Proud to be an American, sort of

I’m on the last leg of my three-flight journey home to Boston. After my time in India and Nepal, I flew to Australia for a month to visit my sister Tali and do some traveling. When I landed in Brisbane, Tali greeted me at the airport with a loaf of gluten-free bread and a sign with my name on it. We didn’t really need the sign, since odds were that we’d recognize each other, and in the end, she greeted me in the airport with a running hug anyway, but having your name on a sign makes you feel nice. Everyone should have their name on a sign at some point.

A nearly empty residential street in Brisbane

Tali took the brunt of my stream of observations as I got familiar with my surroundings that first week, including the ever insightful, “There are barely any people here,” “It’s so quiet,” and “It smells so good!” Australia does run a good ship, from what I can see. Which is sort of funny since the country was basically founded by convicts and sailors. It’s very clean, people don’t jaywalk (which made me crazy, given the lack of cross-walks), and the buses run on time with functional air-conditioning.  I would have filmed traffic on a street corner in Australia, but I didn’t think anyone would be interested in footage of nearly empty streets with cars going around rotaries in the wrong direction.

The thing about traveling in a foreign country, as opposed to living there, is that you spend much more time with other foreigners than with locals. Consequently, most of the people I met were European and Asian.  I met people from Germany, Switzerland, Scotland, England, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Brazil, and China, among other countries. The questions people asked me about quality of life in the US were really fascinating. I played pickup-basketball with some Chinese students at Tali’s school, and afterwards, one asked if I own a gun, because he heard it’s really dangerous in the US. Europeans were particularly interested in our healthcare system and comparing it to how cheap and easy it is for them to get care anywhere in the EU. A Korean asked me about why Obama says that our educational system needs to take cues from schools in Asian countries, which made for a good conversation about the gap we have between available jobs and the skillset of our workforce. We even talked about why there aren’t more women in technology, one of my favorite ever topics! See Tali’s article about this here.

It started to strike me how the geographical isolation of the US (as opposed to a European country) has made Americans much less aware of the rest of the world, not in terms of events, but culturally. Speaking English as a first language is surely a blessing, as English is the language that people use to travel, and sometimes even work, all over the world. But it isn’t really fair that I am able to articulate my thoughts exactly as they’re formed in my head, while anyone for whom English is a second, third, or fourth language may have to drastically simplify an idea in order to express it to me in my language. Beyond this aspect, there is so much more communication behind a spoken sentence than the plain translation of the words. By not speaking other languages, Americans are implicitly telling the rest of the world that we expect them to meet us culturally as well. The gesture of saying “Good morning” or “How are you” in a foreign language seems to be the American feeble attempt at international bridge building, and many of us don’t even do that.

Which brings me to my actual point. American travelers have a pretty bad reputation, and I’ve gotten a few glimpses at the reasons why. Everyone thinks we’re loud and obnoxious, and that’s probably because there are a lot of loud, obnoxious Americans on the travel circuit, fresh out of high school, probably thinking that everyone wants to be American and move to America. I think I was subconsciously under the same impression, and it might have something to do with the number of immigrant families and first generation Americans I know, and the fact that more people want to stay here than the government wants to keep.  Well, newsflash, people like their own countries too. The loud, obnoxious Americans kind of drown out the introverted, low-key Americans, to the point that on a bus tour in Melbourne, after my turn during a round of introductions, the bus driver shouted, “Well I never met a quiet American before!” People like to point out that when someone asks where an American is from, the American will answer with the name of a city and not the name of our country, unlike every other citizen of the world, thus implying that everyone should know what an American sounds like and where all of our cities are located. Add these generalizations to the foreign impression that Americans like to start wars wherever they want and can’t speak any languages but English, and I start to understand why Canadians get offended when they’re mistaken for us.

During my first few weeks in India, I had this new sense of patriotic wonder, thinking to myself, how did I never appreciate all of the freedoms and privileges I had just by growing up in my country? From the clothes I wear, to the education I got, to the different opportunities I was lucky to even entertain, I took a lot for granted. But after this time away, I see that the US has its faults and shortcomings as well, ultimately making it just like any other country. Figures I had to fly to the other side of the world to see that.