It’s all Greek to Me

by Giota Tachtara

Growing up in Greece in the ‘80s and ‘90s, all we knew about Michigan was that it was the name of one of the two certificates we could get for English as a foreign language: The Michigan English Test (MET). The other one was from Cambridge University. I got both, and then I went and fought tooth and nail with state bureaucracy to get a teaching certificate. I felt pretty good about myself. I felt even better about my English language skills when I got a journalism degree from UCLA. From Athens to Los Angeles, Michigan still sounded like a faraway, semi-mythical place about which my knowledge amounted to a few pop culture facts from Detroit.

Then my parents’ worst fear came true: while studying in the USA, I fell in love with an American and I eventually followed him to a little college town where he started studying for his Phd. “Ann Arbor?” my parents gasped in unison. “WHERE IS THAT?” The word Michigan came up and they looked at each other. My father, a mechanic for the Greek Air Force, knew of Michigan and Ford, my mother, whose unpaid labor as a stay-at-home mom gifted us a great childhood, knew Michigan only as the place where people from her parents’ hometown had immigrated to and never come back.

So I came to Ann Arbor MI with an immigrant visa, sponsored by my American husband. I got a green card in the mail. I survived my first winter. And a horribly humid summer. I met new people through the Modern Greek program at the University of Michigan, I heard their stories of postdocs and research and teaching, which had nothing to do with my own experience or the experience of the new wave of immigrants created by the financial crisis of 2011, which the IMF policies intensified and have prolonged until today. I read Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex again with a renewed interest. I heard his talk when he visited Ann Arbor as part of a book tour. I discovered the writings of Dean and Natalie Bakopoulos. I studied the neighboring town of Ypsilanti, named after a general from the Greek War of Independence whose statue I never, in my wildest imagination as a writer, thought I would visit here in Michigan, two centuries after his heroic acts. Through music, food and nostalgia, I tried to connect to the experience of Greek Americans, but I couldn’t. I still had the wrong passport color.

All my confidence in my language skills from the old Michigan and Cambridge certifications vanished in thin, chilly air when people started asking me politely “where my cute accent was from.” Uber drivers asked me for recommendations for Greek restaurants. Grecophiles asked me to write their name down in Greek letters. University of Michigan professors recited passages from ancient dramas expecting nothing less than spontaneous combustion from me. In Ann Arbor, my accent is generally “cute” or “interesting.” But it becomes downright annoying to everyone involved when I have to spell my name over the phone. Or my email. Or when I have to spell my kids’ names now, two boys with ancient Greek names, Turkish middle names (don’t even ask) and their American dad’s last name, which comes from German roots and lost the umlauts somewhere in Ellis island, which they replaced with extra vowels that sound like consonants over the phone and make everything even more complicated. And that’s just the beginning of the phone call, the initial questions, which in every other case are supposed to last only a few minutes. Not half an hour of confusing explanations. And no, thank you, I don’t want to speak to a Spanish representative, honestly my Spanish is worse than my English, but I can speak French pretty well, do you have an option like that? Please stay on the line, your call is important to us.

Well, after ten winters and an equal number of humid summers here, I have to admit that—apart from the general gut wrenching and disorienting experience that immigration is and the fact that nobody gets your jokes because we have different cultural references—Michigan is a place you can easily call home. When I’m feeling nostalgic I visit Detroit’s Greektown and find myself sniffing soaps and packs of coffee that transport me back to Athens. Dearborn is the baklava heaven that smells like my grandma’s kitchen during holidays and the professor of Turkish language here at the university made me börek every week when I was pregnant. Over the four years of the Trump presidency, I was never harassed or bullied like the videos I saw circulating online. And please don’t tell my Greek friends that I admitted this, but the beaches in Northern Michigan are truly beautiful. And of course Ann Arbor, the place with no direct flight to Greece, the town my parents had never heard of until middle age, even though they were the ones who paid for the tutors to help me get my Michigan certification, is the place my kids call home. We chose to have them here at the Mott Hospital when it was brand new, in rooms with views of the Arboretum in all its fall glory, but it still breaks my heart a little bit every time they say home and they mean Ann Arbor.

Don’t get me wrong, I love that they’re so well adjusted, that they get to have an amazing childhood here, but I was secretly wishing that they would identify, even just a little bit, as Athenians. Like me. Their mom with the cute/ interesting/ annoying accent who, despite years of journalism and writing about feminism and women’s empowerment, recently had to ask my husband to book a doctor’s appointment for me because it would just be easier. Being a foreigner and an immigrant infantilizes you in so many ways, no matter how successful you were in your life before the green card, and the feeling is horrible. So, I felt bad the rest of the day. Until I visited my doctor, a brilliant Indian woman who told me she loves treating Greeks because she doesn’t have to explain anything, most of the medical terms are greek words that we immediately understand. We instantly bonded over stories of the crazy names baristas scribble on our steaming cups of American coffee every day. I laughed all the way back to the reception, found the check-out booth smiling, where I realized I have to spell my name to the young woman behind the plexiglass divider, under my mask, with loud noises all around us.

O Zeus help us all.