“The Land of the Free”

          

            I never thought of myself as an immigrant, not until recently. I thought I was an academic / writer / public intellectual crossing borders, writing, doing research, going back and from Romania to the US and back and, most of the time, living in a country that was so diverse and used to its diversity that accent and skin color didn’t matter as long as you worked hard and got along with everyone else.

            Somehow, at the end of my bios that I had to submit for conferences or publications, the phrase “originally from Romania” made its way. And once I heard myself say, in a faculty meeting, “as an immigrant woman,” which kind of scared me. I didn’t think I was an immigrant. I thought I was a hip academic who happened to have an accent and a Romanian passport.

            Yet after ten years of teaching and writing, after living in New York, Texas, Michigan, and New Jersey, teaching more than a thousand students in the process, struggling very hard to get an academic job, and even getting some two-year positions, it gradually dawned upon me that I’m not a tourist, I’m not visiting, that I actually live here, work here and work hard for that matter, and that the locals, from my students to the USCIS, do think that I’m an immigrant, a newcomer in a long series of arrivals, someone who has given up being in the country of their birth in order to be here, the land of the free.

            Ok, fine, but what do they have to say about it? At the beginning of every course I teach, one of my students usually informs me that they can’t stand it when immigrants come to the United States and then criticize their country. They also say that the US is the land of the free and that in the US people have freedoms they don’t have in other countries. Usually it’s students who have never traveled abroad who say that.

            Now I agree that counting who has how many freedoms where is a tough question to answer. But my student are right in a way: in the United States, we talk about freedom a lot. The United States does pride itself in its national identity, like every nation should, and it defines its national identity as “the land of the free”. In contrast, Romania never thought of itself as “the land of the free.” If anything, they would call it “the land where Romanians can be free,” given that Romanians had been dominated by Turks, Russians, and Hungarians from the Middle Ages on.

            So it’s all fine so far, we can call the United States “the land of the free”, but that sets it up high and at some point or another the US has to respond to such lofty expectations. And it does at times and it tried to do so, in an honest way, many times in its history. Like for example during Radical Reconstruction, when the South experienced one of the most progressive “interracial democracies”, or during the 1960s, when women gained new freedoms, or more recently, by attempting, again honestly, to expand the definition of marriage.  

            But that begs the question, how should we define freedom? Is it “freedom from” you name it—government interference in private matters, government regulations, taxes, ideological control, etc.? According to John Dewey, American philosopher, that would be freedom defined as a negative concept, freedom defined as the absence of something.  

            Or should it rather be freedom, defined as a positive concept this time, to do what makes us happy (provided it doesn’t hurt someone else), freedom to thrive, freedom to be healthy and generous and creative and freedom to make sure that everyone has opportunities to do the same?

            I’d love to live in a country like that.           

Resisting Translation

 

            I’m a good immigrant. Seriously. I do my best to blend in. I have a deep respect for place, language, culture—when I lived in Budapest for a year, I tried to learn Hungarian; good luck trying to learn Hungarian in a year! But I diligently studied prepositions added at the end of the noun and nouns that changed their last syllable according to the preposition added and made choppy sentences with all that.

            Living in the US for ten years, you can guess, I give my bookishness free reins. I get a doctorate in American Studies (once someone remarked, “Well, this is the right place to do that!”). I read as much as I can on American history. I check English words in my etymological dictionary: hood and house come from the same root, according to the Chambers, a Germanic word that signifies “cover.” How important is that?

            Yet my Romanianness sneaks up on me at the most unexpected moments. I don’t know where I read about hybrid identities and how immigrant people manage their multiple identities etc. I don’t manage that well. It’s more like I’m controlled by foreign forces. They come and seize me when I’m not aware.

            Like for example when I answer the phone and say Alo! Instead of Hello!

            Like when I explain an assignment to a student and all of a sudden, in my speech, Romanian words mix with English ones. “You only missed one class and in the syllabus it says you can miss up to two without grade penalty, prin urmare you don’t need to worry about it.” I wonder how my student hears it. Are foreigners supposed to babble anyway?

            Like when I get angry and my accent becomes stronger and all of a sudden I can’t find English words, right when I need them the most.

            Like when I count in Romanian—sorry, can’t do two things at the same time, count and speak a foreign language, it’s either one or the other. To the bank teller it must seem like I’m whispering charms over twenty dollar bills.

            Like when I apologize too much, or say thank you when there’s nothing really to thank someone for, I just like that person and I say thanks to mask my happiness.

            And these are situations when I know it. How many other times do I act Romanian, speak Romanian, betray myself as being from somewhere else, perform my foreignness in perhaps disruptive ways?

            But what is my fantasy here? That indeed I can control my worlds, prevent them from seeping undetected into one another, crossing the mental border between “I am here” and “I was there”? Maybe I fear that, unbeknownst to me, I’m functioning according to rules that have changed since I last took a serious look at them, as if I’m playing a game of soccer and halftime has passed and the teams have switched halves but I still don’t know it yet, and I’m running triumphantly with the ball toward the net, about to score a goal, and it’s too late when I realize that it’s my own team’s net and I’ve just scored for the other team?

            This whole experience of living away from the country where I was born, under very different circumstances, makes me realize at a very deep level how much we’re a product of our worlds, how what we believe, expect from life, celebrate and eat all depend on how we spent the first twenty years of our lives. But then, what should I keep? What should I actively try to lose? Here's what's frightening: it doesn't completely depend on me.

Migration, Poverty, and Food

I arrived in Buffalo, NY, in August 2001, to go to graduate school. The first three days I spent at one of my professors’ apartment, a penthouse overlooking the impoverished Buffalo downtown. It struck me as a town of sharp contrasts and sharp winters. Nothing seemed to be in the middle, everything white or black, old, very rich and decaying or young and extremely poor. Where did I belong? I found out soon enough after learning about the many deductions from my $8,000 a year teaching assistant’s stipend.

            That first week, from my professor’s penthouse, I walked to a train station, six or seven blocks away. Used to living in Europe and walking downtown and pretty much everywhere—I didn't need a car in Europe and I couldn’t afford a car in the US—it didn’t bother me. What bothered me was the presence of extreme poverty just a block away from the fashionable area with interwar buildings inhabited by middle-class professionals.

            At a street corner, already in the “bad” area that as I learned later my colleagues who had cars avoided, there was a neighborhood food store owned by a Middle Eastern family. That was my first experience buying food in the United States. Everything was canned and dusty, the sloping floors were covered with ancient linoleum, the smell of some disinfectant detergent made me sneeze. In the end I picked up some cheese, wanting to reward my professor’s hospitality. I wanted to make an omelet. The cheese turned out to be Monterey Jack and, for my tastes at that time, uneatable. My professor, shocked yet amused, explained to me “what horrible things they were doing to cheese”—that’s how she put it—and then two days later took me shopping to a nice smelling shop with bright windows, a young good looking sales person, and carefully wrapped cheeses and jars of olives that cost as much as some of the books I needed to buy—another expense I had failed to calculate out of my meager TA paycheck.

            Then I found a room in a house and I started cooking at home. I dreaded the foreignness of it all. Everything tasted different, even the milk: whether Vitamin D enhanced or the simple 2%, it tasted as if it had been made out of powdered milk, not as if it came from a cow. Bread was different too—either the prohibitively expensive baguettes or the prepackaged stuff, which I once tried to eat untoasted and regretted it. Why did bread have to be sweet? Where were the regular bakeries that poor people could afford, so that they could eat bread, real bread with crust and middle, and not… and not… this? And why were tomatoes so expensive—that was poor people’s food back in Romania, everyone had tomatoes, with everything, they were cheap, you could grow them in your backyard—and why, and why please someone tell me, even when these tomatoes were so expensive, why is it that they didn’t have any taste, just a pale color and a slippery yet hard texture that made me think of seafood?

            And why did it bother me so much?

            “But of course,” an anthropology professor said to me, “it’s normal, it’s food, the ground of your identity.” I thought about this for a long time.