The Fake Croatian Luka Marjanovic
A squared flag welcomed me to the USA, reminding me again that I’m different, that my passport doesn’t reflect my nationality, and that our languages are too similar to be different. “We will explain how ‘Word’ works because we have internationals in our class.” says my professor in our first class at college. “I’m going to slowly spell out some of this because we have internationals in our class,” says my professor at the end of the semester. Thirteen years of learning English, learning grammar, conditionals, and tenses, don’t matter when it takes me a semester to learn how to use ‘tea’ or ‘deadass’ in a sentence. It’s funny to mention some long forgotten war in some long forgotten second world country to a second tier immigrant student, and it’s exciting to explain Uber and Monica Lewinsky to the inexperienced and exotic second world citizen. Why do Americans think they’re so funny? “Can you still receive emails when you go back home over Christmas, or did you apply for this incredible college using a messenger pigeon?” asks my first theater director in the USA, who is also a professor. Every conversation leads to my background, 62
