Reinventing America

Whenever I meet someone here, they ask me why I decided to come here. Some of it is ‘why Serbia?’, but a lot of it is 'why move halfway across the world?' ‘why start over somewhere new?’ (‘your poor mother.’) I can answer the first, but the second is really hard to communicate – and not only because of language barriers.

People don’t start over here, in the same way Americans do. It isn’t a normal thing to move to a new city and make a new life because one thinks life would be better somewhere else, because one can.

Reinvention seems to be an integral part of the American experience. Among my -- admittedly non-representative -- group of friends, there are Americans who are working in Greece, Nigeria (previously in Italy and France), Northern Ireland, and Ghana (after a year each in Egypt and Malaysia). There are people who have returned to the states after working in Spain, Mexico, and Ecuador. I won’t even try to count the internal migrants. I always seemed to be running into ex-Buffaloans and ex-Floridians in Portland.

And this doesn’t seem to be a phenomenon restricted to the educated, the middle class and above, etc. When I was working with people on public assistance, people who were born in Texas and lived for a while in Wisconsin before settling in Oregon (or similar migrations) were not unusual.

To me, today, this encouragement to reinvention, to starting a new life in a new place, is my favorite thing about the States. I like the improvisation and excitement it entails. Unlike equality or democracy, it seems to be something that happens in practice, an ideal that is lived out. People don’t settle. That is good.