Americans All
Michael Dorris
I recognize them instantly abroad: on the street, in crowded rooms, on airplanes, at restaurants—but how? It’s emphatically not skin color, not clothing, not little red-white-and-blues stitched to their breast pockets. They don’t have to say anything, to show a passport, or to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” but nevertheless they’re unmistakable in any foreign setting.
Americans. We come in all varieties of size, age, and style. We travel singly and in groups. We’re alternately loud and disapproving or humble and apologetic. We seek each other out or self-consciously avoid each other’s company. We pack our gear in Gucci bags or stuff it into Patagonia backpacks, travel first-class or on Eurailpasses, stay in youth hostels or in luxury hotels, but none of that matters. It’s as though we’re individually implanted with some invisible beeper, some national homing device, that’s activated by the proximity of similar equipment.
This common denominator is manifest in shared knowledge (we all know who Mary Tyler Moore is), topics of mutual interest or dispute (guns, the environment, choice), and popular culture (do we or do we not deserve a thousand-calorie break today?). In other words, we take the same things seriously or not seriously, are capable of speaking, when we choose to, not merely a common language but a common idiom, and know the melodies, if not all the words, to many of the same songs.
Why, then, doesn’t any of this count when we’re not overseas? Why, at home, do we seem so different from each other, so mutually incompatible, so strange and forbidding? Do we have to recognize each other in Tokyo or Cairo in order to see through the distinctions and into the commonalities? How does that “we,” so obvious anywhere else in the world, get split into “us” and “them” when we’re stuck within our own borders?
The answer is clear: To be Americans means to be not the clone of the people next door. I fly back from any homogeneous country, from a place where every person I see is blond, or black, or belongs to only one religion, and then disembark at JFK. I revel in the cadence of many accents, catch a ride to the city with a Nigerian American or Russian American cabdriver. Eat Thai food at a Greek restaurant next to a table of Chinese American conventioneers from Alabama. Get directions from an Iranian American cop and drink a cup of Turkish coffee served by a Navajo student at Fordham who’s majoring in Japanese literature. Argue with everybody about everything. I’m home.
—from Newsday, October 1999
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