“Which language do you think in?”
“English.”
“Oh, so you’ve lived here long enough to use English even in your head?”
“I was born and raised here.” Jokingly: “Are you saying I sound like a foreigner?”
“Oh no, I didn’t say that. I just thought you were from somewhere else.”
“No. I’m from here. And I think in English. But sometimes I dream in Polish.”
“Really?”
“Or Japanese.”
“I can’t imagine….”
“Yeah.” Jokingly: “It’s great to wake up and not know where you are.”

Just another daily encounter I have with the americanos in my classes. Is it my expensive Danish shoes? The more than pea-sized amount of hair gel I apply religiously every morning? (Although that’s a result of my conditioning during the ’80s and bears no reflection on the stamps in my passport.) The fact that I don’t wear tee-shirts on campus? (It’s not that I go shirtless, I just wear collared dress shirts. Ironed. And tucked in. (I mean, after all, they aren’t ‘collared’ people.))

In my Ottoman Empire history course, I’m considered the Ukrainian expert. If these people knew how I was almost thrown out of that country perhaps they’d start seeing me as “one of them.” I guess it’s really just by default: there’s a Polish woman in the course, so she obviously trumps my expertise in her country. (And yes, she does sound like a foreigner. But that’s why I like her.) Being the Ukrainian expert merely means that every time the professor – with his proper Cambridge accent – mentions Ukraine, he turns to make eye contact with me. In our class, there’s also the slavery expert, the religion expert, the borderlands expert (we, of course, overlap, so it’s a good thing we sit on the same side of the room), the women’s history expert, etc. The professor turns his head a lot.

I don’t have preconceived ideas about where my classmates are from or what languages they do and don’t speak . Or dream in. I dream of asking them the question that the whale asked the scientist when it learned to communicate: “Do all oceans have walls?” just to see what responses I’d get. My response to the whale: “No. Some oceans are as limitless as you are.”