Where Is England in America?

Ver.36.13 : #0013

Photo by Sabrina Mazzeo on Unsplash

It was a quiet weekend afternoon.

I was standing in the living room, watching television.

My mother was sitting on the sofa.

My father was a few steps away, busy with something on the computer.

The news was on.

I don’t remember what the story was about.

I only remember one word.

“England.”

Without thinking, I asked,

“Where is England in America?”

Silence.

For a second, nobody said anything.

My mother looked at me.

Then she laughed.

“What are you talking about?”

I didn’t understand why that was funny.

It seemed like a perfectly normal question.

When I was a child, America wasn’t just a country.

It was almost the entire outside world.

People spoke English in America.

The music my parents listened to came from America.

McDonald’s was American.

KFC was American.

7-Eleven was American.

My friends went to Hawaii.

That was America.

Some went to Guam.

That was America too.

America was everywhere.

So when I heard names like England, Germany, Italy, Australia, or Russia, I never imagined they were different countries.

I thought they were places inside America.

Just like Osaka and Hokkaido were places inside Japan.

Nobody had ever told me otherwise.

My mother finally asked,

“Then… do you think China and Korea are America too?”

I stopped.

That didn’t sound right.

China wasn’t America.

Korea wasn’t America.

I knew that.

Then…

Why was England America?

The question that had seemed so obvious only a few seconds earlier suddenly stopped making sense.

I don’t remember anyone giving me a long explanation.

I don’t remember anyone taking out a map.

I only remember realizing that the world was much bigger than I had imagined.

Not because I had learned a new country.

Because I had misunderstood what a country was.

Looking back, I don’t think I was confused.

I think I was doing exactly what children do.

I had collected the information available to me and built the most reasonable map I could.

The problem wasn’t my logic.

The problem was my data.

After that day, I started noticing countries I had never noticed before.

England.

Italy.

Germany.

Australia.

Russia.

They had always been there.

I had simply filed them under the wrong name.

Years later, I realized something else.

I hadn’t thought English was “English.”

I thought it was American.

To me, anyone with white skin who spoke English was American.

At twelve, I couldn’t tell the difference any more than many Westerners can immediately tell where someone from Asia is from.

When every example looks the same, the brain naturally groups them together.

That isn’t ignorance.

It’s pattern recognition.

Not long after that, my mother introduced me to Western music.

Almost all of it was American.

Michael Jackson.

Madonna.

Later, Britney Spears.

My father listened to Prince.

Without realizing it, my picture of the world kept growing.

But one thing never changed.

To me, America was still the sound of popular music.

It still is.

When I was older, I finally saw a world map differently.

Countries were not neighborhoods inside another country.

Each one had its own language.

Its own history.

Its own borders.

Its own stories.

The map I had built as a child disappeared.

A much larger one took its place.

People often laugh at children’s questions.

“Where is England in America?”

Now I understand why it sounded strange.

But at the time, it felt like a perfectly ordinary question.

Until that afternoon, I didn’t know that “foreign countries” were many different countries.

I thought they were all places inside one.

I didn’t learn about a new country that day. I learned what a country was.