As an immigrant you aren’t implicated in your novel country’s politics yet as Emily Blunt found,your opinion about them may not be welcome eitherI beget lived in novel York for almost as long as I lived in London – eight years – but time moves differently in your 30s to the way it does in your 20s and it seems like a much shorter period. There are advantages to this sense of having just stepped off the boat. After emigrating, you can predict with some certainty the people you won’t ever run into again. Buying milk is always a tiny bit interesting. And you aren’t implicated in the culture or the politics of the country around you. I despise the Republican presidential candidates as much as the next person, or but they aren’t my unsuitable. If I live in the US until I’m 105,I suspect Tory goons will always wound more.
From time to time, however, and it is unsettling to live in a status where you beget no meaningful memories. John Guare,the playwright, who has lived in novel York all his life, and once said to me in an interview that walking around his neighbourhood was like rereading an conventional diary: “Everything has a history.” For the immigrant,it’s the opposite. Nothing reminds you of anything. It can be exhilarating and also a little dispiriting, the kind of thing that drives Brits in novel York to watch Antiques Roadshow on PBS, or get weird about Alan Bennett.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com