French, and get-out-of-my-way-I’m-getting-ready French, which I learned from my French roommate, Stéphanie, in an international dorm.
What is going on in our reading habits is that we want to know, but we want to go home at night to an Anglophone dorm, instead of negotiating with a French-speaking neighbor to stop cooking that awful-smelling thing at 3 am. We want someone to address us directly, to write something just for us.>>
I cite this because I've lived through this experience and long wondered why I found it so troublesome. As a child I was toted from country to country under the sheltering aegis of my nuclear family, and as a result, was rarely engaged with my surroundings. But in college I determined to travel to France on my own, desirous of saying that I once "lived in Paris," desperate not to be left behind while friends scattered across Europe.
And yet, when people ask about my time abroad, I find it difficult to tell them what they want: that it was the greatest decision I made, that Paris was epic, the cuisine memorable and the women so chic!...that I read Hemingway and went to Prague and Dublin on the weekends, and met students from San Diego en route. That just wasn't my experience.
For one thing, my vegetarianism was anathema to French cuisine. I only peeked into celebrated stores like Printemps and Gallaries Lafayette, but ultimately shopped at giant flea markets where I was too shy to barter for the Zidane jersey I wanted. I bought French electronic music and spent hours in FNAC, where a whole world of French and Francophone pop buzzed brightly around me. I did break down occasionally and buy English magazines, but was conscious of why I did so: because I was overwhelmed and lonely, because every day of struggling for words - in the classroom, at the post office, in front of my landlord, at lunch - was constant, exhausting work. As an English major and creative writer I discovered how utterly lost and robbed I felt when I words failed me, when my school French was incapable of producing the humor and irony I wanted to communicate. I clung to American friends, seeking solace, but knew that they were like me: they wanted Parisian friends, to abandon their American identities, to escape being caught as a foreigner.
I didn't even have time to travel outside of France. I took six classes, two of which were at the Sorbonne, determined as I was to experience elite French education. I admit that I was horribly embarrassed in those classes: I dressed differently, spoke haltingly, and was for all effects, clearly an outsider. Even the neat Clairefontaine notebooks that every student scribbled in made me feel shabby and out of place.
And yet...in the past few years, having gotten over the fact that I didn't have a glorious rite of passage in my time abroad, I have become utterly grateful for the fact that it was such a struggle. I see no point to visiting a country in 2 days surrounded by familiar faces and accents. Losing the gift of fluency taught me to value foreigners' broken English, to understand that in English I have humor, depth, layers of meaning, but that I can still crack a basic joke in French. I didn't read Hemingway but I read Beckett in both French and English, and learned that the impact was after all quite different. I discovered that in France they alter common names, so that if you're looking for the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, you'll never find it unless you're also looking for "La Joconde."
All of this sounds terribly self-congratulatory. It isn't meant to be. In Paris I was homesick, lonely and occasionally depressed. But it taught me that after all there are totally different ways of being in the world. That there are - chose bizzare! - high schoolers in France who idolize Woody Allen and Chet Baker, as well as the culture that brought these two figures into being. I learned that discipline, hierarchy and tradition are immensely valued, in spite of my childhood belief that in "the West" there was a constant rebellion against what had come before.
At this point I'll curtail going into more detail. What I will conclude with is a brief note regarding the overtones of Kushner's article: there is a threat of 'McCulture', as she puts it. But we have to be fair. We must recognize that 'McCulture', the dilution of ethnicity, goes both ways: with Americans abroad, clutching Let's Go, and with citizens everywhere -- in Europe and Asia -- who build and patronize more local McDonalds (if this can be taken as a symbol) than ever before.
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