Years ago, I spent two months in Chattanooga, Tennessee as part of a Fulbright program. We were meant to study social entrepreneurship and learn about American culture. Two weeks in, we had only talked about the program itself and how great it was, and very little about social entrepreneurship.
We traveled to places like Alabama and Washington, D.C., and sometimes stayed with American families to experience their culture.
The family I stayed with in Tennessee took me to church and made me chicken. They were incredibly friendly, like Americans often are. I gave them candy from Sweden and they showed me photos from their travels.
I learned that some Americans measure freedom in square footage. The house had so many rooms that my friend and I each got one, complete with a massive bed and a wardrobe the size of a small apartment. The bed was made for two, maybe three. I could sleep in any direction. Their neighborhood looked like someone had copy-pasted the same house fifteen times down a curving street, like a scene from Desperate Housewives. Manicured lawns, identical houses, and suspiciously green grass. Nothing felt like it was meant to be there. Not even the trees could breathe properly. I’d never had that much space in my life, and yet it was the most suffocated I’d ever felt.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” the mother asked me as we pulled into the driveway. “So much space for kids in the neighborhood to play.”
I looked around and couldn’t see any kids.
*
I was relieved to return to my tiny dorm room in Chattanooga after two nights at the Family’s home. Back at campus, I could at least be a little bit free; I could run along the river in the morning before it got too hot or I could visit the 24-hour diner and have a hot chocolate at 2am. I loved that America stayed awake for me, that someone was always there, and that wanting hot chocolate at an absurd hour was treated as perfectly reasonable.
I went to the diner two or three nights a week. I was mostly quiet. Sometimes I read my book. Sometimes Rachel, the waitress, would tell me about her brother who’d arrived three years ago without speaking any English. Now he had his own business. Twelve employees, she told me. I knew a lot about Rachel’s brother, except his name.
*
Sometime during my last week in Chattanooga, I walked home from the supermarket at 10pm only to be stopped by the police asking me what the hell I was doing walking alone at night. I told him I wanted to walk. He looked at me for a long moment and told me I shouldn’t be walking alone at night and asked if I wanted a ride.
It wasn’t really a question.
I got into the car, and we drove in silence for six minutes. I watched the empty streets pass by and thought about how much space there was here, and how little of it I was allowed to access. The officer pulled up to my dorm and told me to be more careful. I thanked him and went inside, feeling like a child who’d been caught doing something wrong.
That night, I fell asleep dreaming about midnight runs.
*
Years later - two years back in Stockholm, six years in London, and one year in San Francisco to be exact - I find myself arguing with my partner about which country deserves to be called the land of the free. I say Sweden, where I can walk home at 2am without a police escort, where you can pick berries in the forest and have a family. He says America, where you can go beyond your limits, build something from nothing, think bigger than yourself. I think about Chattanooga: the empty streets I couldn’t walk and the 24-hour diner that stayed awake for me. I think about Rachel’s brother.
America is about what you’re allowed to be, and Sweden is about what you’re allowed to do.
We never declare a winner.
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