reading and listening and strangers and historical perspective

i just finished the last book of ken follett's century trilogy. i know they were novels, but as historical fiction, i feel like they gave me a more personal take on the sweeping history of the 20th century and a greater understanding of things like the cuban missile crisis and the fall of the berlin wall. literature can do that, as can 20+ years to reflect on the events. it struck me that it's very hard to know the meaning of things immediately after they happen. or even a decade after. i think we are definitely still struggling to make sense of september 11, 2001. and i think our round-the-clock style of news doesn't do us any favors. the nature of today's media means that analysis must begin immediately, before we even really know what's happening and i think it's diminishing the human race. we can't possibly know the meaning of things without reflecting on them. but that certainly doesn't stop the relentless talking heads on television. makes me glad i pretty much only watch netflix and hbo nordic these days (plus my guilty pleasure of a few programs on tlc).

i've also been listening to as many of the strangers podcasts as are available on iTunes. they are filled with stories that make me long for more stories. stories of people who were strangers to one another, strangers to themselves, and then strangers no more. since the host is danish and refers to that fact quite often, i feel a strange connection with her that makes me wonder if it borders on stalkerish. she's been in my country a little bit longer than i've been in hers and she is at times as bewildered by the US as i am by denmark. she seems like someone i'd love to invite over to dinner.

this listening, coupled with reading the edge of eternity got me thinking about marina ivanovna, the very soviet-style russian teacher i had at iowa back in the early 90s. she struck fear in our hearts - using public humiliation as her main motivator. that works for me, i must admit, so despite how tough she was, i quite liked her. she lived in russian house, a big old house on a tree-lined iowa city street where a bunch of russian majors lived - kind of a sorority/fraternity house for slavic geeks. and i wonder what she made of it all? so weird that i never wondered that at the time - i thought of her as a teacher, not as a person. i think we all did with teachers at some point in our lives - being surprised at seeing them outside of school with their families or just mowing their lawn or something entirely normal. it seemed so strange that they were just ordinary people, living ordinary lives.

but here was marina ivanovna, a professor from moscow university who must have lived her entire life under the soviet system, plopped down in iowa city, just as the soviet union was dissolving. it must have been so bewildering and overwhelming in many ways - the nature of the students, the abundance of consumer goods, the informality of it all. i wonder what she made of it and whether she had aching moments of homesickness or whether she felt so fortunate to be there. what did she think? did she find it all so strange? was she happy or frustrated or overwhelmed or puzzled? she was probably all of those things at different moments, just like i am here in denmark, even after all of these years.

we can all feel like strangers at times, even when we live in our own cultures, but it is magnified when we live abroad. i guess all we can do is keep telling stories to try to make sense of it all, and remember to be patient, because it may take the vantage point of years before it does indeed begin to make sense.

legal alien

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.