I’m deeply grateful be back in America – but it’s not the country I left.
Slurping a perfectly ripe peach, I watch a 400-year-old play from a lawn chair and think about the America I used to know.
Meanwhile, As You Like It careens towards its – spoiler alert! – four-wedding finale. (In Shakespeare’s comedies, the more the married-er.) The air is so humid you’d need a boba straw to drink it. At intermission we stand up, stretch, and hug friends and chat with neighbors, while the kids goof off with school buddies, just as we’ve done right here for the past three years.
Ever since we moved from Seoul back to the Midwest, life has felt so homey, so deliciously familiar.
Maybe that’s why it took me months to see how much had changed.
*
The play resumes. A cicada zig-zags drunkenly through actors and lights til, with a heavy plop, it lands on my son’s sleeve. He glances down at it, unconcerned, then back to the stage.
Falling action. The duke, his daughter, and their loyal entourage will at last return from exile.
Maybe you’re the one who stayed. You live among people who’ve known you for years, in a place you know so well you could drive its backroads blindfolded.
Maybe you’re the one who left, then returned.
To the re-homed exile, every scent is familiar and surprising. Every beloved face has changed.
You’ve been gone long enough to look around like a visiting anthropologist. Take some notes, ask some questions. Norms you once assumed now intrigue – delight – or alarm you.
You wonder, “Wait…was it always this way?”
We the Returned see the changes, the way aunties could always see the inches you’d grown, but your parents couldn’t because they were too close to the process.
Water, pot, frog. Etc.
*
Our first summer back, it was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Classic.
We were so freshly arrived we were still jetlagged. Just banging around our new empty house, sans toys, sans books, sans everything, sleeping on the floor as we waited for a shipping container’s worth of belongings to slog through customs.
Life felt chaotic as Dream’s plot for a while there. We scrambled to fix holes, shoo out mice, drain the basement, sign up for park district soccer, and meet our neighbors, all while grieving the friends we’d left behind and trying to grasp what a huge life leap we’d made.
But we knew we had to pause for Shakespeare in the Park. We’d dreamed of it for almost 5 years.
That first night, I remember looking behind me at our fellow picnickers spread on the lawn. They chatted over cheese plates or snuck swigs of contraband wine (illegal in the park). Droopy-cheeked babies stayed up too late. Our children made the rounds hailing new friends they’d met at the school they’d started just a couple weeks earlier.
Nick Bottom brayed. Fairies sang. Puck put a girdle round about the earth, and I teared up for the sweet familiarity of it all.
I already knew people in the crowd, old friends from 15 years ago when I lived here as a newly-minted adult. I was back on home turf after being literally on the other side of the globe. We’d flown round the earth like Puck and landed, with a heavy plop, right back home. It felt so good.
It still does. Do you understand how miraculous linguistic and socio-cultural fluency is?? I can read street signs and chit-chat with baristas. Groceries are easy. I can count currency correctly. Bread tastes normal. I can eavesdrop on strangers in coffee shops, which is very important to me. Hallelujah for home!
It’s just…it took me a minute to realize that home had changed.
*
If, as Jaques claims, all the world’s a stage, then the players, scenery, themes, and a lot more about the American stage has changed.
Over the next (couple weeks? a year? we shall see!) I’ll be writing about the ways I think America has changed since we last lived here.
We’ll talk about how:
weed got a lot more legal
people take more walks for fun
Roe v. Wade got struck down
whiteness and Blackness schismed, which isn’t an actual verb but should be
wildfires became ubiquitous
as did Ted Lasso, which has no alliterative W’s for this list, sad,
and lots more
My list is in no particular order, and it’s not all about headlines. It’s personal.
I’m interested in the ways my country has shifted. The ways my people have changed. And the way it all trickles down to our bodies, to take root and bear fruit in these soul-and-senses selves.
So that’s what you can expect for the next little while.
I’d love to hear from you, too. How have you seen this country change in the past five to seven years? How have the changes impacted you personally?
Slurping a perfectly ripe peach, I watch a 400-year-old play from a lawn chair and think about the America I used to know.
Meanwhile, As You Like It careens towards its – spoiler alert! – four-wedding finale. (In Shakespeare’s comedies, the more the married-er.) The air is so humid you’d need a boba straw to drink it. At intermission we stand up, stretch, and hug friends and chat with neighbors, while the kids goof off with school buddies, just as we’ve done right here for the past three years.
Ever since we moved from Seoul back to the Midwest, life has felt so homey, so deliciously familiar.
Maybe that’s why it took me months to see how much had changed.
*
The play resumes. A cicada zig-zags drunkenly through actors and lights til, with a heavy plop, it lands on my son’s sleeve. He glances down at it, unconcerned, then back to the stage.
Falling action. The duke, his daughter, and their loyal entourage will at last return from exile.
Maybe you’re the one who stayed. You live among people who’ve known you for years, in a place you know so well you could drive its backroads blindfolded.
Maybe you’re the one who left, then returned.
To the re-homed exile, every scent is familiar and surprising. Every beloved face has changed.
You’ve been gone long enough to look around like a visiting anthropologist. Take some notes, ask some questions. Norms you once assumed now intrigue – delight – or alarm you.
You wonder, “Wait…was it always this way?”
We the Returned see the changes, the way aunties could always see the inches you’d grown, but your parents couldn’t because they were too close to the process.
Water, pot, frog. Etc.
*
Our first summer back, it was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Classic.
We were so freshly arrived we were still jetlagged. Just banging around our new empty house, sans toys, sans books, sans everything, sleeping on the floor as we waited for a shipping container’s worth of belongings to slog through customs.
Life felt chaotic as Dream’s plot for a while there. We scrambled to fix holes, shoo out mice, drain the basement, sign up for park district soccer, and meet our neighbors, all while grieving the friends we’d left behind and trying to grasp what a huge life leap we’d made.
But we knew we had to pause for Shakespeare in the Park. We’d dreamed of it for almost 5 years.
That first night, I remember looking behind me at our fellow picnickers spread on the lawn. They chatted over cheese plates or snuck swigs of contraband wine (illegal in the park). Droopy-cheeked babies stayed up too late. Our children made the rounds hailing new friends they’d met at the school they’d started just a couple weeks earlier.
Nick Bottom brayed. Fairies sang. Puck put a girdle round about the earth, and I teared up for the sweet familiarity of it all.
I already knew people in the crowd, old friends from 15 years ago when I lived here as a newly-minted adult. I was back on home turf after being literally on the other side of the globe. We’d flown round the earth like Puck and landed, with a heavy plop, right back home. It felt so good.
It still does. Do you understand how miraculous linguistic and socio-cultural fluency is?? I can read street signs and chit-chat with baristas. Groceries are easy. I can count currency correctly. Bread tastes normal. I can eavesdrop on strangers in coffee shops, which is very important to me. Hallelujah for home!
It’s just…it took me a minute to realize that home had changed.
*
If, as Jaques claims, all the world’s a stage, then the players, scenery, themes, and a lot more about the American stage has changed.
Over the next (couple weeks? a year? we shall see!) I’ll be writing about the ways I think America has changed since we last lived here.
We’ll talk about how:
weed got a lot more legal
people take more walks for fun
Roe v. Wade got struck down
whiteness and Blackness schismed, which isn’t an actual verb but should be
wildfires became ubiquitous
as did Ted Lasso, which has no alliterative W’s for this list, sad,
and lots more
My list is in no particular order, and it’s not all about headlines. It’s personal.
I’m interested in the ways my country has shifted. The ways my people have changed. And the way it all trickles down to our bodies, to take root and bear fruit in these soul-and-senses selves.
So that’s what you can expect for the next little while.
I’d love to hear from you, too. How have you seen this country change in the past five to seven years? How have the changes impacted you personally?