Foreigner I: Europe

The first time I went to Ireland, in 1979, I said to someone in a pub that I was “Italian.” That person laughed and said, “You’re not Italian, you’re American, anyone can see that a mile away.” (After a couple of weeks in the country, I too could tell an American a mile away.)

That casual comment changed my understanding of a lot of things as time passed. When I was growing up, in the context of Dad’s family, not to mention church and school, we had always called ourselves “Italian.” As far as I can remember there were no hyphenated Americans in those days. In America there were Italians, Irish, Finns, and Swedes, not Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, etc., never mind African Americans or Native Americans. No one ever gave much thought to how to distinguish Finn(ish-Americans) from the Finns in Finland; most of us had never been to Europe and never saw any Europeans, so it didn’t matter.

My first reaction to the guy in the pub in 1979 was that of course the perspective was different if you were in Europe; in Ireland, you were only a stone’s throw from the real Italy, which was full of real Italians, and in fact real Italians showed up in Ireland on vacation on a regular basis. It took me longer to realize how big a difference there must have between the lifestyles of Italian-Americans and those of Italians in Italy. Grandma Mat and her generation kept up the food traditions, they could still speak and understand Italian, and they associated mostly with each other and not with other kinds of Americans. Nevertheless, they weren’t really Italian any more; they were Italian-American.

Another thing that first trip to Ireland got me thinking about was foreignness -- in both directions. Ireland (and later England) felt both familiar and foreign to me. The architecture was different from home -- but not too different. (Never mind the question of what “home” means if you’re talking about the U.S. as a whole, from the desert southwest to northern Maine, from Florida to Seattle.) There was a lot of different vocabulary (“car park” for parking lot, “ring” for call on the phone, “call” for come by the house, etc.), but not too much different vocabulary. The lifestyle was different but not too different (no central heating in Ireland; rather, a turf fire, but in a recognizable fireplace). So while it was very clear that I wasn’t in America any more, there was enough that was familiar -- especially and above all the language -- to keep traveling from being very daunting.

From the other direction, I felt foreign. Going across the ocean to foreign countries made me think about the fact that not everyone shares my assumptions, my memories, or my history in a way that people from one country share those things even in a diverse country like the U.S. In another country, talking to people who see the U.S. from the outside, things just look different. The Dublin paper was always full of news about the United States in a way that American papers were never full of news about Ireland, and people actually had strong opinions about the U.S. in Ireland, because the U.S. affected them in a way that Ireland did not affect the U.S.

Those trips made me treasure the chance to go away and feel like a foreigner for a while. I would get some of my fixed ideas shaken up, see the world out of other people’s eyes for a while, see new places out of my own eyes, and come home not quite the same person I was before.

Brussels put a few cracks in that picture. Unlike in Amsterdam, where everyone on the street seems to speak beautiful English, in Brussels, outside my office, most people didn’t speak much if any English at all. It turned out that when I couldn’t have conversations with people, being a foreigner wasn’t quite so much fun. I had a great trip to Brussels (with my side visit to Amsterdam), but it taught me that being a foreigner is a little more complicated than I had thought.

China is another story altogether -- which I’ll try to tell next time.