37 Countries Later: What I Think About America on the 4th of July

Happy Independence Day.

I have been thinking about how to write this post for a while. Not because the subject is difficult — though some of it is — but because I wanted to say something true rather than something comfortable. This is my attempt at that.

Cape Coast, Ghana

I have traveled to 37 countries across five continents. I have eaten at both street stalls and Michelin-starred restaurants in almost all of them. I have stood in the slave castles of Ghana and tried to process what it means that the same ocean that received the bodies of the enslaved also laps at the shores of the country I call home. I have walked through Kyoto's thousand-year-old temples and Osaka's neon-lit food markets. I have sat in the medinas of Morocco and the hilltop villages of Campania and the candlelit tablaos of Seville. I have watched the sun rise over Teotihuacan from a hot air balloon and set over the Seto Inland Sea from a sacred island in Japan. I have walked the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem and stood at the Western Wall and understood, in my body rather than my mind, why this particular piece of earth has been fought over for three thousand years.

I have, in other words, seen a great deal of what the world has to offer.

And I want to tell you what all of that travel taught me about America. Not what it confirmed. Not what it complicated, though it complicated plenty. What it actually taught me — the thing I could not have understood without leaving.

Every Country I Visited Is Already Here

Here is the observation that surprised me most, accumulated slowly across thirty-seven foreign destinations and many years of travel.

Every country I have visited — every culture, every culinary tradition, every language, every faith, every form of beauty — is already present in the United States. Without exception.

Miyajima Island, Floating Torii Gate

Japan is here. In the Japanese American communities of the Bay Area, in the ramen counters of Los Angeles, in the tea ceremony traditions that have been practiced in California since the 19th century, in the landscape architecture of Japanese gardens from Portland to San Jose. I traveled to Tokyo and Kyoto and Osaka and found extraordinary things — and then came home and found echoes of all of them within driving distance.

Teotihuacán, Mexico

Mexico is here. Not an approximation of Mexico, not a Tex-Mex facsimile, but Mexico in its full regional complexity — the mole traditions of Oaxaca, the mariscos of the Pacific coast, the al pastor that Lebanese immigrants brought to Mexico City and that eventually crossed the border and became something Americans now consider quintessentially their own. The taqueros of the Mission District in San Francisco have been making this food the same way it has been made for generations. The authentic taquerías of San Diego sit less than 20 miles from the Mexican border. The ingredients crossed a border. The knowledge did not lose anything in the crossing.

Anejo, Togo

West Africa is here — in the Gullah sweetgrass baskets of Charleston, South Carolina, woven with a coiling technique that has been passed directly from West African hands to Gullah hands to the present day without interruption. In the food traditions of the American South, which are West African food traditions transformed by the particular cruelty of slavery and the particular resilience of the people who survived it. In the music that America gave to the world — blues, jazz, gospel, soul, hip-hop — all of it rooted in traditions that arrived on slave ships and refused to die.

Florence, Italy

Ghana is here. Greece is here. Italy is here — in the neighborhoods of New York and Boston and San Francisco where Italian immigrants built communities and planted gardens and opened restaurants that eventually gave America its most beloved cuisine. Korea is here. Vietnam is here, its presence in American cities a consequence of a war that ended fifty years ago and a diaspora that followed, and the food those communities brought is now some of the finest available on the continent.

Kasama, Chicago

The Philippines are here — in Chicago's Ukrainian Village, where Tim Flores and Genie Kwon opened Kasama, the first Filipino restaurant in the world to receive a Michelin star, in a neighborhood named for a country on the other side of Europe. Think about that for a moment. A Filipino restaurant earning the world's most prestigious culinary recognition, in a Ukrainian neighborhood, in an American city. There is no other country on earth where that sentence is possible.

Agra, India

India is here. In Houston, Texas — which is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the United States, a fact that consistently surprises people who have not been there — Chef Mayank Istwal opened Musaafer, a restaurant whose menu traces a 100-day journey across the Indian subcontinent. The dining room is one of the most ornate I have ever sat in. The food is among the finest I have eaten anywhere. It is in a shopping mall on Westheimer Road. America contains multitudes.

Ao Pi Le, Thailand

Thailand is here. Kemah, Texas — a small waterfront town thirty miles southeast of Houston — is home to Th_Prsrv, a restaurant where two chefs, drawing on their Thai and Choctaw heritage, built a tasting menu that traces 5,000 years of culinary and cultural history from 2400 B.C. to the present. Two traditions. One table. One country. It is one of the most extraordinary dining experiences I have had anywhere in the world, and it exists in a town most Americans have never heard of.

I could continue through all 37. The point is not the catalog. The point is what the catalog adds up to.

What No Other Country Can Claim

I have been to beautiful countries. France is beautiful. Japan is beautiful. Portugal made me feel, in its particular gentle way, that beauty is a form of hospitality. Iceland convinced me that God is truly an artist. Italy — well. Italy does not need my advocacy.

Grand Canyon, Arizona

Every country I have visited has something extraordinary that is entirely its own. A tradition, a landscape, a culinary culture, a way of moving through the world that exists nowhere else.

America has all of those things too. The national parks — the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, the Great Smoky Mountains — are among the most dramatic landscapes on earth. The cultural output of this country — its music, its literature, its film, its art — has shaped global culture for a century in ways that no other nation's output has. The sheer geographic variety of the continental United States, from the Florida Keys to the Alaskan interior, from the Hawaiian volcanoes to the Maine coastline, encompasses more distinct ecosystems and climates than most continents.

But those are not what make America singular. What makes America singular is this: it is the only country in the world that contains, within its borders, a genuine representation of every other country in the world.

Not a tourism exhibit. Not a cultural quarter or an ethnic neighborhood that exists as a footnote to the dominant culture. A living, dynamic, ongoing presence of every tradition, every faith, every cuisine, every language, every form of human expression that the world has produced — brought here by people who came voluntarily or were brought by force, who built something in a new place while carrying everything they had come from, and whose children and grandchildren are now as American as anyone whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower.

That is not something any other country can claim. France is France. Japan is Japan. Both are extraordinary. Neither contains the world.

America, at its best, does.

What Traveling Taught Me To Hold Simultaneously

I want to be honest about what else thirty-seven countries taught me, because honesty is part of what I owe this subject.

Door of No Return, Ghana

I stood in Cape Coast Castle in Ghana and I stood in Elmina Castle, and I tried to understand what it means that people were held in those dungeons and marched through the Door of No Return and loaded onto ships and carried to a country that would declare, a century later, that all men are created equal. The distance between that declaration and that history is not small. It is one of the defining tensions of the American story, and pretending it is not there is not patriotism. It is avoidance.

I have seen countries that handle their difficult histories differently from America. Some suppress them. Some weaponize them. Some — and this is the lesson I carry from a visit I will be writing about soon, to a city that answered one of the worst things ever done to it with an extraordinary act of collective grace — choose to name their wounds not for the wound itself but for the healing they intend. Every country has a version of this question. What do you do with what was done here? How do you carry it forward without being destroyed by it?

America is still working out its answer. That is not a condemnation. It is an observation. Countries that are still working out their answers are countries that are still alive to the question. The ones that have stopped asking are the ones to worry about.

What I believe, after thirty-seven countries and a great many years of paying attention, is that America's capacity for reinvention — its constitutional insistence that the experiment is not finished, that the union is always being perfected rather than having been perfected — is its most genuinely revolutionary characteristic. Not its power. Not its wealth. Its insistence that it is not done yet.

The Food, Because This Is Still A Food Blog

I would be failing my mandate if I did not note that the American food story is the American story in miniature.

Japanese/German Fusion Hot Dog

The hot dog is German. The pizza is Italian. The taco is Mexican — by way of Lebanese immigrants who brought the vertical spit technique that became al pastor. Poke is Hawaiian but the soy sauce and sesame oil that season it are Japanese. The brisket in barbecue joints that make it to New York Times–level acclaim draws on the traditions of Central Texas, which drew on the traditions of German and Czech immigrants who settled that part of the state in the 19th century. The sweetgrass baskets of Charleston are West African. The po'boy of New Orleans is French. The key lime pie of the Florida Keys is made from a citrus fruit that came from Southeast Asia.

There is no American food that did not come from somewhere else. Which means that American food is the most honest expression of what America actually is: a place where everything arrives from somewhere and becomes, over time, something new.

That is worth celebrating. That is worth protecting. That is, on the 4th of July, worth sitting with for a moment before the fireworks start.

Happy Independence Day to everyone reading this, from wherever in the world you are joining from. All 37 countries and more are welcome here.