We made it! I have now completely circled the globe, and I am currently in the place where everything began for me: St. Louis. I will be in my hometown for a few months until I move to Pittsburgh to start graduate school. Everyone asks me how it feels to be back, and honestly it feels stranger than I would have thought. Not only have I been to places completely different from the US, but I have lived a life of movement for four months. My favorite part of the trip was waking up every day and doing whatever I felt like doing — which is a gift something few people ever give themselves. My only responsibility while traveling was to make a train or a plane at the scheduled time; and even if I missed those, it wouldn’t have been a big deal. I now have to find a job, I need health insurance, and I have a closet. These things are boggling my mind.
Yes, the trip was everything I wanted it to be and more. And yes, the trip changed me, but I’m not totally sure how. I do know that I now do a lot more thinking and a bit less talking, which a lot of people would say is an improvement! I have been mulling about an idea in my brain that I am going to try to spell out now. It has to do with national narratives and how they shape the lives of most people in the world. Over the past four months, I visited 15 countries. We started in Asia and worked our way to Europe; with this route, I figured the trip would get easier as time went on. Sure, it was easier to communicate and we could drink the tap water in Europe. But I think I was mistaken by my characterizations of easy and hard.
Everywhere we went, I heard stories that brought to life the history of the place. We visited Thailand during a momentarily cool period of their political turmoil, which has gone on since the birth of their democracy. Our tuk-tuk driver in Cambodia took us to the Killing Fields and told us with sad eyes and limited English that just before he was born, the evil government murdered many people. In Vietnam, talkative men would remind us that even though the Vietnamese have not forgotten, they are no longer angry at Americans. In China, we would wake up one morning to find that youtube had been shut down, and my Chinese friends would just shrug it off as another right the government denies to the people. In the monarchy of the United Arab Emirates, a law was passed one day stating that it is illegal to fire an Emirati — the small class of people that make up the native, oil-rich population. On a train from Athens to Thessaloniki, a young Greek Cypriot told us about his fear that the Turkish language will become mandatory in schools in Cyprus. At a birthday party in Germany, my friend’s mother mentioned that she had to learn Russian when she was little, because she was from the East. In Prague, we stayed in a beautiful apartment owned by my friend’s parents, who were in New York City at the time — they were partially moving to New York, a process they began in 1989 to escape Communism. At a dinner party in Dublin, a table full of Irish and English shared stories about times they had faced guns on roads near the border of Northern Ireland, or faced territorial men at pubs that belonged to one side or the other.
If previously asked to suggest commonalities between the Czech Republic and Cambodia, I would not have known how to answer. But now, I have seen the way both people talk about their history: not as a time that has past, but as a feeling that lives. A Vietnamese person, born however far into the future, will always hear stories of the time America took away the South; just as every German child will be taught about the Nazis and the disgusting outcomes of fascism. This idea of living history struck me the most in Greece, a place most known in the US for its perfect beaches and dazzling ruins. But ask anyone from Turkey or Macedonia about Greece, and they will have much different ideas that have a lot less to do with sun and fun. Greece, one of the most coveted vacation destinations to Americans, is also a hotbed of deep-rooted ethnic conflict and territorial dispute.
When I try to find something similar to this in my life, I cannot. I think for me, and for most Americans, a narrative of struggle or conflict is missing from our lives. Any of our significant wars are too long ago to affect how I feel about my country and my identity. The exception to this, I think, is for black Americans, who do carry on a story of struggle, of who they are and where they came from, and how that affects their place in this country. But for me, history does not affect how I live my life. I am extremely disconnected from it. And in some ways, I think this is what makes Americans seem naive to the rest of the world. We think that Europe is just like America, but with pretty castles and more languages. But it’s absolutely not. It’s a continent with hundreds of ethnic groups and centuries of conflict over borders. Even today there is disagreement on who owns what, from the British Isles to the Balkans.
But in the good old USA, we don’t have to deal with that. Sure, we have immigrants, but so does Europe. What we don’t have is the complexity of relationships, of rivalries and hatred, of oppression and struggle, to the extent that the rest of the world does. And for that, we are at the same time lucky and disadvantaged. We are lucky because the United States is a really easy country to live in. But we are disadvantaged because we have to work extra hard to try to comprehend the problems in the rest of the world. Why did a bunch of people shut down the airport in Bangkok? Why does the Chinese government block websites on June 4? Why is the island of Ireland split into two countries? Complicated histories cover this planet.
Except for here. And most of us never even realize how easy we have it.
Jon and I at the Acropolis in Athens, Greece
SocialVibe