Who I am, part 2 -- ancestry and culture

My "who I am" post two weeks ago, which I started with the goal of explaining why I'm not a political blogger or activist, ended up necessarily being partly autobiographical.  However, having made such a start on self-introduction, I cannot truly deem it complete without delving into another matter, which involves a medium-sized island in the north Atlantic.

I am a natural-born US citizen, born on Long Island, New York in late 1960.  However, my parents had both immigrated to the US just a few years before I was born.  My mother was originally from Sheffield, a large industrial city in the county of Yorkshire in northern England; my father was from Peterborough, a smaller city about a hundred miles north of London.  They came to the US because my father's technical degree and skills could get him a much higher income here than in Britain, whose economy in the 1950s was still recovering from the effects of World War II.

I don't remember New York at all, because the family moved to California when I was three years old, and that's where I grew up.  However, the culture in our home in California was far more British than American.  It was mostly British programming on TV (thank you, PBS), tea rather than coffee, much talk of British history and habits in the home, and so on.  There happened to be another British immigrant family living across the street, and that was where I mostly went to play with other kids.  While I was growing up, my parents and I made innumerable trips back to Britain -- the whole rest of the family was still there, after all.  I frankly suspect that my mother had only reluctantly agreed to the move to the US -- as she got older, she talked more and more about possibly moving back to Britain.  She might even have done it had it not been for the September 11 terrorist attack, which made her afraid of flying for years.  By the time she got over that, she had reached an age where she could not have coped with a project as major as moving to another country.

As a result of all this, I grew up speaking with a mixed accent, which sounds British to Americans but sounds American to British people.  Some years later I made a conscious effort to Americanize how I speak, but the accent remains noticeable.  I did, of course, learn American history and the political system in school, but otherwise grew up with the ancestral culture.

My parents were both born in the early 1930s.  When they were growing up, British society was steeped in class distinctions, which occasioned almost as much prejudice and discrimination as racial differences did in the US around the same period.  A person's class background was instantly detectable not by skin color but by accent (this is still true to some extent even today).  I can remember my father talking about how roughly children of his class were often treated, compared with the "posh" kids who spoke with the "right" accent.  He didn't talk about this much, but the anger was there, at the memories.  He was the first person in his family ever to go to a university, though there must have been plenty of others in earlier generations who had been intelligent enough.  To this day, when I hear an "upper class" British accent, I still feel a visceral "this is an enemy" reaction.  There was also the hodgepodge of regional accents and dialects, far more diverse than those of the US, even though Britain is a much smaller country.  My mother once spoke some of the Yorkshire dialect she had grown up speaking, so I could hear what it sounded like; it was barely comprehensible, and to most Americans it would surely have sounded like a foreign language.  These regionalisms still exist, though they have been mitigated over the generations as modern education brought standardization of language.

World War II was also a major part of their lives, with German bombing raids being a constant menace.  My mother told me of going out one morning and seeing that the house across the street had disappeared, blown to smithereens by a bomb.  My parents held a deep dislike of Germans for most of their lives.  My mother also hated the Japanese, as her father had been in the British army in Singapore (part of the British Empire at that time), was taken prisoner, and died in a Japanese POW camp.  When I was in Japan in 1995, I visited his grave and brought back photographs which she treasured.  As far as I know, I am the only family member who has ever gone there.

After World War II, socialism greatly mitigated class differences, allowing more equal access to education and other benefits.  My mother always spoke of that time with fervent support.  I suspect she wished she had not left Britain just as it was becoming a more equal society, where people like her would finally have gotten a more fair deal.

My last trip to Britain was in 1979, almost half a century ago now.  However, due to the background and upbringing I had, I feel far more sense of connection to the land of my ancestors than most Americans probably do to the places their ancestors came from.  That sense of connection, which has grown stronger over time, greatly influenced my feelings about culture and international relations.

(Oddly enough, my last name doesn't sound British at all.  Most Americans think it sounds French, but it's actually Dutch.  Peterborough, my father's home city, is near an area called the Fens which historically was marshy, and about three hundred years ago Dutch workers were invited to the area to drain the marshes and reclaim the land -- the Dutch have a great deal of experience with such things in their own country.  After the work was done, some of them stayed and settled permanently, resulting in a scattering of Dutch family names in the area.  After three hundred years, of course, my father's family is totally English in culture and genetics.  My father had to do some research to learn the origin of the name, which had been forgotten.)

There have been times when I contemplated going to live in Britain myself, especially when my mother talked about going back there.  I've always had a sense that I might fit in better there than here.  Realistically, though, it was never a serious possibility.  I don't know much about British immigration law, but I have no particular claim on a country I wasn't born in and have no legal connection to.  There are a host of practical differences I would struggle to adapt to, such as driving on the other side of the road.  Family ties would not help me get settled -- almost everyone with a clear memory of my childhood visits is likely dead or elderly by now.  And Britain does not have the free-speech protections of the First Amendment which are all-important to me as a blogger.  Indeed, like most European countries, it has "hate speech" laws which in practice are mostly used to harass people who tell the truth about Islam or transgenderism.  Especially at my present age, I couldn't handle such an upheaval.

But the sense of connection remains, to the place where my ancestors lived for so unthinkably long.  It used to be thought that the English are mostly descended from Germanic invaders fifteen centuries ago, but a few years ago an exhaustive genetic survey of the whole of the British Isles showed that this is not the case.  The English are mostly descended from the indigenous population that was living there before the Germanic invasion; the invaders brought their language and some aspects of culture and imposed them on the existing people.  Like the Welsh, Scots, and Irish, my ancestors have been there for twelve thousand years -- roughly as long as the ancestors of the American Indians have been living in the Americas.  I don't believe in racial memory, but in so much time, the character of the land perhaps imprints itself on the very genes.  I've always preferred cloudy days to the bright sun many Americans seem to favor, for example.

I have sometimes wondered what my life would have been like if my parents had not emigrated, if I had grown up there instead of here.  I doubt I would ever have left, but it's impossible to know.

However indifferent that island in the north Atlantic would be toward me now, it remains part of who I am, and it always will be, for however much time I have left.

[Image at top:  Me at age 23, in 1984.  I look absolutely nothing like that now.]