An American abroad.

"Why are you in Amsterdam?" I've been asked that question frequently in recent months. Perhaps the time has come to answer it.

I've always thought of myself as quintessentially American--half Protestant and half Catholic, half Yankee and half Southern, descended from Polish immigrant grandparents and from 17th-century English colonists. My Ph.D. dissertation was on American poetry; I spent the first ten years of my writing career focusing on American literature and film; my 1993 book A Place at the Table was subtitled The Gay Individual in American Society; my latest book, Stealing Jesus, examined the peculiarly American phenomenon of Protestant fundamentalism.

Yet the more I learned about my own country, the more I became aware of my ignorance of the world beyond. For years I wanted to live abroad; my relationship with someone who had a "real job" in New York City made that impossible. When, at 40, I found myself single again, I took a summer trip to the Netherlands, a country I'd never visited. I returned in the fall and winter. By last spring, single no longer, I was planning to move here with my new partner.

What appealed to me here? In part, the combination of familiarity and foreignness. My hometown, after all, was originally New Amsterdam--yet how different the Big Apple is from Amsterdam, with its canals and cobbled streets! Etymologically, the two closest languages to English are Dutch and Frisian (the Netherlands' second language)--yet both sound, to American ears, far more exotic than French or Spanish. (Most people here speak English, so there's no reason to learn Dutch. This clinched it for me: Romantic that I am, I wanted to learn a useless language.)

In a way it didn't really matter where I went. Mainly I needed to be away from America for a while. I wanted to see how my country looked from the outside. And I wanted to have a better take on my own cultural conditioning. For I sensed then what I now know for sure: that if you live in a foreign country for any length of time, you come to recognize that much of what you think of as the way of the world is really nothing more than the product of generations of mindless habit. Occasionally you'll find yourself outraged by the idiocy of "how they do things here." And at times you'll realize that there are wiser ways of thinking about A or B or C than the ways you have accepted as God's truth all your life.

It's particularly illuminating these days to be an American abroad. You grow up being told that America is the center of the universe--but you can't appreciate what that means until you live in another country, seeing how seriously its people take the news from Washington and how extensively our pop culture has become theirs. How much more they know about us than we know about them! (Yet how they misunderstand us.) The Dutch have a schizophrenic take on Americans: They view us as a country of loud, swaggering, overweight, undereducated, hamburger-eating, sneaker-wearing Jerry Springer guests who take for granted our absolute domination of a world about which we know next to nothing; at the same time, they have an inferiority complex about their own culture and a well-nigh uncritical adoration for our music, our movies, our books. For most young Dutch people, the coolest thing you can do is to speak fluent American (not British) English.

To live here is to be more conscious than ever of one's awesome responsibility as a U.S. citizen--for, as a Dutch acquaintance angrily told me, American voters elect every four years a person who is, in effect, president of the world. Some might maintain that we earned that right: For all its follies and evils, America saved the world from both fascism and Communism. Would the Dutch have done the same for us? No. We're a more romantic people than they are--more overtly nation-proud, more stirred by words like liberty. Yet by absorbing so much of American culture, they've begun to make what's good about us a part of who they are. Similarly, I think we can learn much from them--for example, about putting liberty into practice. Perhaps in that way, in a world that grows smaller daily, we can all make the places we live a little better.