home is where you are happy(纽约时报送给新移民的话).docx

home is where you are happyEvery immigrant leads a double life. Every immigrant has a double identity and a double vision, being suspended between an old and a new home, an old and a new self.The very notion of a new home, of course, is in a sense as impossible as the notion of new parents. Parents are who they are; home is what it is. Home is the wallpaper above the bed, the family dinner table, the church bells in the morning, the bruised shins of the playground, the small fears that come with dusk, the streets and squares and monuments and shops that constitute ones first universe. Home is ones birthplace, ratified by memory.Yet home, like parentage, must be legitimized through love; otherwise, it is only a fact of geography or biology. Most immigrants to America found their love of their old homes betrayed. Whether Ireland starved them, or Nazi Germany persecuted them, or Viet Nam drove them into the sea, they did not really abandon their countries; their countries abandoned them. In America, they found the possibility of a new love, the chance to nurture new selves.Not uniformly, not without exceptions. Every generation has its Know-Nothing movement, its fear -- often understandable -- and hatred of alien invasion. That is as true today as it always was. In spite of all this, the American attitude remains unique. Throughout history, exile has been a calamity; America turned it into a triumph and placed its immigrants in the center of a national epic. It is still symbolized by that old copper-plated cliche, the Statue of Liberty, notwithstanding the condescension and the awful poetry of the famous Emma Lazarus lines (the wretched refuse of your teeming shore).The epic is possible because America is an idea as much as it is a country. America has nothing to do with allegiance to a dynasty and very little to do with allegiance to a particular place, but everything to do with allegiance to a set of principles. To immigrants, those principles are especially real bec