My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [102]
Of course, for some people the identity crisis at the root of an unmoored personality is a bit more fundamental. Immigrants, for example, have to navigate between the increasingly distant and mysterious world they come from and the just-as-confusing place they come to inhabit. In my case, where I come from isn’t exactly a mystery. Going back centuries I can find out almost anything about my ancestors—where they lived, how many children they had and, most important of all, where they went to college. And these people had a definite identity. They were, if not entirely uniform as a group, far more like one another than not. For starters, their ancestors came from England (East Anglia, for the most part) and made the voyage to America as families, rather than as individuals. That’s important, because the settlers of New England were almost disgustingly pro-family, to the extent that they actually outlawed single people and forced them to move in with other families if they couldn’t form their own. They were also middle-class—tradesmen, artisans, ministers—and superbly educated. But the most important thing they shared was similar worldviews, like that stubborn loyalty to the past and a certainty that old ways were better than new ones. One of the more eye-opening facts about the descendants of the Pilgrims is that after going to all that trouble to get away from the Church of England—you know, prison, exile and crossing the ocean in a leaky ship—many of them converted back to it within just a few generations. Some of my relatives even fought on the English side in the Revolution. The point is, despite their newfound freedom to be anything they wanted in the New World, despite the atomizing tendencies of democracy and despite having almost half a millennium in which to change, my family didn’t. Puritan culture remained strong, even after the Puritans themselves vanished.
So how could someone like me possibly have an identity crisis? How could someone so anchored to history feel unmoored, especially after growing up in Boston?
At least to some extent, Boston was the problem. Ethnically, Boston is many things—Irish, Jewish, black, even Armenian. But what it is above all is Puritan. Puritan values ooze from the city’s institutions, its way of life, its customs. No city in America “looks back” with as much ardor as the city with a historical plaque commemorating something on every corner. No city sees itself as constituting “the elect” the way the Puritans did, unless there’s another outlying, midsized city in America I’m unaware of that calls itself “the Hub of the Universe.” No city is as consumed by education, and very few have the same overall climate of harsh sobriety. Growing up in Boston means that you see things like a hostility to fashion, an aversion to self-promotion and the name Caleb as, well, normal. In order to realize how peculiar such things actually are, it’s better to be displaced, and the more violently the better.
In that sense, the experience I’ve had over the last two years has been a lucky one. First came the disassembly of self, the softening up of an already tenuous psyche. Then came exposure to values—potent ones—that were the opposite of those I grew up with, from the way immigrants tend to look forward and care more about results than process, to the way small business isolates you from the rest of the world, as opposed to being embedded in all that family and history. What I’ve been experiencing, in other words, is not just displacement but a clash of fundamentally conflicting outlooks, that of the immigrant entrepreneur and that of the Puritan: someone moving up and anxious to move up even faster versus the chaperones, the people trying to put the brakes on God’s country of the future.
Which is all a roundabout way of saying that I’ve gained some perspective, I suppose. And perspective is an important thing; it may even be the thing. But some conflicts can