When you go on a Rotary Youth Exchange you receive a blue blazer that you’re meant to cover in mementos from your time abroad and pins that you trade with other exchange students. By the end of your exchange, the once-bare blazer is covered in pins, ticket stubs, beer coasters, and flags. The seams are tattered, and bursting with memories. Each blazer is as unique as the experiences of the person wearing it. Just like a blazer, my personal identity has been formed by each new interaction, experience, and self-reflection that I’ve encountered over the years. Each new trial and adventure is like a pin on my blazer. No single pin has much significance in isolation, just as no single event during my exchange, or life in general, can tell you who I am or how I became this person. It is only when looking at the whole blazer, at my combined life experiences, that one can fully form a clear picture of who I am. During the course of my exchange to northern Germany during my junior year of high school, I was finally forced to question exactly what made up my identity. The events that shaped, and reshaped, my identity have stuck with me to this day and I continue to proudly wear them, like the pins on my blazer.
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| Each blazer is...unique |
My grandfather ignited and shared my love of languages and travel. He’d traveled to dozens of countries and was always trying to use the tidbits of languages he’d picked up in each place. He found it very important to adventure and see more than just my tiny corner of this big, broad world. As a child, he’d take me on as many trips as he could and, when I couldn’t go with him, he’d bring me back exotic coins and knick-knacks that I’d hoard like treasure. Outside this influence, however, I grew up in a sheltered home. Not sheltered in terms of strict rules or censored access to TV and movies, but in terms of opinions and exposure to ideas. My mother came from a strong military background, with her father, two brothers, and both brother-in-laws having served in various branches. This afforded her the opportunity to travel the world and live in a dozen locations growing up. Out of all this exposure to ideas, however, the dominant viewpoint that stuck with her was that of her post-civil-rights Alabama upbringing. These factors, combined with the Catholic school education of both of my parents, fostered an extremely conservative environment. I was taught that Robin Hood was a lazy communist and that the real “D-word” was Democrat. Once I arrived in Europe, I was exposed to a level of liberalism that I never even knew existed and,for the first time, forced to reevaluate the beliefs that I had always held as absolute truths.
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| When you google "Typical American" in German, you get this gem |
“In what ways does zis picture represent the typical American?” Frau Hayes asked the classroom in her grating German accent and all eyes shot to me. I couldn’t help but ask myself the same question. I was lost for words as I confronted the picture in front of me, trying desperately to pick it apart. Staring back at me was a pregnant, joint smoking Statue of Liberty with curlers in her hair and a boombox over her shoulder. This picture didn’t look anybody, American or otherwise, I’d ever seen. I began wondering if this is really how my classmates, on the northern German island of Norderney, saw Americans. If this was how they saw me. My whole life, I had been the average, middle class, white girl from a stable nuclear family with 2.5 kids and a dog. Even my name was average, boring even.
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| Equally awesome, slightly more delicious American |
While I was expecting some differences when I arrived in Germany, like Polka bands and Sauerkraut, I had anticipated physically blending in. Instead, I became a sight. My short stature, curly hair, and name that was full of sounds non-existent in the German language made me an “exotic”. As one of the first Americans, besides the German cookie of the same name, that most of them had encountered, I became an open book to whom they came with every question and criticism that they had never had the chance to voice. Much to my dismay, I also became the example of what an American was. Anything that I did, or said, or wore, was viewed as typical of all Americans. The moment I stepped into the school, I was bombarded with questions about which gang I was in, how many times I’d been pregnant, and how many guns I owned. These were stereotypes of Americans I’d known existed but never realized people actively believed. Situations like these put a lot of pressure on me to actively view myself from an outside perspective and constantly defend who I was to others. The identity of “American” was thrust onto me without my permission and I began looking at myself in a more self-critical light, attempting to forge my own identity. As Kinginger states, “The key problems of identity in study abroad, therefore, involve the projection and recognition of identities in a new environment and their correspondence with participants’ sense of self.” Being an American was an integral part of my identity but, because I was confronted with this alternative and very negative view of Americans, I felt myself beginning to distance myself from this part of me.
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| Go to college or get addicted to drugs. Either way, you're gonna end up working at Mickey D's |
“Sorry! Sorry! We’re Canadian!” all the Americans shrieked as we pedaled our four-person bike through the middle of a crowded cafe in the heart of Pisa. We’d gone off the one labeled road on the map and were afraid to let people know we were Americans by stopping to ask for directions, lest they add this to the list of negative interactions they had with American tourists. It had become so important to us to distance ourselves from the “ugly American” stereotype that we touted ourselves as Canadians whenever we were caught doing something taboo. Until this point in my life, I had been raised under the guise that the USA was number one and that everybody wanted to be an American. I came to find, however, that people were pretty happy being themselves, free of the arrogance and negative outside-bias that came with being born in the United States. Once I was exposed to these new viewpoints, I began to see things very differently and opened my mind to new possibilities. I fell in love with European culture and politics and I drank them in like my life depended on it. In the vast desert of ignorance that I had grown up in, this culture was my oasis; it nourished my soul.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” -Mark Twain
I became enraptured by other lifestyles and opinions. I had never known how vast and varied the world was until this point and, the more I learned, the more I realized how little I knew, which I found exciting. For all of this variation, things were strikingly similar across the board. All people want the same things in life. They want to be successful. They want to be important. They want to be loved. They want to be understood. My ultra-conservative upbringing hadn’t prepared me for this realization. Once again, I was forced to step back and evaluate my identity, this time as a citizen of the world. I came to realize that nobody should, or could, be simplified down to their national identity and that stereotypes were universally flawed. This information broke down the notions of race and gender that I had previously held. I had always thought that I was open-minded but I was finally able to see my limitations and work to break them down. I became increasingly empathetic as people shared their stories with me and I saw how varied our stories and paths were, but how they had all culminated in the same exchange. I began to recognize my white American privilege and began attempting to be an ally. Most importantly, I became cognizant of the fact that each person can have a profound impact on the lives of others and that we each have an obligation to take care of all of our fellow people, at home or abroad.
Before a Rotary exchange, they tell you that we each grow up with a pair of glasses, a lens through which we see the world. Each culture and upbringing has a different way of seeing things and often, we see our own specific lifestyle through “rose-colored glasses”. Once we are exposed to a new lifestyle, however, we add a new pair of glasses in a different shade. We are never really able to take off the first pair as they still influence our understanding of the world and, instead, we begin to see everything through a third color; a hybrid of the other two. Seeing through two lenses or having one foot in two cultures never really allows you to stand stably. Once I returned home, I realized that my sense of identity had been built on shaky foundations. Being a liberal, European-minded woman was fine in Germany, but once I returned home, I was at odds with my family. They saw my new-found liberalism as ignorant, arrogant, and disrespectful to the opportunities they had worked so hard to afford me. They told me I was going through the phase that every young person goes through before realizing the realities of the world. They would always tell me, “Any Republican under 30 lacks a heart and any Democrat over 30 lacks a brain.” After seeing a social system that helped its poor instead of its rich and didn’t allow religion to get in the way of making secular laws, however, I felt that I had gained the experience necessary to form a “real” opinion about my political views. Each of these new positions on social and political issues was vital to my sense of self, whether or not my family wanted to accept it.
These conversations with my family dealt a heavy blow to my newly solid sense of identity. I thought I had successfully incorporated both cultures that had so heavily influenced me, but it seemed that nobody back home accepted this new addition as valid. I had this amazing life changing experience and nobody wanted to hear about it. They had sent me abroad to grow up and find myself, but it seemed that, in reality, they were upset when the same girl they had sent overseas didn’t return unchanged. Leonardo Da Vinci once said, “Once you have tasted flight you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward. For there you have been and there you will always long to return.” To me, I had remained the same person at my core, but had merely tasted flight and never again longed to stand on the ground. When a person travels, they are exposed to new ideas and it is impossible to simply forget what they have seen and remain static in their appreciation of the world and its people.
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” ― Terry Pratchett
Works Cited
Kinginger, Celeste. "Language Learning in Study Abroad: A Case Study in France." Diss. Pennsylvania State U, 2008. Abstract. The Modern Language Journal Monograph (2008): n. pag. Print.
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