An American abroad
The first time I left the U.S., I was 17 years old. I went to Spain on a truly terrible tour with other high school students, none of whom I knew and only one of whom even went to my school. I had taken three years of Spanish classes by then and was considering jumping ship for my school’s new Korean class, which would be offered for the first time my senior year. But then I heard a toddler speaking Spanish on the Madrid subway.
It wasn’t like I had never heard Spanish spoken by native speakers before. I grew up in Los Angeles, and Spanish was everywhere. On billboards, on TV, in restaurants and stores, on the street. I always thought of learning Spanish as something that would help me better understand my home. When I heard that Spanish toddler bumbling through his first forays into his native language, however, I suddenly understood that Spanish was foreign. That there was this whole country—many countries!—where Spanish was as natural and pervasive as the air you breathed, and where it didn’t have to coexist or compete with American English. Unlike the Spanish speakers I knew in California, this boy would grow up in a language, a country, a culture, a history that had almost nothing to do with mine at all. It felt like another dimension I hadn’t ever known to look for abruptly came into focus. I realized that learning Spanish wouldn’t help me burrow deeper into my home, which was honestly the last thing I wanted to do at 17. It would take me through the looking glass to a different reality. I stuck with Spanish, and now I live on the other side.
I know how dumb and *problematic* this sounds 16 years later. I cringe at how cliché it is, an American teenager changed forever by a European vacation. I thought I was more interesting than that, truly. I grew up with people from all over the world, and I had to go to Europe to begin to understand just how big and exciting that world was? Really?
Rick Steves wouldn’t be surprised. Rick Steves would clasp my hands and tear up at my good fortune if I told him this story. I had never heard of Rick Steves, affordable travel guru and PBS host, until I read this profile of him in The New York Times Magazine. I found it almost unbearably moving; when I read it again this week to write this, I cried. Author Sam Anderson poignantly captures Steves’ almost evangelical mission to save the American soul through international travel. Anderson calls it “the enlightenment of Americans through their extraction from America.” Steves himself had an experience very similar to mine: at age 14, in a park in Oslo during a family vacation, he was walloped by the realization that “the foreign humans around him were leading existences every bit as rich and full as his own.” This sounds basic, obvious, even a little bit racist. It is, in fact, all of those things. But Steves never forgot the moment when he first knew it in his heart to be true, and neither did I.
Steves spent his life building a travel business that would guide legions of Americans toward their own version of that epiphany. Anderson was one of them. He writes movingly about his own Steves-inspired college trip around Europe, during which he recorded all his experiences in a journal that “was so corny that its cover actually said ‘A TRAVELER’S NOTEBOOK’ over a picture of the Eiffel Tower.” (Much of Steves’ power seems to come from his unapologetic embrace of the corny, and the space he opens up for you to embrace it too.) Anderson’s world, and America’s place at the center of it, cracked open:
After looking at a Roman stone wall topped by a Saxon stone wall topped by a medieval English wall next to a modern paved street, I began to see what a thin crust of national history the United States actually stands on. I began to realize how silly and narrow our notion of exceptionalism is—this impulse to consider ourselves somehow immune to the forces that shape the rest of the world. The environment I grew up in, with its malls and freeways, its fantasies of heroic individualism, began to seem unnatural. I started to sense how much reality exists elsewhere in the world—not just in a theoretical sense, in books and movies, but with the full urgent weight of the real. And not just in Europe but on every other continent, all the time, forever.
Americanness is uniquely open and closed to the rest of the world at the same time. Ideologically, Americanness is porous, available to be claimed by so many different kinds of people with so many different stories. But when you grow up learning that the rest of the world wants to come to you—wants desperately to be you—why would you open yourself up to anywhere else? Americans learn to treat other countries like backdrops even when we are in them. Steves’ epiphany in the park in Oslo, or mine on the subway in Madrid, were so powerful because they were the first time each of us was able to see Americanness as just one of many possible ways of being in the world, instead of the only way.
Maybe Norwegians and Spaniards and every other kind of teenager are capable of being shaken by the realization that the world is much bigger than they imagined (and of the myopia that necessarily precedes that moment). But somehow, I doubt it. Americanness is designed to refract the whole world through its lens and convince you that’s how everything actually looks. At home, it’s all but impossible to escape the illusion even for a moment. So go somewhere else, for as long as you can. This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful I got that chance, at exactly the right time. Rick Steves is right: It really did change everything.
My writing
This week I wrote about a new study weighing in on the question of whether Molière wrote his own plays. Spoiler, he did, and double spoiler, the only thing interesting about this to actual literature experts is why 20th and 21st audiences care so much about authorship.
Recommendations
I have really enjoyed everything about writing this newsletter except for the self-imposed pressure to come up with recommendations every week. So I’m going to stop including them until and unless I feel like it again. Freedom!