the next issue of
discounderworld will feature the stories of legal aliens. i've found that phrase,
legal alien, rattling around in my head for several weeks, since
stacey (founder/editor of discounderworld) put out the call for stories. i've even been fortunate enough to see one of the stories before publication because it features of a good friend of mine, but without giving anything away, let's just say it has me thinking even more. because i too am a legal alien.
and i realized that a whole lot of my favorite people are also legal aliens. a very good, longtime friend is born in fiji, has a new zealand passport and lives in denmark. some of my favorite blog peeps -
bee is an american in england,
polly is from poland, but living in england,
paris parfait is an american in paris (doesn't that sound romantic?),
B from spain lives in oxford,
extranjera a finn in south africa,
miss buckle is an aussie living in norway,
kristine a norwegian in belize (or is it costa rica?) - are all legal aliens. and somehow that makes me feel less alone.
as a legal alien, i think there's always some part of you that intentionally keeps a distance from the culture in which you find yourself. i suppose it's a way of keeping a sense of who you are and holding on to where you come from. but i also suppose that as the years go by, the grip on your former culture becomes less and less and more and more of the culture in which you find yourself takes hold.
meeting
bee at blog camp last week got me pondering how much americanness i have retained after more than a decade outside of the US. and also how much i've lost. observing her in her home in the english countryside, i was feeling as if i have very little americanness left in me. but i wasn't sure whether to feel relieved or wistful about that. in bee's presence, i longed a bit for that optimism, that openness, that talkativeness that are so essentially american. living in scandinavia has made me more pragmatic, more closed and much quieter, i'm sure of that. but i felt that being with her brought some of my inner american to the fore, the best bits of it, of course, surely not any annoying overbearingness.
hans j. wegner chairs in an antique shop in copenhagen
but we have them at our house too.
i know that style is one of the places where i have changed the most and absorbed the most of a danish sensibility. as a visitor recently pointed out, there's not a boring chair in this country. even public buildings like doctors' offices and the tax authorities have designer furniture, so i've definitely become a chair snob. living in the US, i took chairs completely for granted, just sitting on them and not giving a second thought to their design. now, i love to look at chairs and when i'm done judging people by the books on their shelves, i totally judge them by the chairs they have, especially in their dining rooms.
sneaked pic of stacks of arne jakobsen's 7 chairs in a copenhagen antique place
but any real native scandinavian coming into our home feels it has a very different sensibility than a white, clean, light, typically scandinavian one you'd see in a
taschen interior book. so, the style we've evolved is a combination of my american roots (antiques and odd knickknacks) and my husband's swedish-danish roots. there aren't curtains and the light, when it's here, floods into our house. but there is a lot of color around - rich yellow on the kitchen walls, red refrigerator, turquoise in the studio. a vibrancy that's not completely normal in these parts. however, it's not really normal in my upbringing either - that was more plush carpeting and flowery wallpaper. it's surely the result of the mixing of the two cultures that's happened in the past decade.
one of the cultural aspects i've acquired is a taste for and more importantly, an ability to understand, irony and sarcasm. generally speaking, americans have difficulties with that and after 8 years of the bush administration, it feels like it's gotten even more earnest and humorless "over there." whenever i encounter humorless, common senseless airport security personnel in the US, i'm quite pleased to have spent that entire era on this side of the atlantic. but it's hard to know whether i already had a tendency towards irony and sarcasm in me (knowing my dad, i did) or whether living within a culture that is rich with it brought it out in me.
there are days when i feel very far from the little town i grew up in the middle of nowhere, upper midwest. and of course, i AM very far from there. but it grounded me to grow up there, gave me a strong sense of who i am and who i am not and surely enabled me to take the leaps i've taken to be where i am now. and i don't think we can fundamentally change on the inside, so i'll no doubt always be that little girl from the prairie, with the world view that gave me as a foundation. there are just a lot of other layers on top of her now - in every sense, actually - literally, figuratively, culturally - a worldly veneer that wasn't there has been painted on top. but the willingness to meet the world head-on and jump in with both feet is the same. i guess i've just got nicer chairs and a better camera these days.
in any case, i'm looking forward to the next issue of
discounderworld. i'm really interested in what other people think about being legal aliens.
