This is not because I'm planning to emigrate (hi Mom, hi Dad), but because I interact with a lot of immigrants here, and because my grandparents were immigrants. From here. Or--not here, precisely. They emigrated from a different place at a different time. My grasp of Norwegian history is weak so I'm supplementing it with Wikipedia, but as I understand it the bulk of Norway's wealth, the money that undergirds the highest standard of living in the world, comes from oil reserves that weren't discovered until 1969. My grandparents left Norway well before then, after Norway separated from Sweden in 1905, after World War I, but before the Nazis occupied Norway during World War II. They came to America, where they met and married and established the family that would be my mother's and, later, mine.
When I was younger it was important to me that I was half Norwegian--being able to say that seemed cleaner than attempting to excavate the jumbled heritage on my father's side (German, English, Scottish, Czech, French-Canadian...). It's still important to me that I'm Norwegian-American, but that's the caveat: American. Because Norwegian I am not.
It's funny how culture gets altered and magnified during the migration process, though. Years ago--nearly nine years ago--when I was last in Norway, my family and I attended 4th of July festivities, I think mainly directed at ex-pats, in Oslo. There was a rockabilly band and booths selling Dr. Pepper, Snyder's pretzels, other imports. It was funny then, but as I recall it we were flying home the next day. But in retrospect, it's a picture of being an American abroad. It's difficult to capture a culture, so you take what you can get, even if what you can get is processed food and a Norwegian rockabilly band.
And then, of course, there's the reverse, the experience my grandparents had: being a Norwegian abroad. And for my cousins and me: being a Norwegian-American, a couple generations removed from Norway.
Mostly we get the food, it's true. Canned fiskeboller, my grandfather's recipe for tynne pannekaker, bags of Twist, svinstek and krumkaker at Christmas. Food's easy. It's so easy that I devote significant amounts of time to forgetting about it--and then some other international students will discuss the novelty of Norwegian food, and I'll feel, for once in my life, Norwegian. What have these people been doing all these years if not eating fiskeboller?
I have other scraps of Norwegian-ness in me, I think, but it can be difficult to tease those out from the things that are my family's, or, specifically, my Norwegian family's. There are the polite bits of Norwegian I know, though--tusen takk, takk for maten.
And then there's the fact that I have family here. All of my mother's aunts and uncles stayed in Norway, and so by extension my mother's cousins are all here, though her aunts and uncles--my great-aunts and uncles--have passed. Still, I'll be visiting some of these family members over Easter; my mom contacted them initially, but I have an email from one of mom's cousins, speaking on behalf of her daughters: 'They asked me to say that they very much would appreciate to be acquainted with their relative from USA.' That sums up our relationship neatly: we are relatives from different places. We are unacquainted.
All of this because of two immigrations, years ago. And while I wouldn't change my grandparents' paths for the world, I wonder what it was like for them. There was a Norwegian enclave in the New York burroughs when they lived there; they were not alone, and these immigrants crafted a sort of simulacrum of Norwegian culture. Both my grandparents were naturalized U.S. citizens by the time my mother was born. Still, my mother and her siblings grew up more-or-less bilingual. I grew up with a grandmother who sometimes spoke to me in a language I could not understand, because she had forgotten her language was not mine. "What?" I'd say, until she repeated herself for me in English. Here, when someone tries to speak Norwegian to me, I usually say I'm sorry. But I'm older now, and I'm not from here.
This morning on my walk to campus an elderly woman stopped to ask me directions to the bus stop. I used my Norwegian with her because I wasn't sure how her English would be. Still, she switched over, and we had a bit of a conversation over the course of which she asked me where I was from. I said I was American, of course.
No comments:
Post a Comment