The exception was Turkey. Whereas Iraqis, Syrians, Palestinians, and Egyptians would still find themselves tethered to colonial rulers, the Turks won their independence from the Western powers and rebuilt their country themselves, an achievement about which they would never fail to remind me. Only one more world war later, Turkey, showered with funds by the nascent American empire, began to reconstruct its fragile identity in vague imitation of its benefactor. I learned about the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in college; I knew then that millions of dollars had gone to two countries called Greece and Turkey. But when I moved to Istanbul, at age twenty-nine, I had never questioned whether these funds had been anything other than some benevolent American act. In my mind, the scene played out like a rich man in town building a new school; the American president showed up with a sack of money and dropped it on a desk, no strings attached, and the townsfolk cheered with gratitude.
As Crane’s organization had described, there is a difference between knowledge and that “beautiful place beyond it.” But what would I learn by leaving America that was beyond good intentions, beyond sympathy, beyond the luxury of time? What else was there? I had hardly studied World War I. I had no idea that the people of the Middle East had been feeling betrayed by Americans for a hundred years. I had no idea that they had ever thought so highly of the United States in the first place.
A young Turkish artist who had just returned from a decade in New York once said to me, during a brief hopeful era in Turkey, “Western history is a farce and everyone knows it. Perhaps we can take the values that Americans have abused for material gain and do something better with them.” I didn’t tell him that most Americans would have no idea what he was talking about—that I, to some degree, also did not—but by then that feeling of newly recognized ignorance was one I knew well. You cannot grow up in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States of America and live abroad in the twenty-first and not feel it all the time. If I learned something about Turkey, I received it, as unsophisticated but curious people do, as a happy addition to my mind. But if I learned something about America in Turkey—or later in Egypt or Greece or Afghanistan or Iran—it felt like a disruption. My brain experienced the acquisition of such knowledge like a cavity filling: something drilled out, something shoved in, and afterward, a persistent, dull ache and a tooth that would never be the same.
*
IN THE WEEKS before my departure from New York, I spent hours explaining Turkey’s international relevance to my bored loved ones, no doubt deploying the cliché that Istanbul was the bridge between East and West. At first, my family was not exactly thrilled for me; New York had been vile enough in their minds. My brother’s reaction to the news that I had won this generous fellowship was something like “See? I told you she was going to get it,” as if it had been a threat he’d been warning the home front about. My mother asked whether this meant I didn’t want the pretty luggage she’d bought me for Christmas, imagining it wasn’t fit for the Middle East, and like most women of her generation quietly hoorayed her daughter’s adventure. My father, who feared that Islamic terrorists would soon bomb the entire Eastern Seaboard into the Atlantic, stayed up one night watching Pope Benedict’s historic 2006 visit to Istanbul on CNN. I woke up to an e-mail time-stamped 3:00 a.m. that read: “Did you know that Turkey is 99 percent Muslim? Are you out of your mind?”
It is astonishing to me now, but I remember that I, the New Yorker who believed herself so different from her origins, replied calmly: “In Turkey, they restrain Islam. They make the women take their head scarves off and put them in a box before they are allowed to enter university campuses”—as if the women themselves did not mind this humiliating and inconvenient experience, as if I would ever deposit a precious piece of my wardrobe into some policeman’s cardboard box. At that time, Western thinkers heralded Turkey as the one successful Muslim country, and its secularist founder, Atatürk, as the kind of dictator even a liberal could love. I wasn’t just trying to reassure my father; apparently I feared Islam in those days, too. We had all lost our marbles after September 11.
I was inflicting myself on Turkey without good or sentimental reason. I had no connections to the country, but then again I had no connections to anywhere. I was American, two times removed from any European provenance or familial history. I once read that children who grow up hearing beloved family narratives have stronger senses of direction in life; for example, kids who know how their grandmother escaped the Holocaust with diamonds sewn into her jacket, or how their grandfather integrated the high school football team, find it easier to imagine their own life’s purpose. Those without a narrative feel anxious and insecure. There is no cultural self to find, no spicy-smelling kitchen in which to rediscover distant cultural memories, no crimes or mistakes to learn from and redeem, no historical events to compare to current ones. My immigrant grandparents did what the United States of America told them to do: wipe the slate clean. The price of entrance was to forget the past. I was moving to Turkey in part because I had nowhere else to go.
Where I was from, few people chose to live abroad; many didn’t even go on vacation. My town was located by the Jersey Shore, two hours from New York, in a county both working-class and filthy rich that would one day turn red for Donald Trump. My extended family operated an inexpensive public golf course; I worked there in summers as the hot dog girl; politics in my life were limited to small-businessman woes and prejudices: taxes and immigrants and not much else. My town, populated almost entirely by the descendants of white Christian Europeans, had few connections to the outside world, perhaps by choice, and so their resentments and fears festered with little reason to ever be expressed to anyone but one another. I don’t remember much talk of foreign affairs, or of other countries, rarely even of New York, which loomed like a terrifying shadow above us, the place Americans went either to be mugged or to think they were better than everyone else. That was my sense of the outside world: where Americans went to be hurt or to hurt others. When I got into an elite college, I took this small-town defensiveness with me, but slowly discovered that the world was actually kaleidoscopic, full of possibilities.