American

I never felt much like an American until I first visited Mexico and Guatemala in my early twenties. In the market in Oaxaca, I suddenly saw it. Everything about me and the friends I was travelling with said American. Our obvious health and height, our well-nourished bodies and superior dental hygiene: all of it screamed our nationality and privilege. Anyone who looked at us could not help but see the patently obvious: a group of people born with more than their fair share of advantages. Up until that moment, I had been happily haggling with the market vendors, trying to get the best possible deal for my purchases. Once the reality hit me -- that I could go back to the States, and, student that I was, still live better for less work than 99% of the people around me -- I stopped trying to get bargains. If a lady took one look at me and said she was selling something I wanted for sixty pesos, then sixty pesos it was.

Even when I generally paid the first price someone asked, I still got some very good deals. When I went back to San Francisco and saw the same shawl I had bought in Chichicastenango selling for over ten times the price I had paid, I tried to imagine how the woman who had woven it would feel seeing her work in a fancy boutique in North Beach, selling for more than she would spend on a couple months' worth of groceries.

But being an American is more than economics and better-than- average nutrition: it is attitude. And this attitude is manifest even in the most trivial details.

Once in Tokyo, I spotted a cluster of people standing together at the station. I was a hundred feet away from them, but I knew they were American even before I heard them speak. How? They were all Asians; physically they resembled all the Japanese around us. I watched them discretely, trying to figure out what had given them away. And then I saw it: the casual way they stood, the broadness of their gestures, the loudness of their voices. Nothing says "American" like the brash confidence that comes from living in a country where opportunity and the pursuit of happiness are taken as much for granted as the necessity of a car and the right to a daily hot shower.

I have been an expatriate American now for as many years as I have spent in my homeland. Frozen in a time warp, every time I go back, I feel a little more distant, a little more conscious of how long I have been gone. Where are you from? a cashier asked me some years back, when I went home for my father's funeral. America, I told her, and her response was, Yes, but where were you born? Somehow, among my fellow Americans, my natural brashness and sense of privilege has worn off: they take me for a foreigner, or at least foreign-born. After two months in America, I stopped counting how many times people asked me what country I was from.

That last trip back was an eye-opener for me. In many ways, I felt like a stranger, but I knew that I could fit right back into the world I had left and be perfectly happy. It was wonderful to be able to strike up conversations with perfect strangers; to be spoiled for choice in restaurants, served with friendliness and kindness, and surrounded by people of all different nationalities and backgrounds. "Americans are so nice!" my husband and children kept saying, and I could have burst with pride. I did not leave the States for ideological reasons; I left to see the world and have adventures, and my expatriate status has more to do with serendipity than it does with making a conscious decision not to live in my country of origin.

Over the years I have met other American expatriates who irritate me by railing against the shallowness and over-indulgence of Americans and who claim that they prefer to live in countries where there is a greater sense of history and 'more culture.' While I certainly agree that most of us could learn to get by on less energy, I think the rest of this is nonsense. As far as I can see, we're no more shallow than the rest of the world. We've got plenty of history and culture, too -- we just need to learn how to preserve it better. And we ought to appreciate and support it more, too -- especially those of us ignorant enough to deny its existence.

In Japan, and now in the U.K., I have gotten used to my status as spokesperson and (sometimes unwilling) interpreter of all things American. Here my accent -- which I have never made any attempt to hide or change -- gives me away every time. You're American! people say to me, as though they have discovered something I'm anxious to keep under wraps. Even when many fellow expatriate Americans muttered that they were going to buy shirts with Canadian flags on them after two embarrassing and disappointing national elections, I have never denied my nationality. Yes, I am an American. I don't plan on changing my passport, and although you'll never catch me waving a flag or beating up someone who disses my country, I'm every bit as fond of America as the next guy -- probably more so after all these weary sessions explaining and defending from abroad.

Being an American doesn't mean that I will defend everything Americans do or stand for. It certainly doesn't mean I'm behind our president or his war, and although I share the national passion for a decent hot shower, thank God being American doesn't mean that I have to be a super-sized gas-guzzling consumer who wolfs down her weight in hamburgers. No, I'm the worst sort of American: the kind who's convinced that she's as good as the next guy and has a right to fight for her ideals. Who firmly believes in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. My country was one of the first places where anybody in the world could find a home and prosper: I've done my family's genealogy, and I know for a fact that this really happened.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to do some research on how to fit solar panels onto a Victorian style roof. Our hot water supply needs a little help.