Moving Eastward

Sometimes I wonder how much of my life has been influenced by where I grew up.

I'm the daughter of a nurse and a high school English teacher-turned-administrator. They moved into the house I grew up in when I was a little under a year old. They picked it because it was close to the best healthcare and in the same district as the best public schools, and because it was safe and suburban and the kind of place where you want your kids to grow up.

For eighteen years, I lived in a city that only became a city the year before I was born, in a house that was "old" for the area because it had been built in the 1970s. I lived in a community that depended on cars and scoffed at public transportation, where the hum and rush of traffic along the 5 freeway was ubiquitous the way the sound of waves is to people who live along the shore. I lived in the kind of suburban city that is no longer even a suburb of anywhere, except for the suburbs themselves. The closest major city was Los Angeles, all spread out and gleaming and so emphatically and insistently new, but even LA was an hour away, and for eighteen years, I probably spent 90% of my time within a fifteen-mile radius of home.

My parents grew up within that radius. When my mother was in high school, her family hosted an Italian exchange student. Mom remembers showing Beatrice all the sights around where she lived, but specifically, she remembers showing her to Mission San Juan Capistrano. Founded by the Spanish in 1776, when much of California was under their control, it's one of the oldest things there is around here. Mom had always found it pretty impressive, but seeing it with Beatrice, she realized how strange it must seem to a girl who grew up just outside of Rome that the oldest thing around was just over two hundred years old.

The American dream, for better or for worse, is about conquering new places and building new lives. As a culture, we're still dealing with the myth of the west as a grand frontier, the newest part of the New World, the place where you go to remake yourself. But it doesn't seem that way to someone who's grown up there. Aside from intermittent travels and nine months spent studying in London, I've lived my whole life on the west coast of the United States, and somewhere along the line, being surrounded by so much that was "new" just got old.

For a while, I've wanted something very different. I want to live at a center of things, a place to which everyone feels connected by a depth of history almost unimaginable from the perspective of a southern California suburb. I want, not the movement to the unexplored and uncharted, but to trace my steps back across the American plains and to the cities where my ancestors first landed on this continent -- back even further, across the Atlantic Ocean to the ports of Europe, where once those same ancestors mingled and shared a cigarette or two before boarding the ships that would take them across this bridge of water to a new world. I don't want the new world, having grown up with it. I want to reclaim some of what is old, some of what lasts.

Moving to New York seems like a twentysomething's rite of passage. (After all, hasn't American television taught us that everything that's anything happens in New York City?) But for me, it's more than that. It's about reversing the movement west, the movement to the new. It's not about leaving something behind me, but getting something back. And I wonder: if you grow up on the edge of things, in the place that used to be a frontier, the place where the American Dream ends, how is your cultural narrative different because of it? I grew up in the west. Maybe that's why I feel so much destiny in moving east.

A Bigger Doorstep: The Importance of Living Abroad

I participated in Model United Nations all through high school. I was one of the more active delegates in our program, never missing a conference if I could help it. Over those four years, I accumulated binders and binders of research on the topics I found myself debating most frequently. I could tell you the details of conflicts going on all over the world. But I never felt like I was connected to them. I was far enough away to be objective, and as tragic as all of it was, it wasn't happening on my doorstep.

The past few months, I've been realizing that my doorstep is a whole lot bigger than it used to be, and for a pretty simple reason: I spent a year studying in another country, and I made friends with people who had done the same.

When the earthquake hit Japan, one of my friends had just returned from a month spent traveling there. Another friend had previously lived there for six months through a study abroad program.

When terrorism hit Oslo, my Norwegian friend -- whom I met while she was studying abroad for a semester in Berkeley -- had just left Norway to spend another semester abroad, this time in Australia.

And when north London broke out in riots, I heard about it on Twitter and Facebook before it was on the news, because I studied there for a year and most of my friends live in the areas most heavily affected.

When I searched Twitter looking for news of any disturbances in Mile End, the London neighborhood where I used to live, I found this picture of the Budgens grocery store where I shopped when I was too lazy to make the walk down to the Sainsbury's in Whitechapel. I found that the houseboats that usually moor along one side of Regent's Canal switched over to the other side as a way of avoiding riot damage because, to access that side from the street, you need to get past the security guards sitting behind the gate into the campus of Queen Mary University of London. That campus is where I lived and studied. This is my doorstep.

A lot of adults (and a lot of college students, too) seem to think that the point of taking a semester or a year abroad is to goof off in a foreign country where the academic expectations are low and the drinking age is lower, where any misbehavior can be excused by saying, "I'm an American!" This isn't why I decided to live in London for a year. But even those who sign up for study abroad programs with the expectation that it will be one big party have the chance to stumble across the lessons I've learned from it. No matter your intention, if you spend enough time somewhere else, you'll find yourself connecting with people in a way that animates the places they live, the struggles they witness, and the hardships they suffer.

It's one thing to talk about globalization and large-scale human interdependence -- it's another thing entirely to feel it within the network of your friends, spread out across the globe. The earthquake in Japan becomes something that could have happened to Kat or Natasha; the bombing in Oslo is something Sidsel just missed; and the London riots are going on walking distance from where Cara and Kaite and Alastair and Abbi and so many other friends live. It hurts, sometimes -- but that's because I'm connected, and because I care. And I'll take that over the world-weary "more bad news as usual" any day.

Perspective

Recently, Time Magazine released color photos of London in the aftermath of the Blitz. It's amazing to see the kind of devastation that London and its people managed to withstand, but the picture that strikes me the hardest is of a small church standing undisturbed on a block where most of the other buildings have been bombed to rubble. Because I know that church. I visited it last year, when I was living in London. It's not very large, and not very famous, but it's where John Milton -- author of Paradise Lost -- is buried, and where his father was buried before him, and so I went to pay my respects. Three hundred and thirty-six years after his death, I'm sure a lot has changed, but the place still stands. On the outside, at least, it looks just like it did fifty years ago, enough so that I could recognize it in an old photo having only been there once. Some form of church has stood at the site of the present St. Giles' Cripplegate since 1090.

To a girl who grew up in a city that was only incorporated a year before she was born, the sense of depth to human history embodied in this single space is awe-inspiring. When Michel de Certeau says that haunted places are the only ones people can live in, I think this is what he means. I'm sure not everyone would agree with him -- I know plenty of people who live just fine without the past ghosting about their everyday routines -- but I do believe there's something about these "haunted places" that makes them paradoxically more alive, and more worthy of being enriched with a portion of my life, than any corner of Outer Suburbia ever could be.