Star Lounge: American, Americaner, and Americanest Ways to Speak a Foreign Language

It's a struggle. I write this the week of our Italian midterm and I have no idea what I'm going to do aside from study my little butt off. But believe me: the luster is gone (or was it ever there?), but I'm enjoying Rome just as much as my first week.

It's been fun speaking in English to all the English speakers in the city. I'm making a collection: not just my classmates, but other Americans from California, Iowa, New York. I've collected Australians and Englishmen and Scots. Beacons in a sea where I'm too lazy to buckle in and learn how to swim. The Pantheon is a short walk from school--but everything else is a mile away.

A gorgeous fountain (that's in front of the Pantheon) at night (a short walk away from school).

This is a short point of personal contention for me. Maybe you'll agree: I'm slightly ashamed that the best (and, really, only) Italian I know is how to order food in short baby-sentences. It's bad, folks. That's why I'm torturing myself so I can get this midterm done.

The word for this is "liminal." The word became more popular among my Internet-brained generation for various reasons slightly beyond the scope of my comprehension. But what it means is, Between points; a transitionary stage. The question is, though, how much am I really transitioning?

In what one might call an effort to buff up my word count, I will illuminate another passage from one of my school essays, this time my submitted midterm for English 240. To be so wordcount-efficient:

I can speak from experience that, having lived in Rome for less than two months already, the experience of being a culture-shocked tourist has left me. Now every restaurant, Italian food a novelty in the United States, is just another place to stop by for a quick lunch between classes. I’d discusses with my family before departing all of the amazing, exotic food I would have eaten in Europe; now it feels as if, though the make and ingredients may be objectively better than in America due to different laws, that the food is just food; a workman’s thing, sustenance for students. I, too, wonder what the newly-arriveds see in it. Yet I do not speak the language. I know the key phrases to order food and drink, but I cannot hold a conversation in Italian. [...] I live almost as a local does, though my friend group is restricted to my classmates almost, the people I flew in with and who speak the same brand of the foreign language that I’m also stuck with. 

Italy is beautiful. There's no denying that. For as much of a Debbie Downer as this blog post already is, I have to admit that I cower, feebly, in the beauty and majesty of my host country.

The essay that the above passage is derived from explores a short story by author Jhumpa Lahiri, called "The Boundary." It's about an Italian family hosting a family of tourists in their small village near the coast. It possibly derives from Lahiri's own experiences being an international person, a Bengali American born in London who moved to Italy to fully immerse herself in the language. She describes in an essay, "The Wall," how in Bengal and Italy she's spoken to in English even though she's speaking in their language. This same sense of liminality of identity is seen in "The Boundary"'s protagonist, also possibly South Asian like Lahiri. Not only are the tourists liminal in this space, but so is the hostess herself.

I cannot claim to feel the same level of alienation as any of these people. To remotely compare myself to them would be an immense disrespect to everything Lahiri has worked for and accomplished. I'm just a privileged American student living a cushy semester abroad--I don't struggle nearly as much as Jhumpa Lahiri, who goes as far as to hire people to translate her own Italian-language stories back into her native English. That's dedication.

There is beauty in what she does. She shares in the same beauty as Rome's humanist streets and ancient architecture. It's the same beauty as living in a walkable city for the first time, where you can walk across a living, flowing river, unbound by concrete shelves, and not worry about being run over by cars going fifty miles on an ugly, gray stroad. It's a beauty that I, for all my faults, really, really appreciate.

I haven't been to any other countries aside from Italy this trip. My roommates are a different story. I write this literally a day after three of my roommates--Joe, Drew, and Ivan--returned from Prague in Czechia, a place somehow even more English-friendly than Rome. Next week, during Spring Break, they're going to Morocco and then to Croatia.

I can't fly anymore. It's been just under two months since the nineteen-hour flight from LA to Rome and I'm still tired of planes. I still ache, I still cherish the bed I finally have, after a flight that still feels longer than just under two months. That's why I'm taking the train when I take my mom to Venice, something I triple-promised I'd do--told her we'd see it before it sinks.

A sunny day in Sorrento. Say hi to Joe in the foreground.

For our last overnight excursion, we went to Sorrento, a beach town near Naples. From there we went to the small, touristy island of Capri, just off the small peninsula jutting from the coast. It was a cloudy day, and this was still during the off-season, not quite Spring yet but not quite Winter. The island was empty; we arrived to the port on our ferry and it seemed lively enough, but going up the hill and taking the rickety, underfunded bus to Anacapri, we could see clear as day that we didn't belong here. Not now, and maybe not ever.

That was Capri. I didn't know what to feel. We'd come to exploit the fruits of their labor but the fruit tree was still molted for winter.

And I still don't speak Italian.