how to explain to your kids that they are aliens
My legal status is currently almost congruent with my cultural identity. In Romania, where I was born and raised as a Hungarian, I was not an alien. I was part of a minority. In Germany I became a German citizen after relinquishing my Romanian citizenship, so I was not an alien, but a Spätaussiedler, an immigrant of German ancestry.
Finally I almost managed to bring my legal status in line with my cultural identity: a Central European in the Midwest, a legal alien.
My wife says I shouldn’t call myself an alien or even a legal alien, though. She says they don’t use that technical term any more in the US but another technical term: ‘permanent resident’ or the non-technical term: ‘recent immigrant’. This is technically correct, since the Wikipedia defines an alien as someone “who has temporary or permanent residence in a country (which is foreign to him/her)” It further proposes that he or she “ may be called a resident alien of that country. This is a subset of the aforementioned legal alien category.”
My personal view on the matter is that there are advantages in being a bit of an outsider: you can distance yourself more easily from the local forms of culturally accepted idiosyncrasies (like no speed limit in Germany or shooting your family, neighbors and presidents in the US, or beating your wife in Hungary) and have more fun discovering new manifestations thereof.
I only run into difficulties when I am pressed by my children who are dual citizens of Hungary and Germany to give coherent explanations. I keep on avoiding to discuss this issue until they grow a bit more so they can read How To Be An Alien by George Mikes (whose contributions to Radio Free Europe were definitely funnier than mine and so are his explanations regarding the legal and cultural status of being an alien).
But I might still have to teach them somehow the lesson Sting learned as an Englishman in New York:
“It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say.”
Sedaris lowered himself again
David Sedaris lowered himself again: he told dirty jokes during a performance in Madison, Wisconsin: Celebrated humorist Sedaris not above ribald comedy at Overture
That would have been perfectly acceptable in any country in East or South Europe, where political correctness is not part of the national hypocrisy toolbox.
Back in the late 1990s I did business development in East Europe for a German company and all export business development managers assembled every year three times to exchange their ideas and experiences at the German headquarter. On one of these occasions we had to be trained to use a new software but the software manager had left for vacation without leaving the password for his substitute. It took the substitute about two hours to reach him and during this time we all told dirty jokes, except our German colleagues who were embarrassed since the ribald words marking the punch line of a joke translated into German were only ribald and vulgar but not funny.
Our German colleagues shook their heads incredulously also when I told them that little booklets entitled ‘The best Gypsy Jokes’ and ‘The Best Jew Jokes’ are sold at every railway station and at hundreds of other places in Budapest by Gypsies. And I’m sure they are collected and published by Jews.
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