When I was twenty years old, I spent 3 months in Italy as an au pair. It was the first time I’d lived in another country for any period of time, and for the first few weeks I was lonely and alienated. My Italian was broken, I of course had no friends, and having never put much effort into my wardrobe in the first place, in this highly fashion-conscious country I was down right homely.
There’s a John Donne poem in which he compares the first exploration of a woman’s body to the discovery of America. “O My America!” he writes, “my new-found-land/ My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned/ My mine of precious stones, my empery/ How blest am I in this discovering thee.” In a letter home to my boyfriend in Virginia, I told him I couldn’t imagine Italy ever stirring such wonder and excitement in people. Only America, I thought, could support such a universally satisfying metaphor.
This was a pretty stupid thought, of course; and without calling me stupid (bless his heart), my boyfriend rightly told me so. Italy is a wonderful and beautiful country, with a culture and people adored the world over. One could easily fill a bookstore with stories of nothing other than middle-aged American women finally discovering the meaning of life after eating a meal in Tuscany. But this was my first time away from home. And it was the first time I’d really thought about America and what it meant to me.
It was the summer of 1999. The U.S. was heading the NATO bombing of the Former Yugoslavia from a base at Aviano, Italy. In July, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bissett died in a plane crash. The former evoked suspicion and resentment. The latter, tremendous grief and nostalgia. These were certainly not the most significant events in American history, but seeing the States from the outside then was hugely affecting. When the bombing campaign ended, I remember the children running through the house shouting: “The war is over! The war is over!” I wasn’t the most politically conscious college student at 20, but I knew enough to know that no one at home thought we were “at war.” And with a constant vigil of news coverage on the television beside us, I learned much more about the tragic history of the Kennedy family talking to my teary-eyed host mother over cigarettes and espresso than I had at school.
I’ve traveled a lot since then.
Every time I leave and view home from afar, through foreign newspapers and foreign eyes, it looks and feels different. I realize that, for the locals, it is different. I don’t know that there is any one “America.” And I don’t know what it means to be “an American.” I don’t really care to decide on an answer to these questions. But I do have many thoughts on the matter, and I’ll try to put those thoughts here.
