I Feel Most at Home When I'm Farthest From Home

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On the last day of our trip to Italy in April—a nonstop week of taglierine, focaccia, and bucatini, of Timorasso and prosecco, of old friends and ancient ruins, of high-speed trains and effortful gondolas—Sandy, my 12-year-old, and I needed lunch. After stints in Torino and Venice, we had spent the last few days in Rome, and now, finally, we were at the Termini rail station, bound for Milan, where we’d board a flight home to New York. Panini—we needed panini.

And so we found panini, up on the mezzanine branch of Eataly. It was midday, and relatively quiet. No line. I surveyed the premade options under glass, settled on a prosciutto and a prosciutto cotto, and told the young woman behind the counter, in the best Italian I could muster, “Vorrei due panini—questo e questo.” I’d like two sandwiches—this one and this one.

She pointed at the two I’d indicated and said, “Eso y eso?”

“Sì,” I said. “Eso y eso.”

“Comer aqui or para llevar?”

“Para llevar.”

It was only when I was paying for the sandwiches that I began to realize we’d switched from Italian to Spanish, which I also don’t really speak, and I was left baffled. Did I present as Spanish? Did I speak Italian with a Spanish accent? Was the Eataly employee a Spaniard working in Rome, and had she herself unknowingly switched back to her native language?

Whatever the true reason—which I will never know—I was overjoyed. I’d successfully navigated a basic daily transaction in another country, and in not one but two foreign languages. This is the stuff I live for as a traveler, those moments when my own foreignness briefly slips away, when I feel like I’ve made the tiniest hint of progress, when I can imagine, for a minute or two, that I’m at home here, wherever I happen to be.

“Gracias,” I told her as I picked up the bags of sandwiches. Or maybe I said, “Grazie.” I honestly don’t remember.

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A Foreigner at Home

I’ve never felt truly at home anywhere I’ve lived in the United States. As a child in Massachusetts, I was a little weirdo, a shrimpy nerd wrapped up in his own world of Star Wars and Lego. As a teen in Virginia, I was the Yankee, the Jew, the nonconformist intellectual, the kid with no accent, with no ties to the commonwealth. As an adult in the New York media world, I was never cool enough, or literary enough, or rich enough to move among the elite.

But beyond that, I never felt like I understood my country. For much of my life, America has moved away from me, embracing ideals, leaders, and even facts that appear utterly alien, and often fantastical. I never got it, and I still don’t get it, and the events of this week have reminded me how little I get. I am clearly, inescapably American myself—there’s no getting around that. But how American can I really be if I can’t make sense of my fellow Americans? I feel like an outcast, a foreigner in my native land, a man from Mars who just happens to hold the correct passport. Can you have Impostor Syndrome over your citizenship? Well, I do. I feel like a fake¹.

Outside the United States, however, a universe of possibilities opens up. Out there, in Vietnam or Taiwan, in France or Portugal, I am so obviously an American that no one expects me to understand anything. Out there I’m a tourist, I’m an infant, I’m Homer Simpson. I’m a foreigner, talking nonsense, unconnected to the land, fundamentally unpredictable.

This is my happy place. This is where I’m comfortable: knowing nothing and so having to figure everything out. Generally, I get things wrong, as all tourists do. (And we are all tourists, we who can and will go “home.”) I have offended people from Shanghai to… well, surely other places, but for some reason mostly Shanghai. I have missed cues, drunk too much, eaten too little, taken connections for granted, been overly familiar. Much of that, I hope, can be forgiven—what does one expect, after all, of a foreigner?

But those times when I’ve gotten things right? Bliss! The curtain is pulled back an inch—technically, since we’re outside the United States, a couple of centimeters—and I get a glimpse of what it might be like to understand the place you live in: how people think, why they act the way they do, how they fit in to the rest of their world. I might be projecting, I might be grasping, but no matter: Those moments make everything that leads up to them—the mispronounced words, the confusion and hesitation, the sartorial disjunctions, the miasma of awkwardness that envelops travelers the way the cloud of filth surrounds Pigpen—worthwhile. I live for them, and I am as comfortable enduring the failures leading up to them as I am uncomfortable inhabiting a culture I am, by birth, supposed to comprehend but never will.

My family moved around a bit when I was young: various spots in Massachusetts, a year in England, Virginia, a year in Denmark (though I was living in New York by then). I liked it, I didn’t think much of it, though my mother’s mother once reportedly told her, “You people—you’re like Gypsies!” Maybe. We were—or I am—more like Wandering Jews. The legend defines the Wandering Jew as cursed, or possibly beloved, by Jesus, who made the Jew roam the earth, immortal, until the Second Coming. As with most Christian legends about Jews, it’s not really flattering—a justification for dispossessing Jews of land and rights throughout Europe for centuries. (TBH, who needs justification for such things?) And you could certainly see in 19th- and 20th- and 21st-century Zionism a reaction to that stereotype: Let’s get a homeland and end this wandering, because oy vey my feet are killing me (to say nothing of the pogroms)!

I am hardly a leader of the Jewish people. (Hard to believe, I know!) But had I been, at any point in the past 150 years, I would have fought against this instinct. To not just wander but to be the wanderers is special: Nothing is expected of you, yet everything is a revelation. (You do have to avoid being perceived as a threat, and maybe slaughtered, but that’s on them, not on us.) To be the one who passes through, who makes it work, who adapts according to his or her resources and inventiveness, who can find home for a minute or an hour in the most foreign of shores, that’s unique.

Or maybe not so unique. The United Nations estimates that 117.3 million people around the world have been forcibly displaced from their homes, and that’s to say nothing of the millions more who’ve willingly traveled over oceans and mountains and swamps and deserts in search of, well, something else, something better. These migrants, having abandoned their homes, by choice or by force, know more keenly than I the sweetness of a breakthrough, of an unforeseen string of good luck, of a sentence correctly pronounced, and understood, for the very first time.

I kind of love that we more often call them migrants now, rather than immigrants, in recognition of the likelihood that their wanderings may never truly come to an end. Home can still be home even if it’s not forever. I would just like us to start to see ourselves as migrants as well, no matter how rooted we may seem in our communities: The homes we occupy now we will one day certainly leave, and our fervent, irrational attachment to them, our fixation on defining what they and we are all about, does us and the world no favors. Let’s let home go, and accept that we understand little about ourselves, and move on when we need to, or when the whim takes us.

Notes

1. I do, however, feel right at home as a New Yorker: Not only am I instantly identifiable as a Brooklynite, but I get this place more than I’ve ever gotten anywhere else. Alas, New York City is still in America, which remains a mystery to me.

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