After 9/11, my American family decided to learn about other cultures. This is how I appeared in their home. I tell them about Armenia; they tell me about the Chinese guy they hosted before me.
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My American family is Protestant. We always pray before meals. Especially when eating oatmeal with strawberries around the circular table.
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On Sundays, we go to church, read the Gospel in the church basement, and look at the blood-colored map of the world’s endangered Christians hanging on the wall.
Missionaries of our church passionately work in the reddest spots on the map. I silently rejoice that my country smaller than a bullet is, though dipped in blood from all sides, still America-colored.
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My American father collects old wall clocks and guns. Guns hang on the basement wall, and the broken clocks on the wall of the living room. On Sundays, we dine in the white room of clocks and, over a cup of life-giving water, discuss all the flavor nuances of our everyday bread, the functioning of our digestion systems, and the rise of evil in the world.
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Our house is on a lake. It is our private lake that we share with four other upper-middle-class families like ours. My American father built our house with his own hands during his youth, forming the statistics of America’s economic growth along with his baby-boomer friends. It’s a joy to look at the lake from the glazed kitchen with a morning coffee, while the squirrels move on the branches of the huge coniferous tree. Beyond the glass, under your feet, is the sky, two turtles, waves from the neighbor's motorboat, and the imminent winter hiding in the mirror of the lake.
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My American love is a yarn shop. It was while wandering around in this dark and dirty, uncomfortable November, misty rain on my face, Bach in my ears, tired of Intermediate Statistics, hiding my frozen nose in the sleeve of the jacket, when we met on the showcase next to the spice-smelling Somalian video rental. You were the Orange, thick and woolly. I tightly hugged you, those two thick knitting needles, and got unbelievably warm. And while the radio at home continues discussing the issue of entering or not entering Iraq, I knit you: large, warm, and sunny.
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My American mother walks around our lake every morning. I walk with her on weekends. Our walk takes an hour. On our way, we meet walkers, runners, dog walkers, dog-poop scoopers, cyclists, deer, squirrels, and even wild turkeys. The day is always silent. But we talk. She tells me about the hardships of raising her two kids, about being diagnosed with cancer twice, and escaping death. Twenty years ago and ten years ago. I tell how my father died in the war. Ten years ago.
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I faced the world at the university. Entered the auditorium and there it was. Now I am frozen: I look at it and it looks at me. America is in the middle; the Atlantic Ocean, Europe, and Africa are on the right; and Asia and Australia on the left. And I was told that humanity was born in the Armenian Highlands. I got it. The center of the Solar System is the Planet Earth.
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The basement of our university is our bunker. Built for centuries to come. Strong and sterile. A monolith. Sound-proof walls and countless corridors. A labyrinth. The buildings of past and future are connected with long passages. Medical engineering, social sciences, management, law, history, IT programming, physics, philosophy. Sixty thousand students. I do not know the number of teaching staff. Like dwarfs, we walk silently in the windowless, sunless underground corridors. We look for gold. Each of us in her hole. None of us has borders, but all doors and exits are closed. There is not enough air. Everybody is against the war on Iraq. Silence. A step forward and a wall. I order all issues of “Pravda” for 1961 in the library.
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I get out from underground. The sun is cold. The wind brought the news. There is a bridge over Mississippi that has two levels. The lower one is for cars, the upper one for us. It is cold and our bridge has a glass tunnel. Glassy, so the sky and city skyline are visible. Catchwords, slogans, graffiti, invitations. Mumbles in my ears. Is out of the system. So is even more within the system. Is the system itself. In the language of aliens. “Russian club: join us,” “Union of Arab Students,” “Society of Native Americans,” “Gays and Lesbians! We meet every Friday,” “Want to learn Salsa?,” “Protect your future!,” “Osama Bush Laden,” “Anthropology . . . More than life.” Letter-letter-image-color-number-idea-word-song . . . Staring at me from everywhere. I got it. It’s an audio recording in the tunnel, it says: “Hi, I am Angela, I am Eric, my name is Jane.” They are many.
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My American grandmother is 95. She lives in a nursing home. We came to visit her today. She grows tomatoes in the garden of the nursing home. It is Saturday and my grandma has her hair dyed at the nursing home’s hairdresser, and has had a manicure and pedicure. My American father says to his mom: let’s go play cards. She doesn’t hear. He takes her arm and brings her in. All four of us sit down at the circular table. My grandma asks where I come from. She gets only the “Soviets” out of her son’s explanation. And I tell her about my grandfather who brought American Studebaker trucks from Iran for the Soviet army during the Patriotic War.
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The international students at our university are invited to a dinner. At a rich Americans’ club. The millionaires got interested in the world after 9/11 and they want to hear about other cultures from a direct source. The club is on the rooftop of a skyscraper. Women with expensive makeup, men in expensive suits, white-teeth smiles. Me, like a gladiator in Rome. The millionaire I got kept speaking about the fall of the Roman Empire for the entire evening. What a consistent pattern, he thinks, empires come and go. Yet, America will live for a long time. Because they are free. For instance, he has a permit to fly a plane. And in Europe he would not have that permit.
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My classmate is in the military. So is her father. And grandfather. And her mother, brother, uncle. She has served, and the army now pays for her education. Mine is also paid for by American taxpayers. So we both owe the taxpayers. Democrats and Republicans. We took a class on “History of Ideas in America” together, and we are all against the war. Today was sad. Especially her. Told us that tomorrow she leaves to fight. In Iraq. Is against, but has to. Protect the American values.
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Our internship is in a place where we speak about the Gini coefficient, poverty, hunger, and illiteracy all day. In the evenings, we organize receptions, criticize Bush’s foreign policy, Chicago economists, the US not signing the Kyoto. All this around Pacific red salmon and black caviar. Thanks to an intern friend, I betrayed the Orange with Chomsky. Very quickly, in an hour-long meeting, where there were many leftists, anarchists, punks, old hippies, Trotskyists, feminists, immigrants from the Middle East and the Soviets, conspiracy theorists, the lazy jobless, the ideologically unemployed, the homeless, depressive alcoholics, and zealous youths.
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On 11/9, democracy won. My Republican American parents continue praying for me and my family every Sunday. I trust in their prayers.
