Making my son an American

Dispatches from a disorienting summer in UK and US politics

The US Embassy in London | Photo by James Kenny on Unsplash

[I’m trying something new this week: If you’d prefer to listen to the essay below rather than read it, hit play on the audio player above the photo. The usual list of links and recommendations can be found below the essay. Do let me know if you enjoy this audio option!]

The other day, returning from a holiday, a UK border force officer lingered over my British passport a second longer than what seemed necessary.

“You were born in Los Angeles?” he asked as he handed it back to me. 

“Yes,” I answered, knowing what was coming. 

“What are you doing here then?” 

It’s an interaction I’ve had hundreds of times in the 13 or so years I’ve predominately lived in the UK. 

My answer tends to go in one of two directions. At the airport the other day, I chose the lower effort option: “It’s a long story,” said with a curt laugh to indicate that I will not be taking further questions at this time. 

The other option is a long diatribe about the realities of living in the United States. The guns, the healthcare, the shoddy or nonexistent public transportation, the lack of government-mandated vacation time, parental leave, or funding for childcare. How it’s one of the only countries in the world where the concept of medical debt is even a thing. How what the US is actually good at, above all else, is exporting its own mythology by way of popular culture. 

I sometimes go even further: How the deeply individualistic reality of living there would strike individuals of many nations, even developing ones, as pretty grim. How the pursuit of economic growth above all else often comes at the price of the collective identity that gives citizens a shared sense of place and reality. How you can travel to dozens of countries all over the world, as I have, and you will struggle to find destitution like you see on the streets of one of America’s richest cities, San Francisco. 

The unsuspecting soul who is on the receiving end of this well-rehearsed monologue usually shuts up pretty quickly after that. 

Despite the fact that my American accent has not budged a single inch in the near decade and a half since I left, my relationship to my American identity is an evolving beast. Two things in the past few years have made me reckon with it even more. 

The first was moving away from London, which I did in 2020. First to Margate, and then more recently to Leeds. In London, where I lived for the bulk of a decade, it feels like everyone is from somewhere else. Few people care about an American accent. But outside of London, the idea that you would move from the land of opportunity — and California, no less! Los Angeles! — to a country where the weather is more often than not grey, the national attitude is generally pretty negative, and the salaries uniformly lower seems, on the face of it, bizarre. Indeed, in the past four years I’ve been asked to defend my position to live here more than ever. 

The other factor in this reckoning was something I did in April. After much procrastination and bureaucratic annoyance, I finally dragged my toddler to the US embassy in London to acquire a Consular Report of a Birth Abroad and a US passport. As we did endless laps around the fortress-like embassy’s waiting area to pass the time, I thought about why I was going through this diplomatic charade. The simple answer is that like my British parents did for me after I was born in the US, I wanted to give my son options for the future. 

When I moved to London at age 21 in 2011, I did so bearing two of the most powerful passports in the world. Pre-Brexit, pre-Trump, it felt like I could live anywhere, do anything. I genuinely believed the world was mine for the taking. 

And while it’s fair to say my son is still privileged to have these two passports, I feel fairly confident that, the way things are going, he will not have the luxury of my former world view. 

***

The best exploration of the dysmorphic nature of American identity I’ve ever read comes from the journalist Suzy Hansen’s book, Notes on a Foreign Country. In it, she details a process of unlearning everything she thought was true about being an American when she moved to Turkey. She writes: 

“The totality of Americanism was something that often an individual couldn’t see. It was too enormous, and too omnipresent. It might be embedded in sentences of our novels. It might be embedded in the language we read in magazines, and in the language I myself as a journalist used. As Claus Offe writes, ‘The United States is no longer a spatially distant entity but a military, commercial, and cultural presence, here and now, in common space. American realities have in part become our reality.’  […] If I had not known that magazines, plays, books, writing programs, newspapers — even hotels! — had all been produced to shape my sense of America’s greatness, then what sort of individuality did I possess?” 

This explains why nearly everyone, of every nationality, has a relationship to America. Its political, cultural, and social tentacles are not a matter of just policy, but of psychology. From the cab driver in London who cannot stop talking about Trump to the child in Palestine who is an orphan thanks to the weapons provided by a superpower, there is no other country that has this kind of insidious, inescapable reach. 

Hansen’s book argues that Americans across the political spectrum believe that this is simply the natural order of things — America is just that great, so everyone wants to claim a piece of it. But she details a long history of intervention and propaganda that has made it so. And nowhere is this looming presence felt more than in an election year, when non-Americans all over the world are all subjected to a kind of political trauma they have no say in, but will surely be affected by. 

*** 

It would be absurd to say there aren’t things that being an American has given me. The University of California inspired in me a kind of free-thinking and practical optimism that turned me into the journalist, and later, the writer I am today. My psyche still feels deeply embedded with the American ideal that you can want something and just go after it — without waiting for anyone’s permission. 

Almost every day since I left America, I have lamented the comparatively poor customer service of basically every other nation I’ve visited or lived in. Holding onto the expectation that people should go the extra mile just because is perhaps the most American thing about me.

I hope my son inherits some of this — my directness, my work ethic, my willingness to take a shot. Especially as he will be growing up in a culture that will inspire more conformity and resignation than striving and differentiation. I want him to possess the gumption to try, to always back himself. 

But the longer I’ve spent outside of the US, the more certain I am that I could never move back. In a very literal way, the life I have built for myself since 2011 would not have been possible in America. For one thing, I have chosen to be self-employed for roughly 70% of that time, often with precarious creative income streams. Which, in America, would mean that I would be forced to pay for health insurance out of pocket or go without health insurance at all. Non-Americans have absolutely no conception of how expensive this would be, the risk I would be taking, the reason that would shape my life choices, like whether or not to have a child. Americans can’t imagine any other way.

Most Europeans who visit America will complain about the tipping culture. And despite my near-constant griping about poor customer service, I’m actually glad to live in a country where that high standard of service is not the norm. Where there is a sense that everyone is entitled to basic aspects of life and survival, despite how hard they work or how relentlessly they hustle. 

I’ll never forget the first summer I spent in London, working in a truly terrible restaurant in Covent Garden, when all the staff were inputting their paid holiday time requests. The idea that everyone from a waiter in a restaurant to a corporate executive would be entitled to paid time off by the state was deeply bizarre to me. But I’ve since seen how it has an impact on the way people live here. The idea that everyone has the right to do something other than work, even for a few weeks a year. That matters to me, a lot. 

American customer service is so good because it simply has to be. People must get rich or die trying. This foments a kind of stress and survival mode that has a deep impact on people's psyche and health, and I feel it every time I’m there.

And then there are the things I can’t fully explain. How, when I land in the UK, I feel my nervous system settle a bit. How the dark humor, wit, and self deprecation that is so central to the British identity has shaped the way I think and write. That there is an undercurrent of civility in Britain — the queues, the signs, the omnipresent offers for tea — that is hard to place your finger on, but is deeply comforting to me. How the UK feels closer to the rest of the world, which affects my ability to see more of it. How it’s the place, on some deep level, that I actually am from. 

***

It’s been a hell of a summer to be a dual citizen. A general election that was called for on May 22, and efficiently carried out on July 4. The result was a monumental shift to the left in the UK after 14 years of Conservative rule. Then England’s national football team made it to the final of the Euros, which is never really about football at all, but about national identity itself. They lost, which somehow feels fitting. 

And then there’s the US. One deeply unpopular candidate who won’t — but absolutely should — step down. The other, a 34-count convicted felon who looks very likely to win a second term. One assassination attempt. And four months to go.

You can say a lot about the UK’s ousted Conservative party, almost all of it bad: the truly breathtaking levels of incompetence, the grim reaper approach to gutting the social state, their genuinely baffling and ghoulish policies. But even after more than a decade of living here (with six different prime ministers in that time) I still find it remarkable that a prime minister who knew he was wildly unpopular called an election that resulted in his party losing power — when he was not required to do any of that. He then not only stepped down, but apologized when he did. Within a day, a new government moved into Number 10 Downing Street. This all happened within six weeks.

This feels like a version of democracy that at this point, Americans could only hope for in their wildest, most unrealistic dreams. 

Which brings me back to that question the border force officer and so many others have asked me. Why would I choose to live here? I often wonder how much longer I will have to answer it, if the mythology of America will ever be pierced. I wonder what my son will make of the notion that America is the greatest country in the world. If Americans will still believe, despite all quantifiable evidence to the contrary, that is the case. 

It’s clear to me that whatever happens, my son won’t inherit the America, or the world, that I entered into in my early twenties. I don’t think he will have the same easy breezy relationship to travel, the same boundless optimism, or sense of global opportunity that I once had. 

Perhaps that’s a good thing. Maybe my own early-20s optimism was fuelled by the kind of propaganda that Hansen details in her book. I think it would be good for America, and by extension, good for the world, if we could part ways with that myth. If more Americans could do the work to shed that default setting.

Because what I am writing about here is not that the UK is so great, and that America is so bad, but rather that the chasm between the exported presence of America and the lived reality on the ground has never seemed wider. It’s why I balk each time I’m asked that question. It’s why I choose to live here, and not there. It’s why, one day, I hope I stop getting asked to justify it. 

With thanks to

Yasmeen Serhan

for feedback. Check out her Substack Foreign Correspondence and her excellent work for Time Magazine.

Things I enjoyed reading

• What drove Aaron Bushnell to set himself on fire in the name of the war in Gaza? This piece is a nuanced and non-judgemental look at a life’s tragic end. [NY Mag]

• Genuinely good marriage advice. [Shannon Watts]

• This piece about Kanye West’s architectural monstrosity in Malibu is jaw-dropping stuff, expertly reported. [New Yorker]

• Adam Curtis convincingly argues against the era self expression, which has led us to forget that all the real power lies in the collective. [The Creative Independent]

• No one talks about Covid anymore, but the hangover from that period is still shaping our lives, our mood, our politics. [NY Times]

• Oliver Burkeman on how to bypass that merciless, unforgiving drill sergeant that lives in your head. [The Imperfectionist]

Things I enjoyed listening to

• The Small Bow podcast is back! I enjoyed this interview with writer Emily Gould on mental health, living in a two-writer marriage, and just generally going through it. [The Small Bow]

• “I had put so much energy into figuring out how not ot lose myself to caregiving, that I completely ignored the possibility that I might, in fact, find some of my self there.” [Death, Sex & Money]

• Miranda July’s new novel All Fours is all I want to talk about at the moment. So I enjoyed hearing her talk about how writing it intersected with her own life. [Changes with Annie McManus]

Work with me

For the first time in a while, I have a little space in my freelance writing and consulting practice to take on clients. I can offer one-off strategy calls or ongoing support in the areas below.

• Crafting a content strategy that meets your readers/audience where they are

• Building a compelling newsletter for your brand that people actually want to open

• How to describe your big project, personal brand, or business in 100 words

• Writing, editing, ghostwriting, and editorial support

I’ve worked with people from this newsletter audience before and it’s always been such a positive experience! You can read more about my work and professional background here. Get in touch rosiespinks@gmail.com.

ICYMI

In case you missed it, I published an interview with the author and big thinker Africa Brooke this month. We talked about personal responsibility, self sabotage, and what the culture wars are really about. I really enjoyed it.

Word soup

“I’ve never known a writer who didn’t feel ill at ease in the world. Have you? That’s part of why we write.” —Andrea Barrett

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