The American Thing, Again

Last night I got an email from New Zealand Immigration saying that they’ve done the first stage of my residency application and needed some extra information about my job to continue on. This was pretty exciting because a) the information they wanted was really easy to get and I had it in the mail this afternoon and b) I hadn’t really heard from them since the end of January when I popped the application in the very low-key box in the Wellington office and then just started…waiting. They let me know they’d received it, which I guess is better than nothing, but that’s been it. Did my medical records squeak through onto the deadline? Would I have to send more of my fingerprints to the FBI? Would I, heaven forfend, have to pay another fee?

Well, who knows. They haven’t told me when they’ll get around to processing the rest of the application, or how likely it is that I’ll be accepted, or anything else, really. What it did make me think about is something that I noticed the very first week I was back and have been noticing on pretty much a daily basis ever since: there sure are a lot of Americans around this year.

I seem to remember being the only one I knew, the first time I was here. I guess every now and then I would run into someone from Boston or Phoenix or Schenectady or something, but for pretty much those entire two years all the other expats were British, Irish, or German, with some exotic sprinklings of Swedes and Argintineans. Back then I was having the American conversation a lot and I always felt like I had to go out of my way to show how not-stereotypically-American I was, if I wanted to be accepted. As time went by I got over a lot of those feelings and just sort of went on with my life. When I started traveling again about this time last year it would come up occasionally, just because I was backpacking again and “So where are you from?” is how you start the Backpacker Questionnaire, but actually as I think of it, I spent so much of that trip by myself that I didn’t think about it much.

Which is not to say that I didn’t, and don’t still every once in a while, take some sort of weird pleasure in being a bit of an outlier, a unicorn, kind of like in college when all my friends were engineers and physicists and I was the lone liberal arts major. I don’t love the idea of representing any one demographic exactly but I did like being the only one—at least the only one I knew, which is what counts, right, because actually there are a lot of Americans in New Zealand—the working holiday visa expanded from a thousand a year to five thousand a year, for example—and in Wellington especially. There’s actually even an American club or something that’s sponsored by the embassy, but for a long time I was the only one I knew.

Well, not anymore. Last year, randomly, a childhood friend of mine from the island got a job here and we’ve hung out, and there’s another American girl at my work, who is actually from Seattle and actually went to my same social work program at UW a couple of years after I did. One of my next door neighbours is American. I hear American accents all over the place now—I feel like I’m constantly whipping my head around on the bus to try to figure out where those flat vowels are coming from, if they’re not coming from me.

It’s not just that there are more of us, it’s also that there doesn’t seem to be as much anti-American sentiment as there was in 2006. I got here the day after US Inauguration Day and people here were stoked about Obama, man. “Well, now that you’ve got that new President,” I must have heard about eight times that first couple of days. People were congratulating me, and everyone seemed to have read his books, and just the other day I saw someone wearing an Obama shirt on Manners Mall. This was not the case during the Bush years, let me wholeheartedly assure you, when I felt like I had to apologize for my country’s foreign policy at every party. In fact this time around I find myself hedging my bets a little, politically speaking, saying things like, “Yes, I’m glad too—let’s hope it all goes the way we want it to” or “Yeah, it was awesome being involved in the 2008 elections, I think things are going to get better for a lot of people.” Around here I, who teared up during the inauguration speech and had all those giddy conversations with strangers that evening at the airport about how we were so happy to have a new president, all of a sudden am passing as a skeptic. All of a sudden New Zealanders are telling me how great America is, and all of a sudden those American conversations are going in directions I never thought they would two and a half years ago.

All in all I’m happy to forgo feeling like someone a bit out of the ordinary if it means that…well, I don’t know actually. I don’t know if people have fewer stereotypes about Americans or if more Americans are traveling abroad lately or if I’m just seeing what’s been here the whole time. I just keep noticing all the Americans around lately, t as I gett closer to belonging a little more fully to New Zealand.