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On a warm afternoon in late April 2001, I walked down Gedimino, smiling at spring. I was jet-lagged from my first trip to America and still intoxicated by its nature, food, seemingly unrestricted personalities, and cosmopolitan vibe. A trolleybus rolling by slowly like a large yellow chunky caterpillar, its whiskers gripping the wires above, was about to hit a large puddle. I quickly jumped to the side, trying to avoid the splash, when I bumped into an acquaintance.
“Oh, Amerikonka is back!” he said.
And just like that, without even a chance to say hello, I crossed the threshold from local to semi-foreign. I had spent three weeks in the Bay Area visiting my husband, Giedrius. Two months ago, in February, he had started a new job as a senior software analyst at a start-up in Oakland. It was he who turned me into Amerikonka.
Was it my smile, a light suntan, or my desire to be a global citizen dividing my life between Vilnius and the Bay Area that I shared with my friends and colleagues that prompted him to label me?
I didn’t know whether to get upset with “Amerikonka” or laugh it off. That day, I shrugged it off as a strange nuisance. I felt no different about myself – a 32-year-old woman, married, a feminist, researcher, historian, lecturer, and co-host and co-editor of a radio program. Of course, I was also a Lithuanian. I had no idea it was just the beginning of a rift, and I didn’t know how to navigate it. A few years later, my friend Saulius, when arranging a meeting for us in Vilnius with our Las Vegas Lithuanian friends Vida and Kastis on his phone, joked, “My Amerikonai wants to meet with your Amerikonai.”
The words Amerikonas and Amerikonka do not simply translate into “American” (Amerikietis). The word Amerikonka connotes not just any American but a Lithuanian American. Amerikonas has its roots in twentieth-century Lithuanian cultural imaginary. Writer Petras Cvirka, in the hugely popular satirical 1934 novel Frank Kruk, mocked a farm boy, Pranas Krukelis, who transformed into Frank Kruk, a casket maker, in the United States and who returned as a businessman full of particular mannerisms, declaring love for his homeland. His business failed in Lithuania, but he kept retelling his success stories – only to be mocked. The play, based on the book, often aired on our TV screens during the Soviet occupation. New adaptations are still performed in theaters.
No longer only a fictional character, Amerikonka became a social type that arrived in Lithuania with independence. In the early 1990s, these people looked and smelled different. It was usually a person who had escaped Soviet occupation or whose parents were refugees. Amerikonka(s) spoke accented Lithuanian, smiled a lot, and wore brightly colored jackets easily spotted in the sea of gray and black on the sidewalks. They also often used the phrase in accented Lithuanian – “But in Chicago…” meaning everything was better in the US. The Amerikonkas in their 60s looked rested and wore shorts despite their far-from-ideal bodies. They seemed intrusive. A type of Amerikonka taught English to Lithuanians and advised them on all matters of the world – what to eat, how to behave, or how to decorate their apartments. They proudly wore Lithuanian national costumes and worried about the disappearance of traditional culture. Amerikonai also bought up old town apartments for cheap as investment properties while professing their love to Lithuania, but not entirely moving back to their beloved Lietuva. In some sense, it resembled a relationship between sophisticated “Westerners” and the unkempt locals. If the male version – Amerikonas – could be associated with wealth and bossiness, an Amerikonka was more grotesque.
In the 1990s, Amerikonas was a benevolent and sarcastically endearing character named The Best Man (pabrolys) on the satirical TV show Dviračio žinios. The character was based on the senior adviser to the Lithuanian president (Valdas Adamkus), an Amerikonas himself. The Best Man greeted everyone with “Hi guys,” often inserting “well” between sentences, and laughed a lot. He confessed that he became the senior adviser only because he was the best man at the president’s wedding and vacationed with him in Mexico every year. The Best Man was like Jason Sudeikis’s character on Saturday Night Live, inserting “babe” into every sentence while chewing gum.
Stereotypes are vicious in how they slip in, spread, and take over the imagination. I was guilty of peddling them, too. Amerikonka implied a posture, foreignness, and a sense of superiority in my milieu. Only recently, I laughed at the stories of those who came back from visiting their relatives, working illegally as home aids or construction workers. Some of them enacted accented Lithuanian after a few months in Chicago. Many told stories about dumb, fat, but moneyed people who were not able to develop sincere relationships, who lived in messy homes, had no skills to navigate their lives, ate tasteless food, wore ugly clothes, and drove big cars instead of walking. These stories were strange and, indeed, entertaining. Students, actors, engineers, and construction workers shared similar narratives, creating an image of the country as materialist, soulless people who cared only about money and lacked intellectual and cultural depth. There was no good coffee or decent food in America. It was easy to cheat over there, too.
To be called an Amerikonka was not exactly a compliment. It caught me off guard and felt like a bee sting. Neither my husband nor I aspired to become Americans or run away from Lithuania. The world was becoming more global and connected, and we yearned to travel and experience that world. Giedrius went to the US to work in the Bay Area’s booming IT industry, which attracted people like him from around the world. It seemed like a three- to six-year adventure, so why not eat at McDonald’s, abstain from coffee, get a big car, and drive through wide open spaces like in the movies Easy Rider and Paris, Texas?
When the job contract was signed and we were waiting the expected six months for the H1-B visa to arrive, on weekend nights, when the dial-up rates were lower, we searched on Alta Vista and Yahoo for information about Oakland and the Bay Area from our home computer in Vilnius. The first image that took a while to download via the slow dial-up connection was an image of the Oakland Gay Ballet dancing Swan Lake on the lawn of Lake Merritt. At that time, we were watching bootlegged TV shows dubbed in monotonous Russian. The X Files was one of our favorites. On the show, FBI agents often consulted Berkeley programmers about aliens. It seemed like a strange and fun place to be. The University of California, Berkeley, was also near Oakland. I browsed its library catalog online. It had every book I wanted to read! I would improve my English, read books for half the year, and then teach for another half in Vilnius.
In March 2001, I landed at San Francisco International Airport, full of stereotypes and ready for an adventure.
My preconceptions about terrible American food and fake and dull people melted faster than ice cream on a warm day during my first month in the Bay Area. It was easy to crack the assumptions of tasteless food, living not far from a gourmet ghetto in North Berkeley’s vibrant restaurant scene. People talked about food like they spoke about art. Green salad was considered a whole meal.
It was easy to be overwhelmed by choices of deliciousness for every taste and affordability, from a prix fixe dinner at legendary Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse that gave Californian cuisine its reputation, to latkes with apple sauce at Saul’s, to a 99-cent-per-item Chinese diner down the street. I loved tasting slices of ripe, juicy varieties of nectarines, apricots, and oranges at farmers’ markets in Berkeley and Oakland. Every visit to Berkeley Bowl, a local grocery supermarket, where an array of eggplants, peaches, bok choy, and other greens from local farms and around the world were available, was an exploration of the food world.
Watching fog roll into the bay on a late summer afternoon, with a still-warm slice of thin- crust Cheeseboard pizza, made by a collective of worker-owners, and a cold Sierra Nevada beer on the rooftop of the place at Cedar Street, it was hard to complain about my life.
Giedrius’s coworkers, Leo, Marius, Somitra, Nishar, and Michelle – from India, Montana, South Africa, Canada, and California – invited us to their homes, and we joined them to go on hikes, skiing, to the movies, and to jazz concerts. Nisar was a connoisseur of German cinema, and Somitra introduced me to Jhumpa Lahiri’s and Monica Ali’s books. Michelle was a guide to the Mission neighborhood in San Francisco and electronic music. Leo taught us about cultural idioms and TV shows and waited at the San Francisco International Airport to pick us up from a trip to Vilnius without being asked. He glued the word Vilnius on the office wall clock and adjusted it to Lithuania’s time zone when Giedrius went on vacation, in case they had to call him.
I joined a group at UC Berkeley, where I met feminist researchers and realized the limits of my English and theoretical knowledge. There, I also learned about the existence of “other” Americans and the concepts of “flyover country” and “coastal” America. For some, the Midwest started just east of the East Bay Hills. It turned out that every place had its own assumptions about others.
My cultural geography and history expanded through encounters with people and their stories. I didn’t expect to be overwhelmed by the beauty of the Pacific Coast and the redwood forests. I soaked in the bay air, the morning fog, and the first rays of the sun around noon. And the sunsets! I was possessed. They were so unfamiliar that I wanted to carry them with me. Poet and Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, who ended up living in the Berkeley hills, observed this too, writing in Visions from San Francisco Bay: “There is nothing equally exalted, equally grandiose in Europe; its wildest panoramas are small and tame by comparison.”
In California, I felt much freer than when traveling in Western Europe. In the 1990s, when Lithuania was not yet in the EU, I, like many travelers from unprivileged and poor countries, had to prove the benign nature of my travels by showing invitations to conferences and hotel bookings. Women my age were often perceived as promiscuous at best or potential sex workers at worst. Trafficking in women was not a rare phenomenon in those days. I always felt stark inequality and financial insecurity when abroad.
On my first trip abroad to Berlin in 1995, I was invited with other seminar participants to dinner at a restaurant with white cloth tables and dark green velvet walls. I looked at the menu, not knowing what to order. A waiter brought a plate of three white mushrooms covered in spinach on a beige parsnip puree. That meal cost half of my monthly salary. I couldn’t enjoy the meal despite not having to pay – the food lodged in my throat. There were many indigestible situations like this. Once, at an after-conference dinner in London, a historian asked me if I had a TV growing up or if I knew what a lamb was. I confirmed that I knew it, wondering what she thought of me and the country I was from. On a train ride in Germany in 2001, a man gave my friend and me five Deutschmarks upon learning that we were from Lithuania. He even apologized that he couldn’t give us more.
Time flew by fast. I hardly noticed how three years turned into a permanent residence.
During my visits back home, I didn’t know how to behave. My experience differed from the usual narratives. I didn’t complain, and that was my sin. Upon a visit to Lithuania, a colleague at the Research Institute in Vilnius, where I worked, asked what my husband missed in the US. I asked her to specify.
“Bread, kefir – I mean our food?” She explained.
“None of that,” I said, thinking about the abundance of diverse foods. “So, he is a cosmopolitan.”
“I guess so,” I replied.
“Cosmopolitan” was not a compliment but an expression of suspected adultery to the Lithuanian nation. Cosmopolitans threaded between different cultures, tainting the purity of Lithuanianness. This connotation of cosmopolitan was a residue of the Soviet ideology, suggesting rootless people who admired Western/ bourgeoisie culture and whose faith in the USSR project was questionable. But I liked “cosmopolitan,” dismissing my colleague’s suspicion.
I was annoyed by comments about the US’s absence of good coffee, food, and culture. My friends weren’t shy to mention that Americans were materialistic and lacked authenticity and spontaneity. It would have been wise to nod and let it go, but it peeved me, so I argued sometimes, possibly sliding into Amerikonka. I started noticing a lack of empathy in my successful friends towards the less fortunate ones. I realized that I was also somewhat blind to inequalities when I lived in Lithuania. Also, from afar, my homeland looked less exceptional. Many countries have painful histories. Lithuanians were not the most hardworking, the most honest, or the most curious people. Like everywhere else, they stretched along the spectrum.
Back in the Bay Area, I kept in touch with my friends through email and ICQ chat, but I did not actively seek out other Lithuanians living in the area until I was introduced to Danute, a wonderful person who acted as a hub for local Lithuanian connections in Berkeley. There were two to three hundred Lithuanians there, mostly American born. I also met a couple of dozen IT engineers and their wives holding H1B visas or green cards, young women married to American husbands, and quite a few struggling to obtain legal status. For Lithuania, we were all emigrants, underlining the material needs of our relocation. Emigrants embodied sadness, the struggle to survive, and a longing for their homeland, as represented in Lithuanian literature about migration. The notion of an expat driven by adventure and professional growth had yet to be known.
One day, I received an invitation to an Easter picnic from a new arrival from Kaunas: “Do not become cosmopolitans who grow palm trees in the backyard and sit by the pool.” He sounded like my colleague in Vilnius. As if attending the Easter gathering was proof of my Lithuanianness, the same way eating tacos and not cepelinai endangered my national identity. What kind of Lithuanian was I becoming? As an Amerikonka and a cosmopolitan in Lithuania, I learned another label – Tarybukė, perhaps the most hurtful one.
On another occasion, I went to an annual Lithuanian community event to celebrate Lithuania’s Independence Day at the community hall in the basement of a Catholic church in Berkeley. A guest speaker from Los Angeles, a woman with permed hair and a loud, fiery voice, gave a speech. She called people like me, born in Soviet-occupied Lithuania, Tarybukai, a Lithuanian diminutive meaning “little Soviets.” Tarybukai is a stereotype generalizing the third-wave migration from Lithuania to the US. She spoke as a member of the World Lithuanian Council. According to her, Tarybukai didn’t know what democracy was and selfishly left Lithuania when the country needed help.
“What do you know about democracy?” My friend Agne asked, imitating the zealous guest speakers’ voice.
Agne was one of the first to raise the homemade Lithuanian tri-color flag in June 1988, which had been forbidden since 1944. She participated in every single protest against the Soviets despite the potential risks.
“Shut up, Tarybuke! What do you know, traitor?” I said, joining the game.
Agne smirked, nodding towards the door. We walked out, appalled by the speaker’s patronizing remarks about our choices: taking advantage of the opportunity to choose where to live or travel, a privilege not available during the Soviet occupation.
What did we know about democracy? We fought for it. When Soviet tanks roared on Vilnius streets in 1990 and 1991, we were the ones who tried to understand why our predecessors didn’t resist in 1940. We had to correct it, no matter what. We fought for independence and stood against the tanks in Vilnius on January 13. My husband sat on a box of Molotov cocktails, holding a shotgun inside the parliament building when independence was still hanging by a thread. I lived through the most challenging years of high inflation and radical changes without any idea of running away. I could not associate myself with the narrative of expulsion.
Tarybukė it was. I felt wounded. As if a hump grew on my back, crushing me down to a place not of my choosing. How naïve I was, thinking I stood straight after shrugging off the heaviness of the Soviet occupation. The hunchback was impossible to remove, like a birthmark or biological determinant.
***
A “global life” was way more complicated than I had imagined. Who was I, and where did I belong? I was changing. Every time I went back, I was struck by Lithuania’s homogeneity and irritated by homophobic, racist, and ageist remarks by my former colleagues and friends. Lithuania was rapidly changing, too, as it was preparing for accession to the European Union. Newly built shopping malls became a source of pride. There was nothing like that, one of my friends told me, “not even in America.” The new shopping center, Akropolis, combined restaurants, stores, a movie theater, and a skating rink. Soon, there were the Europa and Hermitage shopping centers in Vilnius. The new Maximas grew like mushrooms in every Lithuanian town. Complaints about the materialism of others while admiring the rise of consumerist culture didn’t seem contradictory.
Meanwhile, where I lived, people gathered signatures against the big box stores, seeking to support mom-and-pop shops. It amused me that Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley sold T-shirts with the hammer and sickle symbols on Berkeley Republic T-shirts. At concerts, people smoked weed openly despite it being illegal. Women I knew didn’t wear makeup or dye their hair. In Berkeley and Oakland Hills homes, people washed and reused plastic bags like my mother in Soviet times. They desired to practice a zero-waste life and bought furniture at Urban Ore, a store that sold salvaged stuff. Global warming and George Bush and Dick Cheney’s creeping “fascist regime” kept them up at night, they explained.
Seeing the inversion of the desires of scarcity and the desires of abundance perplexed me. Sandwiched between Amerikonka and Tarybukė, I felt neither. I was still a feminist, a researcher, a teacher, and a writer. I felt at home between the cultures, figuring out how to inherit my past and embrace the present. I admired American openness – people opening and inviting neighbors and coworkers into their homes, accepting cultural differences, and small talk with strangers, which I was not good at. I drifted apart from my homeland and got closer, yet I have always retained emotional intimacy with Lithuania. My milieu in both countries became more alike than different.
More than twenty years passed. One lazy afternoon, I indulged in a shopping adventure at Eileen Fisher with my friend. She put on white pants, looked at her middle-aged body in the mirror, and asked, “Would I look like an American retiree in Vilnius?”
“You are the one. Embrace your inner Amerikonka!”
We laughed.
