Butter Face

Sweet Lord, that's loud

In that ever amorphous subject on which I majored in college, there has always been room for expansion. Want to create something new? Combine geography with any other topic, and you've got yourself a new discipline! Here's one, gleaned from the New York Times article above: geographies of sound (actually, I'm sure it already exists). Let's create another one: geographies of memory, and now we've got a jumping off point for this here blog post.

As the article attests, Cairo, Egypt, is sensory overload. Clinging to the Nile beneath the baking Saharan sun, the city is home to more than 15 million people, all trying to carve their lives out of North Africa's most crowded corner. A crucible of humanity, it is loud, hectic, frustrating, exhilarating, and above all else, memorable.

The sheer force of sensory assault embeds Cairo so deeply within one's memory that not much is required to precipitate a flood of recollection. To this day, whenever I walk out of my house to the smell of smoke, I'm back on Cairo's hazy streets. Wake me with a call to Islamic prayer over a loudspeaker, and you betcha I'm back in that awks expat apt. Slaughter a goat before my very eyes? Yep, Cairo. The list of inside jokes and humorous anecdotes that Sarah, Amulya, and I amassed over those four winter weeks would fill an entire blog, but for the sake of relating my Latin American adventures, one memory stands out.

Deep within the twisting alleyways of the famous Khan al-Khalili market, I was hunting for souvenirs. I can say without reservation that no country is as chockablock full of touristic kitsch as Egypt. Only there can one buy miniature pyramids filled with glitter AND giant pharaonic cat statues. As I paced from stall to stall, hoarding the glittery pen-holders as if they were ancient loot, the cat-calls began (not from the statues). The Egyptian peddlers and touts were admiring the two lovely hijab-less ladies flanking my either side. "You are lucky man," they exclaimed. "Where are you from?"

Sarah and I responded tersely, "America."

"Ah, of course," their eyes fixed on my fat American wallet and Sarah's...hair. Then to Amulya, "Where are you from?"

"America," answered Mools, an Indian-American, Telugu, Brown, and Ethiopian look-a-like

The response: "But...but...your face..."

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Flash forward a year and a half later, and I'm in a whole different kind of geography: a cold, wet, and quiet border crossing between Chile and Argentina. That sound, that nearly constant roar of humanity that the NYT article so articulately describes, is absent, replaced instead by the silence of a late Fall's snow. The memory, however, is nearly the same.

Out on an excursion from Valdivia's protest-weary bore, my two Michigander friends and I are being assigned positions in a single-file line. As is standard procedure at Chile's rigid customs outposts, an officer walks down the line, barking names and connecting them to faces. As he nears the line's gringo-trio of an end, his accent uneasily forces out a pair of English names, "Will Cotton, Michael Levengood," and then with Spanish ease, "Teresa Asevedo." Teresa hands him her passport, and he returns a puzzled stare. "You are American?"

"Si, soy Norteamericano," Ms. Asevedo, the all-American granddaughter of a Mexican, explains in her (in)famous Spanish accent.

"Como es posible?" Customs-man questions.

Translation: "But...but...how?"

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The act of traveling doubles as an adventure in confronting misconception. Whether held by the traveler about a foreign land or by the foreigner about a traveler's home, misconceptions and stereotypes are a constant element of life abroad. The United States lives and dies by a unique position within this scheme of misunderstanding. At once, we are the world's most known country; world-renowned (and at times loathed) for our president, our wars, our Coca-Colas, McDonald's, and celebrities. On the flip side, our country is also one of earth's most mis-known.

Mis-known is an altogether different beast than unknown. Ask Americans, "How do you feel about Chile?" and the responses would probably run the gamut from "What, who, are you offering me food?" to "Oh, you mean Latin America's most economically developed and politically stable country?" That is how I've explained it to inquiring students. "Some Americans know a great deal about Chile, other's have never heard of it; some care, others turn a blind eye, and there are many people in between these extremes."

Ask a Chilean, "How do you feel about the United States?" and I can assure you the unknown "who, what?" response will not be heard. You'll sense instead emotion, admiration, contempt, thoughtful reflection, or gawd knows what else. Same goes for those feisty Egyptians or for almost any nationality. In all cases, however, the reactions are based on the great mis-known.

Whether from the inside or out, nobody truly knows a country. The nation state is far too complex an idea, human beings themselves too diverse. There will always be a matter of misunderstanding and incompleteness. But this has never stopped people from learning, teaching, and offering their own two-cents on the world beyond their borders. That is what I'm doing in this blog, and it's what I do daily as a "cultural ambassador" from the United States to Chile.

Sometimes the debates are heated, as in that chilly La Serena hostel last month. Battle lines were drawn and it was a trio of socialist-leaning Chileans vs. a pair of not-so-socialist Americans, assorted Europeans in between. Other times the commenting goes on behind others' backs. If only I had a (thousand) peso for every time I've complained about Chilean protest culture. And then there are the angering revelations, like when somebody told me they world rather study in England than in the U.S. out of a fear of terrorism.

Luckily, there are also those funny little anecdotes, the harmless misunderstands that make us laugh. In the case of Amulya, everything was American but her face; for Teresa, everything Chilean except her passport.

At times I've tried to correct these little mistakes. In Jordan, I once took flack for explaining to a incredulous taxi driver that the U.S. really did have a landscape similar to the Jordanian deserts. In Chile, I shot back, ""Umm...I think you're more likely to be killed by a terrorist in central London than in rural Michigan."

Other times I've let it slide, in that Cairo market and on the Chilean border. Though each time I wished I had offered some knowledge. After all, "The U.S. has a large Indian-American community; in fact, there's a massive Hindu temple in my hometown," and "the U.S. is home to over 45 million Latinos...that's three times the population of Chile!"

I've come to realize that the best way to correct and instruct is to explain that the U.S. is diverse, really really diverse. I tell my students that geographically, we've got it all. Culturally, even more. We're not all from Hollywood, and we ain't all Texans. We have different accents, languages, skin colors, religions, values, and opinions. America is everything you see on television, and it's everything you don't. America is what you think it is, but more.

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The great thing about traveling is that it allows you to know the world through memory: not simply recollections of what you have read, heard, or seen on television, but of actual experiences and people. A mental melting pot of sound, smell, and sight is your ultimate souvenir, far more valuable than a glittery sphinx or alpaca figurine. The impact on the great mis-known, however, can be mixed. Misconceptions are either broken or reinforced, stereotypes created or shattered. And to travelers, a foreign country can become everything beneath her countenance, or nothing but her face.