Every time someone from across the pond comes to visit me in the U.K., I ask them to bring me one thing: marshmallows.
I don’t really like s’mores, but when I moved from Colorado to London four years ago, I realized that my awareness of smashing marshmallows, chocolate and graham cracker together was tethered solely to an American upbringing. Slowly but surely, my disconnect from the culture that raised me began becoming apparent with the poking of tradition-sized holes in my heart, starting with s’mores. I tried to spackle the hole by hosting s’mores parties in my back garden, but unfortunately, British marshmallows just don’t roast and melt in quite the same way. Only the American variety will do.
Worldwide, relatively few people migrate to another country — just 3.6 percent of the global population, according to the United Nations’ World Migration Report. The U.S. and U.K. are popular destinations, where foreign-born residents make up about 14 to 16 percent of the population. When I consider the debates over immigration here in Europe, or in the United States over the southern border, I realize I’ve had it extremely easy compared to many migrants. I’ve moved not because of violence or food insecurity, but by choice, and started my aspirational path toward dual citizenship in a country where my native language and the primary language are the same. I’ve also found a supportive group of other foreign transplants. And still? Figuring out how to adopt a new culture while holding onto the one that raised me is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
“It takes three generations to become fully assimilated,” Dr. Gerald Gems, a professor emeritus at North Central College in Illinois and third-generation Italian American, says. The first generation often sticks close to familiarity, he says — this is why we have so many ethnic enclaves, like Basque country in Nevada and Koreatown in LA — while the second generation lives in two cultures. The third generation usually doesn’t speak the language of their grandparents’ birth country. As a woman trying to navigate a different set of norms within my own native language, I often feel like I’m navigating all of these phases myself at once.
About a year after my move to London, I was riding my bike and attempted to cross a quiet intersection via a crosswalk instead of making a turn across a lane of traffic. It is indefensible, I know, but my excuse was that I was still getting used to cycling on the left side of the road, and right turns felt dangerous. I also didn’t think I would get caught. The crossing guard — or “lollipop lady,” as they call them in Britain, because of the stop signs they hold — spotted me from the other side of the road and was not pleased with my behavior.
“Will you dismount your bike! Please!” she shouted. It was not a request, and it startled me. When I did as ordered, she shouted, “THANK YOU.” An American English translation of this interaction probably would have been something like, “Get off your bike, you jerk! Idiot.” For the first time, I understood this. Finally! I thought. I speak English English now!
For most of the following two years, I spent hours every week scheming about how to officially move to this place permanently. In the absence of a right to abode, I settled for frequent visits, alternating a few months in the U.K. with extended visits back to the United States and elsewhere in the world. I read everything I could about immigration laws, contacted lawyers, and spent months assembling an application for a talent-based arts visa. I had years of experience writing for international publications, so I was told I should qualify. It was devastating when I was denied on the basis that my application was lacking literary merit.
I studied British history and read books. I visited castles and asked silly questions in museums. Receiving praise for “sounding British” became a game for me.
So, I launched Plan B: grad school. In a panic about the state of my future in a country I had grown to love, I filed applications for master’s programs in London as if my life depended on it. In a way, it did. I decided to go back to school to A) learn how to actually write with literary merit, and B) gain time to produce something suitable enough to return to Plan A.
At times, it felt like there was an immediate trade-off for everything I gained. I was living exactly how I pleased, but I was also living with tremendous uncertainty. What if I didn’t get into grad school, or if I did but it ended up failing to lead to a visa in the end and wasting all that money? What if I left to visit friends or family and wasn’t let back into the U.K.? I love the life I have built in London, but I feel far from my family, whom I also love.
I began feeling the constant pull between the two realities of my new home and my old one. Every element of daily life was exciting again — mailing letters in iconic red postboxes, shopping for groceries in stores with unfamiliar goods in beautiful packaging, going for a walk around the neighborhood and stumbling upon something not just old but ancient — but there was also culture shock, loneliness, anxiety and language fatigue.
These discomforts caught me off guard. At first, I thought I understood the conversations I was having because I recognized almost all of the vocabulary words. It took time to realize Americans and Brits often define these words differently. It was a year before I realized that when Brits say they “could do” something, what they are really saying is, “I recognize that this thing you have asked me to do is within the realm of possibility, but I would very much prefer not to do it. So, no.”
I mistook passive aggression for politeness, and on at least one occasion I was actually shouted at for the order in which I assembled a cup of tea (adding milk before you’ve removed the tea bag is on the order of a crime against the king).
Lots of little misunderstandings like this started to amount to a big challenge for me, so I resolved to see assimilation as a sport. I studied British history and read books, like Bill Bryson’s “Notes From a Small Island” and “Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour,” a study of Englishness by anthropologist Kate Fox. I visited castles and asked silly questions in museums. I spent weeks hiking along the English coastline, and I watched trash TV as a “culture study.” Receiving praise for “sounding British” became a game for me. I started taking conversations about the weather more seriously, and I perked up at every “well done!” imparted for jettisoning my Americanness. But I also wondered: Did I like this new version of myself?
Of course, there’s no requirement to assimilate into a new culture. I could very easily be friends with only other Americans and live in a little bubble of familiarity. But this can be isolating and also defeats the point of my desire to live in London. Opting out of fitting in only works for so long.
Assimilation is “most difficult” for first-generation immigrants because they are “basically losing their culture,” says Gems, who has also written at length about cultural identity and assimilation in sports. In “Sport and the Shaping of Italian American Identity,” he explains how Italians gained respect and assimilated into American culture by becoming really, really good at baseball.
Today, he explained, we share so much global media that it can be a little easier to fit in when you move to a new place. But there are lots of behaviors and cultural references we think are universal that aren’t. “The first time I gave a presentation in Norway, I was telling these baseball jokes, and nobody was laughing, and I’m just bombing,” he says. “And finally, the person who brought me over there said, ‘Well, you have to understand that we don’t know how to play baseball.’”
Figuring out how to adopt a new culture while holding onto the one that raised me is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
I have been fascinated by the ability to see American culture more clearly from afar than I ever understood it back home. There is a flip side to every characteristic I used to see as exclusively negative. Yes, we are loud, we can be overly familiar with acquaintances, and we often ask strangers for such inexcusable favors as moving down a few seats so our whole group can sit together. But we are also, often, more comfortable assuming a level playing field because the very existence of our nation was founded on the notion of dismantling formal social, political and religious hierarchy.
I can’t speak for all of us, but when I see groups of Americans abroad I notice that we are often friendlier and more open at first meeting than many of our counterparts elsewhere in the world. We value genuineness, individualism and optimism. We are more likely to think we are capable of impossible tasks, and we are more willing to ask others to make space for us. I have examined what I perceive to be “rude,” and have gained empathy and admiration for people who are comfortable with themselves no matter where they are.
“Americans grow up with the perception — well, most Americans, white Americans, certainly — that they can be anything they want to be,” Gems says. “We keep pushing this idea that anybody has an opportunity in America, that anybody can rise from whatever their station is in life, and become president or whatever.”
This entitlement to hope is not a universal character trait elsewhere. I used to worry that we were far too self-absorbed as a nation, and perhaps there is some truth to that. But now, I am also grateful for the way this aversion to giving up has probably been the very thing that has enabled me to keep going even when the logistics of immigration have felt insurmountable.
Being stuck between two cultures has allowed me to live in a beautiful liminal space where I can adopt the elements of the new culture that I admire, and let go of the elements of my “Americanness” that no longer serve me. I now love sharing American traditions — like s’mores — with my friends abroad, perhaps more than I loved experiencing them for myself in the U.S., because when I share my traditions with people who haven’t experienced them before, it bestows an opportunity to examine and appreciate them in a new way. It also gives me the license to adapt them however I want.
I understood. Finally! I speak English English now!`
Since moving to London, Thanksgiving has replaced Christmas as my all-time favorite holiday. Here, I have seen Thanksgiving for what it truly is, or should be: not a forced, reluctant gathering of people who are pretending to like each other, but an annual commitment to show our loved ones that they matter so much to us, we will prioritize basking in their insanity for a day. Not because we must, but because we genuinely love each other underneath all the tension.
The first time I hosted Thanksgiving in London, in 2022, I wanted to recreate an authentic American experience, knowing that almost none of our 18 guests had experienced the holiday before. My flatmates and I trekked to a historic poultry market at 2 a.m. to get the turkey and then realized we had no idea how to make one. We enlisted a chef friend to cook it for us, and he covered it in bacon, which we didn’t know was permissible under the Thanksgiving tradition code but has since become nonnegotiable for us (it’s delicious).
And when it came time to go around the table and say what we’re grateful for, there were plenty of awkward laughs from friends who thought this silly tradition was just a little too American and earnest for them. But it was delicious, warm, chaotic and hilarious. It felt just like home. Turns out, you can find patches to repair those tradition-shaped holes in your heart, no matter where you are.
This story appears in the October 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.