Citizen Of The World

I did a double take the first time someone spoke to me in Turkish. I was sitting in the teachers' room at the school where I teach and a kid walked up to me and began what sounded like an anxious pitch. I caught one word -- someone's name -- but that was it.

"Sorry," I spluttered, interrupting him mid-flow, "I don't speak Turkish."

The kid took a step back and stared at me, as though taking in my foreignness for the first time. I don't feel Turkish either, I felt like saying. How could I look Turkish when I don't feel Turkish?

On one of my last trips back to California, my sister and I had lunch at a little hole-in-the-wall Mexican place in our hometown. I haven't lived in California for ages, but this restaurant was one that my family used to patronize frequently. When we were finished, I asked if I could pay with traveler's checks. The waitress asked me for I.D. and I handed her my passport. She looked at it with great suspicion.

"Where are you from?"

"Here."

"No, I mean, where are you from?" she repeated meaningfully. "Your place of origin."

I stared at her. "Right here! California."

She tilted her head. "Really?"

"Really! I went to North!"

She narrowed her eyes. "So where were you born?"

"California."

But she wasn't going to give up. "And you've lived here all your life?"

Ah, now there she had me. "I've been away for a while," I admitted.

"How long?"

"Well -- a long time." But I'm still American.

In fact, my father and the previous owners of this restaurant had known each other professionally, and the last meal my father ever ate had been in this very restaurant. I can't open my mouth around a British stranger without seeing American dawn in his eyes, and yet to this woman, I did not sound like an American. How could I seem like a foreigner to her when I still felt American?

My sister claimed that I still sounded like an American to her, so whatever acquired foreignness I had was an elusive, hard-to-pinpoint thing. My accent hasn't really changed. I'm not one of those Americans who actively seeks to sound like something else; I persist in using my own dialect and pride myself on spelling 'check' without a Q and 'color' without a U. I still say 'gas', 'hood' and 'trunk' when I'm talking about cars, and a parking lot will never be a car park for me. But this same experience was repeated throughout my stay in America. No doubt about it: I've changed.

In Japan, very few strangers ever initiated conversations with me in Japanese. For several decades, I studied Japanese, both formally and informally; I worked for a Japanese company, attended a Japanese university, got married in a Japanese ward office, ate Japanese food, had Japanese friends, gave birth in a Japanese hospital, and raised Japanese-speaking kids. I've been told that my Japanese accent is close to native; on the phone, people often assume I'm a long-term Korean resident. But I could still go into a store, ask for something in Japanese, and get back Sorry -- I don't speak English. It's not really my accent, I just don't look the part.

After seventeen years in Japan, I never really felt Japanese -- but I have come pretty close. Whenever I hear criticism of Japan and the Japanese -- however well deserved -- I instinctively flinch -- I can't help myself. Once, while doing a part-time job in Scotland, I saw Japanese scrawled on a box of computer parts and I almost burst into tears, it was so nostalgic.

My first week in the Netherlands, I caught myself tensing as I walked down the street. All around me people were speaking a language I could not understand. I felt as though my foreignness was radiating out of me like it had in Japan; I imagined that the people who looked my way were thinking foreigner, just as everywhere I went in Japan, people saw me and thought gaijin. When I caught sight of myself in a shop window, I realized the truth: that I looked just like most of the people around me. People spoke to me in Dutch and laughed when I told them I could not speak the language. "American?" one woman trilled, highly amused. "Really? I would never have guessed."

"Tee-cha," one of my students told me today, "I think you understand Turkish."

This amazed me. "Why?"

"Because sometimes you look at us when we are speaking Turkish and you look like you know."

I burst out laughing: I couldn't help myself. I can barely count to thirty in Turkish. I still get 'excuse me' and 'have a nice meal' mixed up.

"I think you know what we are saying," he insisted.

Later I told one of my Turkish colleagues this. "Apparently I look like I understand Turkish," I said. "And people have spoken to me in Turkish. Who knows -- maybe they think I could be Turkish."

She laughed. "The first time I saw you, I knew right away that you were American."

"Why?"

"You just look like one."

Sometimes I really do wonder what I am.