Home is where You are Happy
Every immigrant leads a double life.
Every immigrant has a double identity and a double vision,
being suspended between an old and a new home,
an old and a new self.
The very notion of a new home, of course,
is in a sense as impossible as the notion of new parents:
parents are who they are; home is what it is.
Yet home, like parentage, must be legitimized through love;
otherwise, it is only a fact of geography or biology.
Most immigrants to America
found their love of their old homes betrayed:
They did not really abandon their countries;
their countries abandoned them,
and in America, they found the possibility of a new love,
the chance to nurture new selves.
Not uniformly, not without exceptions.
Every generation has its Know-Nothing movement.
Its understandable fear and hatred of alien invasion
is as true today as it always was,
but in spite of all this,
the American attitude remains unique.
Throughout history, exile has been a calamity;
America turned it into a triumph
and placed its immigrants in the center of a national epic.
The epic is possible because America is an idea
as much as it is a country.
America has nothing to do with loyalty to a dynasty
and very little to do with loyalty to a particular place,
but everything to do with loyalty to a set of principles.
To immigrants, those principles are especially real
because so often they were absent or violated
in their native lands.
It was no accident in the '60s and '70s,
when alienation was in flower,
that it often seemed to be "native" Americans
who felt alienated,
while aliens or the children of aliens upheld the native values.
"Home is where you are happy."
Sentimental, perhaps, and certainly not conventionally patriotic,
but is appropriate for a country
that wrote the pursuit of happiness into its founding document.
That pursuit continues for the immigrant in America,
and it never stops, but it comes to rest at a certain moment.
The moment occurs
perhaps when the immigrant's double life and double vision
converge toward a single state of mind,
when the old life, the old home fade into a certain unreality:
places one merely visits, practicing the tourism of memory.
It occurs when the immigrant learns his ultimate lesson:
above all countries, America, if loved, returns love.