Tell Us About the Boy From New York City

One interesting aspect of teaching EFL is that you get to play many different roles. Literally. In the past month alone, I have, with various students, played a real estate broker, a shop assistant at Bloomie's, a hotel clerk at both the Hotel Pennsylvania and the Hotel California, a ticket agent at Penn Station, and a bedraggled husband who insists on moving out of his mother-in-law's apartment. But the role I play with the greatest frequency--indeed, the role I am likely playing while I play any of the dozens of other roles EFL teaching demands of me, as you can see from my description of roles played in the past month--is my personal favorite: the role of The Boy from New York City.

You see, I happen to be one of those people for whom the question "Where are you from?" has no simple answer. Born in Michigan, raised in New Jersey and Missouri, with parents currently living in Kansas and a long stint of living in the City That Never Sleeps, I often find, Stateside, that I have difficulty saying which of these places I am really from. But in Moscow, I feel little guilt about glossing over all of this tortuous personal history and saying unambiguously that I'm from New York.

Part of that, of course, is that my students don't care that much where I am from in America. To many of them, American geography is about as hazy as the Moscow air on a midwinter morning. I have been asked--more than once, and on each occasion in all seriousness--where in New York Hollywood is located. I feel I owe my students an answer they're likely to have heard of.

There is also a more devious reason for me to tell students I'm from New York. In a weird way, this makes me an authority. If students have fantasized about going to America, they have fantasized about seeing New York. By telling my students this fiction, I suspect, I make New York more real for them--in the same way that, for a West Village native, meeting someone from Russia make it easier to believe that you don't actually fall off the earth if you go east from LaGuardia. Being from New York, I get to tell them that such fabulous places as Penn Station, Bloomie's, and, yes, even the offices of Corcoran Realty do indeed exist--and invite my students to pretend they're there.

I also tell my students I'm from New York because it quickly establishes me as an American--and, in my students' mind, the most authentically American kind of American. When I tell them New York is the Big Apple, that our airlines tickets are not single but one-way, and that they should ask for the restroom, not the toilet, at Bloomie's, they believe me. It's nice to be believed--even if the price you pay is having to play a role rather than be completely yourself.

But the most important reason I tell this lie is that in my heart, I really am the Boy from New York City. When I think about going home--a thought that occurs pretty often these days, as the summer approaches and I contemplate that I have less than two months left in Moscow--it isn't my parents' three-bedroom house in Wichita, Kansas that my thoughts turn to. For one thing, my parents moved into that house when I was out of college; the house is really their home, their little haven from the cares of their world. For me, it's a place to go to see them, or a refueling stop on the way somewhere else.

No--when I think of home, I think of the hearty flavor of brisket sandwiches at Fine & Schapiro's, the calming feel of undulating waves (are there any other kind?) on the Staten Island Ferry, the sheer terror of crossing Queens Boulevard on foot. I think of a subway that, filled with rats and winos though it may be, at least calls itself a subway, and not a metro, a tube, or an underground. I think of the fabulous views you can see for the price of subway fare--New Jersey from Riverside Park, Manhattan from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, the Brooklyn (not Manhattan) skyline from the Smith and 9th Street station on the F and G lines.

Scarlett O'Hara can keep the red earth of Tara. I'll take the Fairway in Red Hook any day.