I was totally thinking of something else when you said one of us.
I had a conversation with my German friend about how Germans felt that our soccer couch used to be their head soccer coach. She said it didn’t bother them. (I’m from the U.S)
I then told her about how mad we get when someone who isn’t even a citizen of the US but just went to one of universities or just works here (like Yao Ming went to play basketball for China that one time for China, where he is from. He might be, but I actually have no idea if he is a citizen of the US or not).
It’s mainly famous people, but I feel like (except Mexican immigrants and some other people sometimes but mainly people from Mexico) we co-opt people. Like oh. You are in the U.S? You want to go eat a hotdog? You are obviously one of us.
People (at least where I live where if you have an accent you are from somewhere else and they are curious. I have gotten questions about my accent before and I am an American who has lived in the US my whole life. I just come from a different region). Lots of people do ask about accents but they aren’t like oh you are obviously not a citizen here. You must either have a green card or citizenship. Once more. You are one of us.
I did that to my art history teacher in high school. He was from Canada and had taught in Korea at least long enough to meet his wife there. I was like, nope. You may still be a Canadian citizen but you are one of us now. To be fair he was trying to get citizenship. But the fact that it was taking so long for him and his family to get around the paperwork just blew my mind. He lives here.
It’s kinda like the Borg if you have ever seen Star Trek Next Generation. Not really in a you have to do exactly what we do, (lots of people get persnickety over what language you want to speak though) but we see you. You are in our country. You are obviously chill. We can tell by your shoes/hat/hair style (pretty much anything you are also interested in or like) you are one of us now. We’re having a barbeque Tuesday. I realize that major cities aren’t as much like that though.
I am also guilty of being really surprised that the African guy in my management class wasn’t intending to stay here. I saw him outside of class and asked a question or something about his presentation on Africa (we were talking about over seas management and each group had different countries were were supposed to study) and for some reason where he was going after college came up and he said he was going back to Africa. I might have even said what I was thinking where was along the lines of “What? Nah you should stay here.” (but in a far more polite way, but definitely still in a ‘you are one of us’ way).
To go on an even further tangent I don’t understand the whole ‘ugly American tourist’ thing. I have heard that people who come over here seem to think we are pretty friendly. We probably are really bad tourists, but we are really excited to visit your country. We can’t just take a ferry or train across three different country in an hour. But not in the US. We are a huge country. If you are driving somewhere you are going to Mexico or Canada. Once more we are a huge country so we don’t to a whole lot of that. Except go to Mexico to party. That does make us look bad I think.
But seriously. You are at least a ten hour plane ride away from us, the Euro is worth almost twice what the dollar is (using Europe as an example here). We have planned to come see you for a long time (it does take quite a while to plan out where you are going to stay, how you will pay for everything and all that). We are so excited I’m surprised we don’t try to hug you.
Yes we don’t speak Italian, French, or whatever you speak. If you have read our news or watched our news once you would see that we just don’t have as good of an education system. Going across three countries (if you spent all that money on a plane ticket you might as well) and we probably aren’t sure where to start. Three different countries, three different languages.
I guess we are kinda stuck up like it’s so great here why wouldn’t you want to join us? But I mean, you go to school with them, you work with them, whatever, you get kinda attached. Like, hey. Where are you going? Why are you going back to the U.K? I thought we were going to hang out.
I wasn’t so much like this in high school because there were so many girls from different countries. You knew you would probably never see any of them again after graduation. But college is the time you are supposed to make life long friends. I guess we are kinda clingy.
Sorry that was so long. I have just always wanted to talk about that.