Coming home with new eyes: from September 11 to January 6
The view from elsewhere can be jarring, but a new perspective provides insights.
2001
The summer after my junior year my sister and I went on the high school Spanish club trip to Spain. It was a two-week long trip that visited most of the country in a circle: Madrid, Toledo, Sevilla, Barcelona, San Sebastian. I am almost overwhelmed at the thought of that trip, even today. For a 17-year old girl from South Dakota (even one who had been to Washington, DC, California, Florida, and New York City), seeing cities and structures that are thousands of years old was something that boggled the mind. And in my desire to learn and practice Spanish, being in a country that is filled with people (especially little children!) who speak the language fluently, without translating from English in their heads… well, it was almost too much to bear. How small I was, and how big and beautiful the world.
There was so much to take in. The smells in Spain, like the damp stone smell of the gypsy caves where we went to see flamenco performed. The dry warm air of the Mediterranean climate. The tastes of the split pea soup, the bread and meat at breakfast, so different from my own breakfasts. The castles, windmills, paintings of royalty and Moorish mosaics. I felt like I had landed inside a real storybook and I didn’t want to leave. I was astonished to find that the “regular life” of others could be so different from mine.
Perhaps it was this experience that opened me. It certainly planted in me a question: “What is life like for people who speak Spanish?” I wanted to know how they saw the world; as if speaking Spanish itself was what built the Roman aqueducts or invented the running of the bulls. It was a simple question, really, as it was based in my very basic revelation that people around the world are much different from me. I now think this is a basic piece of information, but for my 17-year old self it was really revolutionary.
My question was important though, I think, for the same reason. It opened me to the idea that other people experience life differently than I do, that they think and plan and learn and feel entirely different things, because their lives are made up of different smells, tastes, sights, neighborhoods, histories.
On September 11 of that year, just a few weeks after my return from Spain, my high school homeroom watched in horror as the second plane hit the World Trade Center in New York, after having watched the first smoking building while thinking what a terrible freak accident that had been. As probably nearly every US-ian felt that day, it was a shock that I didn’t think possible.
Some friends and I had all taken Advanced Placement (AP) US history the year before. We learned a lot from that class and we trusted our teacher, Mr. Lubeck, so during band period we skipped class and went to see him, to see if he could explain what was going on. “I am not surprised by what happened,” he said. We were taken aback. Weren’t we well informed on US history and current events? We had taken his class. We were good students. Why were we so shocked by the day’s events, while Mr. Lubeck was not surprised? What did he know that we didn’t? Also, what did the hijackers see in the US and the world order that I couldn’t see?
When I was in my first year in college, one of my professors had us do an activity to simulate the (mis)interpretations at which one can arrive when one enters a new culture. The idea was to pretend that we were aliens, arriving to Earth for the first time. We were to go somewhere, like a grocery store or sporting event, and interpret the place or event as if we had no idea what was going one. The example given to us was of aliens attending a football game. One could imagine that they might interpret the game as a fertility ritual, in which large, virile men would carry an object representing an egg to a special destination, with barely-clothed women jumping up and down excitedly next to the ritual area.
This example interested me. While the aliens were wrong about football (they were wrong, weren’t they?), the plausibility of the interpretation meant that I had to give football a second look. Perhaps there was a kernel of truth in the meaning they found.
Regardless of the true meaning of football, the idea of the activity was to see a familiar place with new eyes, and to imagine seeing a new place for the first time.
In my own work I have presented study abroad students with information about cultural adjustment, culture shock, and re-entry: I talk with them about positive and negative feelings that one gets when entering a new culture, and also when coming back home.
The stages of cultural adjustment are: initial euphoria, culture shock, gradual adjustment, and adaptation and biculturalism.
The causes of culture shock that I have spoken about with students include: detachment from familiar cultural cues and known patterns of behavior; entering a social environment with different ways of believing, valuing, performing and organizing; high performance expectations in ambiguous circumstances; and finding that things you value about yourself may not be valued in the new culture.
As have many others, I have often found that the most jarring culture shock can occur when one returns home, when one least expects it.
2004
The day that I watched the American flag burned at a concert in Nicaragua was in the same month that the Abu Ghraib photos came out. US soldiers in Iraq were photographed torturing prisoners of war, stripping them down naked, releasing dogs on them, keeping them in stress positions, and worse. Grafitti was added to the “EEUU imperialista” tags on various walls around the city of Managua. The new grafitti read: “Bush terrorista.”
I didn’t need to see photos from Abu Ghraib to know that something was wrong with US policy. I had just spent the semester in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. The 1954 US-sponsored coup in Guatemala that led to the genocide of over 600,000 indigenous people got my attention, but didn’t really sink in at the time that I read about it in Guatemala City at the beginning of my semester abroad that spring. The civil war in El Salvador, during which US-trained and equipped death squads murdered thousands of peasants in brutal mass massacres, and gunned down religious advocates of the poor — including the now sainted Archbishop Oscar Romero — started to get under my skin. The Contra war in Nicaragua, the counter-revolution sponsored by the US, which was trying to destroy the Sandinista revolution, started seeming downright cruel. After all, the people of Nicaragua, led by poets and artists, had risen up against a corrupt and violent dictatorship of three decades.
In Guatemala our group stayed in a mountain village called Todos Santos. There, for generations, indigenous people have been going down to the coast for at least half of the year to harvest coffee or indigo or bananas for large plantation owners, often foreigners. They are forced to buy all of their provisions from the company store, and often leave their stint at the coast breaking even, or even owing money to their bosses. This is because they were given insufficient land for farming by the colonial powers, and therefore couldn’t subsist for all 12 months of the year as they had done before colonialism. The language school that was operating at the time I visited was making it possible for families to make enough income housing and teaching students so they no longer had to go to the coast.
In El Salvador, we were present for the month leading up to the 2004 presidential elections. The US ambassador at that time insinuated to the people of El Salvador that they should vote for the conservative candidate, Tony Saca, because the two million Salvadorans in the US would suffer if they didn’t. My classmates and I had to stop going to the local Internet cafes because other young internationals, suspected to be elections observers, were getting mugged and intimidated so that they would leave.
Our group asked representatives of a resettled refugee community in El Salvador what we as US citizens could do to support them. “Go home and change your country’s policies toward El Salvador,” they told us.
In Nicaragua, we did home stays in villages that were attacked by US-supported Contra forces during the Contra war. Homes and coffee cooperative buildings still bore the bullet holes from the fighting, 30 years later.
The night I saw the US flag burned in Managua the Venezuelan band Los Guaragüao sang that “it’s not enough to pray; many things are required in order to achieve peace,” and “people pray out of good faith; they pray from the heart. But the pilot also prays as he gets in his plane to go bomb the children of Vietnam.” Many in the crowd changed the word “Vietnam” to “Iraq.”
Soon after that, my semester abroad was over and I arrived back home. My parents picked me up from the airport immediately after attending a nearby Lutheran university commencement ceremony at which George W. Bush was the speaker. “He is so compassionate,” I remember someone saying. “His eyes are so blue.”
I felt like an alien, looking down on a football game that didn’t make any sense to me.
2014
I left the US for Central America with an internal mission of connecting US people with the rest of world, in order to understand it better and be better world citizens, have better relationships around the world. I did that work for more than nine years, teaching Spanish, talking about cross-cultural adjustment, leading study trips, accompanying students as they carried out internships or field research.
It turns out I was usually doing this with white students. White middle-class students, many of them from the Midwest, or from US universities; people a lot like me. The ones who were not like this, not like me, were often wealthier than I, from the coasts, and still white.
Later into my time in Costa Rica, I started working with more diverse groups of students and travelers. It was in the moments when we would do the cultural adjustment workshop that I started feeling more challenged. Some black and Hispanic students would point out that their cultures did not fit the cultural orientations that I associate with my white, Middle-class upbringing: of being future-oriented, feeling in control of my own fate, stressing “doing” over “being,” prioritizing individual rights, and assuming that people are basically good. They spoke of valuing the present, feeling subjugated by fate, and valuing the collective.
There was another slide in that presentation that challenged me when I was doing this workshop with a racially mixed church group from St. Louis. As I was going over the reasons culture shock might happen, I got to “things you value about yourself may not be valued in the new culture.” I often give examples such as: perhaps you like to run, but the culture you are visiting sees this as a silly hobby and makes fun of you for doing it; or perhaps you work really hard at being a strong and independent woman, and the new culture thinks that you are just mean.”
At this particular workshop, one of the white participants (a pre-teen, actually), asked: “Can this happen even in our regular lives, that something about ourselves is not valued by the people around us?”
I stopped short. This was not a question I was used to getting.
I can see now that this deep and poignant question can be applied to any number of “differences” that a person may have or feel: sexuality, religion, race, hometown, clothing, etc. But in that moment I looked at the black participants in the group and felt very convicted. It became clear to me that the non-valuing of the lives of minorities in the US goes way beyond something that can be called “culture shock,” and fixed with a two-hour workshop. I also felt embarrassed that I was in any way attempting to teach a concept of difference to people who daily experience feeling excluded or exploited by the larger society.
I felt that on a gut level as I looked at the African American participants. They were so gracious in their thoughtfulness and reception of the workshop, but I could see that my words and approach were really meant for a white audience. They sat politely and did not question me, but I wondered if perhaps they had something else they wanted to say. I was left thinking about what it could be, as I didn’t know how to ask in the moment. I was still in my mindset that there was one monolithic US on the one hand, and the rest of the world on the other, and that privileged US people needed help understanding or connecting with places like Central America.
The workshop with the group from St. Louis took place on August 6, 2014. Three days later, on August 9, while they were flying home, Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, six miles by car down I-270 and West Florrisant Avenue from their church. The church members arrived to Dallas/Fort Worth to pass through customs not quite two hours after Michael Brown died in the minutes after 12:02 PM.
My husband and I were watching the news that day, and I wondered out loud to him what it would be like for our new friends to arrive home to St. Louis. And I wondered to myself what my newfound nagging conscious over racial and cultural differences in the US would mean for my own life.
These things don’t necessarily sink in at the moment. But they percolate.
The learning that I did in these two moments of discussing cultural adjustment (with my study abroad students and with a church group from St. Louis), started me on a new path. I knew that any discussion about cultural differences must also include a discussion on power differences. I didn’t re-enter the US myself in August of 2014, but my mind did, seeing history and current events in a new light.
2017
When I moved back to the US after nearly nine years abroad, it was as the spouse of a foreign engineer, brought to the country temporarily through a work visa. I hadn’t been planning to come back. While I had entertained thoughts of returning on different occasions, after getting married, buying a house, and having a baby in Costa Rica, I thought that my roots were fairly firmly planted there. But my husband, the employee of a US company with a back office in his country, was asked to do some work for the company’s client, so we left everything in our new house behind, baby crib and all, and came, with our seven-month-old in tow.
The van dropped us off at the extended-stay hotel, our home for the next who-knew-how-long, at 11:30 PM. It was dark, and we fumbled with our four large suitcases, our two small ones, the baby’s stroller and car seat. When we entered the suite, it smelled of smoke and the crib we had asked for was not there. After calling to request one again, the hotel staff brought it in: it was a small crib with metal bars, resembling a jail cell in my mind, with the mattress down next to the floor, far too deep to be able to reach my baby. “I want to go home!” I screamed in my mind. “What did we just do?”
The days unfolded before us, unknown, but an adventure of some kind. After eating breakfast in the hotel dining room each day, my son and I would play in the suite with our few toys. He and I didn’t have access to a car, yet, so during the day we might walk the neighborhood with the stroller, and see if we could get as far as the grocery store, around two miles away. He was still learning to eat solid foods, so I was hesitant to get too far from home when I knew he would have to nurse or continue to learn about food back at the hotel.
I remember managing my anxiety about this big change, and the uncertainty involved, by employing strategies I had taught to the study abroad students I worked with in Costa Rica. If they were at a loss for what to do during an unstructured internship, I often told them, they should get to work on their own projects, such as drawing a map of their new home, writing down questions for their supervisor, writing in a journal, or reading about their work or location.
Soon my baby son and I did have access to a car, a used Chevy Envoy that had plenty of room for groceries and the stroller, but which used a lot of gas and, it turned out, had numerous mechanical problems. Nonetheless, the Envoy became our “adventure machine” and took us not only to grocery stores but to the local public library and eventually to other parts of St. Louis like Forest Park, the Griot museum, and even all the way to the Cahokia Mounds in Illinois.
At the library we learned about the magic of library story time, where babies and toddlers are welcome to play, crawl, sing and listen to stories for free on a weekly basis. The St. Louis libraries were the most generous with this service of all of the places I later lived with small children in the US — the story time was free, took place every week, and did not require advanced registration, a huge advantage for a new mother who was still figuring out the dance between baby life and the outside world.
Also at this library I was able to pick up several books on the history and present of St. Louis, a city I knew to be torn by issues of race and class as well as politics. I read about the VP Fair and VP Parade on the 4th of July. VP stands for Veiled Prophet, a white-hood-wearing member of St. Louis high society who, in the early history of the city would use the pomp of the parade to keep the working class population in its place. I read about the East St. Louis race riot of 1917, during which between 39 and 150 black indivuals were killed when white strikers took out their anger over black scabs on the predominantly black community of East St. Louis. In contrast, the strike which preceded the founding of the Order of the Veiled Prophet by a year, in 1877, did not disintegrate along racial lines.
I was reminded of the history of banana republics such as the one where I had lived (Costa Rica), where banana companies in the 20th Century would divide workers along racial lines in order to prevent them from organizing against the company. St. Louis didn’t sound or feel much different from my adopted home country, and the racial tensions of the city and the country started to fit in my mind within a larger story of global capitalism. I felt that I was seeing a familiar place for the first time.
2021
My family and I were at the airport in Costa Rica, having visited my in-laws for the holidays. As we were waiting to board our flight back home around 1 PM Central Time on January 6th, I checked the news on my phone. I saw that the Capitol building was being overrun by Trump supporters, and there were guns drawn.
I wasn’t really surprised. When we made our trip plans, I noticed that we were scheduled to fly back on January 6, and I told my husband (a few weeks before the trip), “I hope we have a country to come back to that day, the day the Congress is scheduled to certify a contested election.”
As we took our seats on the plane, I was watching a live video of costumed and flag-wielding rioters at the door of the Capitol, waving others into the building.
But then I had to turn off my phone.
Our flight was going to be four hours long to arrive back to the US. I wasn’t sure what I would be seeing, or how I would be interpreting it, when we landed. I’m still working on that.
In my more than 17 re-entries to the US from time spent abroad, including my nine years living in Central America, my view of my home country has become muddled, it has been clarified, it has been qualified. I have come to understand that my country, like any country in the world, has pros and cons, things to admire and appreciate and things to try to change. I have learned that the US is not immune to some of the political issues that we often point fingers at other countries for suffering. And the patriotism or tribalism we feel is not unlike the patriotism and tribalism felt in other countries.
The view from elsewhere can be jarring, and can also yield insights that we might not otherwise have, being caught up in a place we have lived all of our lives. Leave-taking and re-entering have both helped me to get closer to these insights.
In 2001 I was floored to realize that there were people and cultures out there that had drastically different experiences than mine. I wanted to learn more about that. My quest let me to the next stage, which for me was trying to build connections and right wrongs between two entities: my own country and everyone else. But while on that journey, I learned that within my own country are complicated histories, terrible injustices, and big cultural differences. And later I realized that this is the same as everywhere else: the racial and class conflicts, the political divisions and strategic policies… the US is not the exception to any rule; it is a part of a world that is worth getting to know, and also in great need of improvement.
I want to see other countries not as an alien would in a first encounter, but as someone who can understand and appreciate the proverbial football game for all of its significance, both material and symbolic. And I want to be able to look with new eyes on my own country, to gain insights that will help it to be better, to live up to its own ideals.
