I'm New Here

Today is the fifteenth anniversary of my move from Croatia to the United States. I guess it’s time to stop using the above excuse when I mispronounce “haphazard”, forget a state capital, or get confused about how to use a drive-thru lane¹.

It was maybe two years after the move that I started thinking full-time in English, a language I’d previously only used in the classroom. Oddly, English felt more comfortable in my brain than Croatian ever had. Long sentences were easier to build, idioms were deeper in meaning, and new phrases came more naturally and more frequently. I didn’t feel myself tripping over the grammar or worrying about the vocabulary as much. There always seemed to be a different way to say something if I got stuck on a word.

This is partly due to the prevalence of American culture in, well, much of the rest of the world. I grew up with American cartoons, TV shows, and movies (all beautifully subtitled instead of horribly dubbed). I listened to American music—duh. I used computers set to English.²

And it’s also partly because I was born in one country—along with its own culture, language, and values—called Yugoslavia, a hybrid glued together from disparate peoples after World War I; then it morphed, through a civil war, into another—Bosnia, the previously largely-Muslim, Ottoman-influenced Yugoslavian republic; and then the family moved mere blocks away to a third, Croatia—a predominantly Catholic, Italian-and-Prussian-influenced, “Western-style” country.

All these moves came with tweaks to the way I spoke—Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian, the three big languages of Yugoslavia, are very similar, but the minute differences were seen as absolutely crucial delineators once the warring started between the Yugoslavian republics. It’s as if Texas and California went to war, and saying “y'all” in San Diego went from folksy-cute to a potentially mortal giveaway. Look, it’s one of THEM! 

And what I spoke of mattered as well. You wouldn’t want to profess your love of a (completely apolitical) Serbian band from the 1970s during the war in Croatia in the 1990s. Better to stick to Looney Tunes, My So-Called Life, and Radiohead.

Of all those post-Yugoslavian places I lived in, Croatia is the country with which I mostly associate my childhood. This despite the fact that I lived there a shorter time than in Bosnia, or in the US now. It’s because the place where you went to high school casts such a long shadow over the rest of your life, I think. Croatia was where I made all the friends I remember, all the friends who shaped my tastes and opinions and prejudices. Meanwhile, memories of kids from my early childhood were smudged by the war that transitioned me into teendom.

And my high school memories are fading now as well. I’ve met so many lovely people since 1999; they’re displacing the old friends. Only so much room in the li'l brainbox. I try to keep in mind that this happens, to some extent, to every high-school graduate. People move away, start jobs, start families. Friends become Facebook updates.

Most adults have a home to go back to for the holidays, etc. My immediate family all moved to Florida when I did, so trips back home are now to the “new” home.³ And as for my life in Bosnia, I literally can’t go back to that house. It is now occupied by another family, relocated there by the “other guys’” army when they invaded our hometown. We escaped to the Croatian town across the river and stayed there for years, practically able to look back on the family house we had fled in the middle of the night, unable to visit it. And when the war finally wrapped up and it became safe and legal to cross the border and walk the old streets again, it was still emotionally unsafe. So I never went back. 

But I’ve been in the United States for fifteen years now, and it feels more like home than any other place. The US of A has been inviting and welcoming to me. I’d worried about fitting in—I have always worried this my whole life, and I always will—and was pleasantly surprised to find the people here patient and eager to help a newcomer. This is largely luck, likely; had I been of slightly darker skin, or slightly more visible religious beliefs, or of less middle-class-mainstream needs, things may have turned out differently. That sucks. But this is home now, and the cracks and holes in my home are mine to fix.

In four years, I will have technically been American more than I’ll have been anything else. It has already felt that way for a long while.

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¹ For the first ten or so years here, I’d avoided the drive-thru lane because I—don’t laugh—didn’t know how it worked. I felt silly driving up and asking, ok, what happens now? At some point in my mid-20s, a switch flipped and I’m now generally more eager than anything to ask precisely that: hey, I’ve never done this before, how does it work?

² It still freaks me out today to see an operating system in Croatian. I have no idea what half the words mean, because they were all hastily invented in the late 90s to catch up to decades of American terminology.

³ I live in Portland, OR now, and I prefer it to Florida by a margin as wide as Florida’s highways, though I can’t really complain about spending the holidays there. Or can I…!