He doesn’t exactly Two-Step, but he’s just as American.
I carry on several romances outside my marriage. One with cheese-fries, another with shoes, one more with houses I can’t afford. I idle often with these lovers. The most unrequited, however, is my emotional abandon to Nice, France. She is my preferred mistress, someone I cannot have a life with but allow to consume me. More reckless admirers have left their lives behind and asked her to take them whole, but I doubt I’ll ever build the fortitude or arrogance it takes to overlook the possibility of crushing rejection and become an immigrant. I don’t have what it takes, I probably never will. For now, I live in the same town, on the very street I was born, weakly denying that this is both convenient and cowardly.
I’m fully aware that the immoderate adoration I have for Nice is what causes the reverent to immigrate with little more than about 50 words of a foreign vocabulary to survive. I understand this is the case based on several known examples of exactly this narrative:
Wo/man from Country X seeks fulfillment, borrows [modest amount of local currency], kisses everyone s/he knows good-bye before boarding a plane with just one suitcase of valuables and arrives in Country Y without any idea of how s/he will survive on [considerably lesser amount of exchanged currency], only to make a happy, new home and life different from what s/he imagined and find fulfillment within her/himself.
These known examples include my parents, their siblings, my husband’s parents and their siblings, about a dozen cousins, neighbors, friends from childhood through law school and work, local business owners, doctors who have performed surgery on me, contractors, personal trainers, and the man who used to sell me fruit from his cart on Maiden Lane. I know Americanized immigrants from Egypt, Korea, Greece, Italy, China, Canada, Ecuador, Cuba, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Columbia, England, Macedonia, Serbia, Iran, Germany, Trinidad and Tobago, the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Nigeria, and Morocco. I know others who landed in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Canada, Brazil, Ireland, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, only to never board another plane with a destination of home.
The imprint of immigration is evident in my life. I recognize its timidity and resilience. Without overgeneralizing each unique experience, the immigrants in my life are successful in both the traditional and spiritual sense. They found their way to their love, their wellbeing. They found a deep appreciation for another culture, language, set of ideals, and swallowed them whole.
Perhaps the greatest example I can share is my father’s. He is demonstrably a more patriotic American than I am. He immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s, bringing with him what exchanged into about $100. He had a single phone number, belonging to a friend of a friend, to call when he arrived. He lost the phone number in the hustle of JFK Airport. He was stranded and scared but in New York, so hopeful. He tells his arrival story like it had happened to someone else, someone he feels sorry for. Someone he would welcome into his country with open arms because he was resolute in making an honest, clean American life, rather than chasing an undeserved foreigner’s dream. His road to citizenship was rocky and involved patience, sidestepping con artists, and befriending John Lennon and Howard Stern, who liked him because he wasn’t star struck when he served them at the deli he ran near Central Park or delivered food to their homes.
He welcomed my mother and her brother, when they first arrived in New York in the early 1980s, by taking them on an Amtrak train trip from New York to Houston. To this day, he marvels at the beautiful country they saw unroll in front of them.
When my sister was born in the late 1980s, we were a household of six because my grandparents had come to live with us. Our rented apartment grew smaller by the day, and my father worked two jobs until he and my mother saved enough money to become homeowners. They preferred another cramped apartment in one of the new-at-the-time high-rises in Jersey City because each window was dotted with the shimmery glimmer of the greatest city—their city. But the school systems offered less than they wanted, so they settled in a house in northern New Jersey, where they could see the skyline driving to and from work every day. My father’s interior design contribution to date has been little American flags among the plants draping the front bay window.
For the last 20 years, he’s run his own old school, New York-style deli in northern New Jersey and knows almost every customer by name, including the entire police force of no less than four neighboring towns. Growing up, I could not keep a summer job at his store.
“No, Monica. Zis is Mike. We don’t charge him for za coffee.”
“Good morning, Winnie! I’m sorry to call you on your cell, but Monica forgot to give you za treat for za cats. I will stob by after work, if you will be home.”
“Smitty, Monica didn’t know you only eat your lunch at zat table. I tell her to clean it now.”
After my first few hours, I was invited to eat lunch quietly at the back of the store and read the newspaper. This was not just his business, but his world.
“I love zis country,” he says with his New Yorkified Egyptian accent. “I dun care if I never, never go back to Egypt.” It’s true. I can count how many times he’s returned to Egypt on one of my little American-born hands. When his father died, he said he had to work and did not make the trip. He stayed here when his mother passed away too. He found sufficient comfort in his family here and in his home.
Through the day, he doesn’t speak Arabic, except to count quickly, and he scribbles notes to himself in a confusing hybrid of English and Arabic letters. He often watches Fox News. He prefers American cars (with an American flag bumper sticker) and his favorite vacation spot is Cape May, New Jersey. I’ve heard him with my own ears favor Cape May over the pink beaches of Bermuda.
This small brown man’s sense of belonging, of self makes it seem that being an immigrant is easy. It’s seamless, even unremarkable given how natural, full, and complete he is here. But I know better. For all the ways my father is truly, deeply an American in his mind and heart, American-born Americans doubt his authenticity. It’s these fellow Americans who make his love affair with this country an audacity.
On a spontaneous trip to Cape May, he parked the car near the “Vacancy” sign of the biggest hotel on the beach, called The Grand. Mid-afternoon, he and I walked into the lobby together.
“Ello. Hi. How are you? I would like one room for my family just for tonight. We decide to come last minute, but I’m habby I see you have vacancy,” he said.
“Hi. No. Umm. I’m sorry, no. We forgot to change the sign outside. We don’t have any rooms available.” The man behind the desk eyed his counterpart and did not make eye contact with us.
“Oh. Zat’s too bad! Ok. Next time!”
“They’re lying, Dad. They have a room, but not for you,” I said as we walked away.
“No, why zey do dat? Zey don’t have a room, Monica,” but I could tell he wasn’t sure.
When we got to the car, we conferenced with my mother and sister. My mother agreed to walk her pale, red-headed, freckled self into the lobby and request a room. (She is an immigrant too, but she doesn’t look the part and her accent is far less noticeable.)
“They have rooms on every floor,” she said when she came back.
“Why zey don’t like me? I’m here and I bay the same amount as anyone else,” my father asked legitimately. He was hurt.
This was not an isolated incident. My father, as he must be, is largely blind to when people are cruelly intolerant of his accent, of him.
“WHAT ARE YOU SAYING? I CAN’T UNDERSTAND YOU.” I once heard a customer shout at him.
“WOULD YOU LIKE SALT, PEPPA, OR KETCHUP?” my father shouted back like the woman was hard of hearing, rather than what she really was—mean.
His arrival story isn’t what terrifies me. I could land in Nice with next to nothing and make something of myself. I could dedicate my life to contributing to the community of my choice, learning a completely different language, finding shortcuts through inroads that are undetectable to visitors. I know I could. What I don’t think I can do is wage a silent, peaceful campaign on my fellow citizens for respect and legitimacy. I don’t think I can find happiness in a place where some people don’t think I deserve to find it. Not even my father can make that look easy, because it just isn’t.
And it isn’t solely because my father is an Arab-looking man in a post-September 11th world. Immigrants of all kinds and levels of success and assimilation face this external barrier of integration. I know personally that this something—perhaps the only thing—my father has in common with a small Korean-born friend of mine (who I will call “Joanne”) and, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
About a month or two ago, Joanne invited me to join her for a weekend down the shore with some of her colleagues. One of the attorneys Joanne works closely with generously opened his seven-bedroom family vacation home to their entire team and guests. Joanne and I were the last to arrive late Friday night, but we knew we were on the right page because we brought with us the very wine our host’s mother stocked in the wine cellar. We grabbed drinks and wedged our way into the dining room roundtable of casual discussion among the four white couples and a black woman. We double-dutched into their game of Cards Against Humanity and felt welcome.
The next day, the group stretched themselves awake by heading to the beach, but when I got my hands on a lovely bicycle with a basket from the garage, I went my own way. I caught up with them under an umbrella and the still-hot sun late in the afternoon. We played a game called “Mafia” before we went home and made dinner together and played more games, including a bean toss. Over dinner and drinks, we shared more intimate details about our lives, and Joanne was one of six happily bonding, overworked co-workers.
As the night wound down, we played one last game, called “Headbanz.” The premise is to stick a card with a person, place, or thing printed on it inside the slit of a plastic headband, so that everyone can see the phrase on every card but his/her own. Taking turns, each person races a sand-clock timer to guess the phrase brandished across his/her forehead by asking the group a series of yes or no questions. “Am I found in the bathroom?” “Bacon!” “Do I use electricity?” “San Francisco!” “Am I a fictitious character?” “Pajamas!”
The second to last cardholder had “Arnold Schwarzenegger” printed across her forehead.
“Am I an American?” she asked after deciphering that she was a living male.
“Yes!” Joanne and I said in unison.
“No!” everyone else shouted together.
[Silence]
“What are you guys talking about? He’s definitely an American.” And with that Joanne launched a raw debate with her and me on one side and everyone else on the other. (Eventually, the girl with the card on her head took it down and joined the He’s-Not-an-American group.)
“He’s DEFINITELY not an American.”
“But he’s held public office,” I said.
“Not as an American.”
“He was Governor of one of our biggest states,” Joanne said.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“He’s married to a Kennedy.” I said.
“He has an accent, therefore not American.”
“When he flies into JFK from an international destination, he stands in the ‘American Citizens’ line in customs,” I tried again.
“He was born in another country, and can’t be American.”
“But I was born in another country, and I’m an American,” Joanne dropped her bomb.
“Well…not for purposes of this game. No one thinks Arnold Schwarzenegger is actually an American.”
“We do,” we said.
Joanne immediately excused herself to bed. I participated in one more round of yeses and no’s, hoping that my immigrant tendencies didn’t alienate me again before saying good night and good-bye because Joanne and I planned to leave early the next morning. When I went upstairs to our shared bedroom, Joanne did not want to discuss what had happened or her feelings. I laid in the bed across from hers and tried to laugh it off, crack jokes, but in her silence, in the grinding of her teeth, in her snuffs, sighs, and tossing and turning, I heard her ask legitimately: “Why zey don’t like me? I’m here and I bay the same amount as anyone else.” She was hurt.
Joanne, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and my father are three very different immigrants who have built three very different careers and lives atop a common foundation of a maddening love affair with America. They are Americans in heart, soul, mind, but to some countrymen, they are forever disqualified from being one. That is the impenetrable border.
Whatever anyone thinks, my father is a happy suburbanite, with a dog that digs her way out of their fenced backyard and terrorizes the neighbor to the left. Because of his enduring love affair with New York and America, I sit on my balcony in Hoboken, facing west towards thousands of black, white, brown Americans stacked in towers. From the reflection on the Hoboken High School windows, I watch headlights smooth by and wonder, is this a car I’ve been in? Do I know someone who loves this driver? Sometimes it is, and sometimes I do. Facing east, I confront millions more, stacked higher and more tightly across the New York skyline. It’s a beautiful place, a beautiful home, but it is the one chosen for me. Until I’m more like my father, I’ll want from here to sit on a Niçoise balcony and think the same.
Nice. She’s beautiful, isn’t she?