There is a club on thefacebook.com ( for those who want to pretend they don’t know) called “Brits,” and I am in it. I have no deep philosophical reasons for joining clubs on the site, though I tend to make sure that I have some legitimate reason for considering myself an affiliate. Other people probably feel the same way. Their reasons for joining “Brits” is most commonly that they consider themselves an Anglophile. Perhaps one or, God forbid, both of their parents are British, in which case, why the hell are they here, in Middletown, Connecticut? That’s where I come in.
Well, I’m not really British. I don’t have a maroon-colored passport; I have two navy blue passports from the U.S. and Canada, though the latter has lapsed. I suppose that makes me a hypocrite in light of my last column entitled, as you may recall not sarcastically, “Go Canada.” Symbolically, this means that I have, after many years of uncertainty – even aversion – decided to pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, the flag I was born under. Or perhaps I am just succumbing to the reverberating words of my mother: “Don’t you dare give up your American passport as long as you live.” Strong words for a disillusioned registered Democrat (okay, she isn’t American, but if she were, she’d be a Democrat.) The truth is I never got the chance to call myself a British citizen, though I lived there for 12 years and picked up, if not the accent, the pronunciations, spellings, and mannerisms. I’ve had to curb my habit of punctuating outside the parentheses, saying “disorientated,” remarking that I am going to “have” a shower rather than “take” a shower. Minor issues, really, but for a time I clung to these tiny cultural discrepancies.
Props to a former hallmate for commenting that I was “not really British” during those first painful days of acclimatization known as orientation week. She was right, but as far as allegiance was concerned I couldn’t at that time have been more confused, or rather more confident that I had made a poor choice in “hopping” across the pond to experience what my father had abandoned after one short year. Like me, my father witnessed in his two semesters at Wesleyan the tragic event that “rocked” our respective generations. On the top floor of Fisk Hall, he noticed a flag collapse to half-mast seconds before a student ran into the classroom announcing Kennedy’s assassination. For my part, I sat alone in the middle of the Nic Lounge watching buildings collapse, briefly accompanied by another student who pulled up a chair, remarked, “This is like, so sad,” and left after a minute, evidently deciding that class was more important. “Was she right?” I thought. I didn’t even know what I was watching, not to mention how I felt about it, as I’m sure many people of any cultural background would agree. I have always speculated about my degree of sadness during those moments, and have seen that over the past four years I have become more mournful as Americans have perhaps become less so; I’m just catching up to an inherent patriotism that most Americans take for granted.
The question remains why I came to America for my college education. Truth be told, my high school, if it were to identify itself like a person would, was ostensibly “American.” Once in the luxurious building that housed it, I was on an island, where similarly displaced friends and I ranted about the frequent departure of our classmates “back to America” or elsewhere (with their diplomat, oil magnate, or in my case, journalist parents to blame.) My confused, multi-but-unexotic-passport-holding friends and I were just that—displaced persons who swam in the at-times unfriendly waters surrounding our pretentious hub, the American School in London, but really had very little connection to British society. We read The Times, watched the generous five channels on our TV sets, spelled ‘color’ with a ‘u.’ We drank hard cider out of pints, had an aversion to our most American of peers (whatever that meant), and adopted British comedy as the paradigm of the genre.
But the answer to why I applied to Wesleyan is that I was afraid. I remember thinking that my quasi-American accent and other such aspects of my personality would isolate me in a British university. But there was also a sense that life in London, in all those twelve years, had never really been demystified by me or anyone else because I had taken it for granted. I floated through it (thanks to the protective private school bubble) first as a child who loved the enormous garden (“square”) I was allowed to play in because it was big and green and full of trees, not because it was English; then as a teenager, who naturally began to recognize the peculiarities of the culture and others that I had lived in. My decision to come here explains a common problem for people with my type of upbringing: we never quite want to find a home. Finding a home is like getting married, and it’s a desire considerably more embedded in American culture. To stay in England would have been to embrace that country finally as my adoptive mother country, which suggests that I am essentially afraid of commitment.
What I chose instead of cultural marriage was to dip my feet into yes, perhaps wimpily skim the surface of yet another facet of the First World. Four years later and I have come to the same realization: I love America, but I’m not in love with America, and I still retain a sense—a growing sense—that I’m a fake, which is truthfully a crucial aspect of cultural open-mindedness. At Wesleyan, there is a similar self-consciousness among students. It’s that typical thirst for awareness found in most bright students who know that it’s an inalienable right to seek out and claim an understanding of as many cultures as possible. Though it may be tempting, don’t let your accent hold you back.
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