A letter from Meiriceá

Leaving made sense, more sense to others than to me at times, and staying seemed the rasher decision, writes FIONA MCCANN

THE NUMBER of people leaving Ireland as emigrants this year and next is predicted to reach 120,000, according to the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI). There’s something unsettling about seeing yourself in an ESRI statistic, but there it is: I am one of that 120,000, having recently left the country for pastures American. Which makes mine a small contribution to an embarrassing national statistic, reflected within which is the failure of a government to keep its people in work and at home.

Yet I see my own case as somehow outside of the bell curve: neither economics nor unemployment had anything to do with my decision to leave the country this time. I left by choice, having married an American and promised, in some romantic impulse long before the knot was tied, to follow him back to his homeland should he ever choose to return. He did. So I went with him.

In saying that, the ache of departure was softened by the fact that many of my friends were leaving too, most of them not out of financial necessity, but in search of a better standard of living, of a house with a garden or a city with a stronger civic sense, in search of an adventure, a new perspective, a hiatus from home.

They were heading to Melbourne, Berlin, New York, London. Me, I was off to Portland, Oregon, one-time home of my all-time husband.

It may sound deceptively self-sacrificing, this emigrating-for-love stuff. But there was a part of me eager for something new, a restlessness for a change in perspective and a more bankable summer. And what with Obama replacing Bush at the helm and thereby paving the way for all that hopey changey stuff that sits so well with a wannabe immigrant, I saw the United States as returning to its mythical status as the land of promise and possibility that had fuelled teenage fantasies of escape from what I saw as my parochial surrounds.

In leaving Ireland for Meiriceá, I was riding in the wake of generations of Irish before me. Yet the Irish emigrant experience, if such a thing can be generalised, has changed. The internet has put paid to any notion of really starting afresh, and cheap airline tickets and American sitcoms have taken the mystery out of the Land of the Free.

America is different now to how I think it must have seemed to my immigrant predecessors who walked down gangplanks – the Eilis Laceys of Irish history. It has been demystified by mass media and increased global traffic.

As for the Land of Opportunity? That little moniker was bestowed before there was such a thing as Homeland Security. America may be easier to get to than ever, at least for Europeans, but it’s a helluva lot harder to stay. The hell of Ellis Island has been replaced with a hell of form-filling, financial outlay and frustration.

The I-130 was my particular bugbear, the first great hurdle between me and the coveted status of “alien relative”. It required a level of detail which would be considered vulgar in polite society, on top of which I had to amass a variety of documentation, undergo a medical examination that would prove me free of tuberculosis or syphilis, and provide a police record from every country I’d ever lived in for more than 12 months, showing myself to be a clean and law-abiding citizen: for the purposes of US immigration, one is guilty until proven innocent.

My application was made on marriage grounds, and I expected I would have to answer questions about my husband’s preferred brand of shaving cream to prove that our marriage was not a sham.

As it turned out, nobody challenged the legitimacy of our marriage. Instead, it was death by a thousand papercuts: visits to the US immigration office meant forking out wads of cash for processing fees, and dealing with employees behind bomb-proof glass who seemed deeply puzzled by answers that didn’t fit in boxes. Phone calls about our application rarely produced a human voice, but sent us through endless menus before referring us to a website that took years off our lives.

But I’m lucky. The visa came through and – as painful as I found the process – I was constantly aware of how much worse it would have been if I’d spoken a different language, come from a different country or cultural background, or been applying for different reasons. Though it was touch-and-go for a while, I had every reason to believe I would finally prevail. So much for “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”, though. I imagine the wretched refuse might easily get hung up on the paperwork.

Still, when the visa did arrive, my feelings were mixed. I liked my Dublin life, and I liked the people with whom I was sharing it. The city had offered up new charms to me over recent years, and I began to see the increasing appeal of staying in one place for longer than a year or two, of being part of the long-term cultural flow of this country of my birth. There were other reasons not to leave: I had a job I loved; my parents weren’t getting any younger; it was a bad time to try selling a house; the American economy was hardly in much better shape than our own; and in case that wasn’t enough, I was pregnant.

When I spoke of leaving, reluctantly, unconvincingly, not many cautioned me against my exiting Stage Left. In fact, some of those staying were vocal in urging me to grasp what they saw as a fortunate opportunity. Leaving made sense, more sense to others than to me at times, and staying seemed the rasher decision.

SO I LEFT IRELAND and arrived in America, where the culture shock would better be described as a slow and stealthy culture creep. Having grown up on a diet of US sitcoms and films, the language, vocabulary and architecture of the United States were as familiar to me as those of my own country, and in many ways more real, in the stupid way that the streets and families on TV can become more real to us than our own.

But the people I encountered daily weren’t quaint cast members from a happy-ending sitcom, but real Americans – many, many of them – and though the content of their speech is as varied as their global roots, they share something in delivery.

They are forward, friendly and assertive in a way that sticks in the Irish craw. They make unhesitating statements without fear of possible offence, and they seem to care a lot less than us Irish about the impression they’re making on you as they do it.

There are the clichéd differences: how they spell, the volume of their speech, their strangely punctual ways, aversion to clotheslines and obsession with take-out coffee. And there is a difference in landscape: the wide roads with the slow-boat cars bigger than Stoneybatter cottages; the wooden houses sprawled over plots of land that could have fed several families in famine days; the porches and basements; the doorstopper pancakes and motels and drive-thrus.

And some of it seems better and some of it worse than home, and sometimes I commit some cultural faux pas or miss a conversational cue that makes me long for the comfort of a fellow countryman.

At other times I am the smug European, bursting with pride about things like national healthcare, free third-level fees and a national sport played by people who actually hold down other jobs.

Yet the more I find out about America, the less definable it appears, the more complex, the more subtle, the more different, the more the same.

And the more I hang on to my own Irishness, the more I’m forced to question what it really means, what the cultural trappings and songs and expressions and accent and embarrassing habit of apologising for everything, have to do with being Irish, and what being Irish has to do with being me.