At one point we thought Katie had been motivated by a fear of not fitting in with us. But she was enough as she was for us to have liked her. The real stories about her life in America—the few true, vivid ones—they were as fascinating and different for us as Poland was for her. Her LinkedIn showed she had worked as a disabilities carer rather than as a teacher before the PhD. Why hide this? It’s something to be proud of, something I respect. But all the lying has dissolved our trust and respect; now even what was genuine isn’t enough to recover it. I hope she gets help.
I’ve been dwelling on that facial expression of hers when she didn’t understand my Polish. It’s the same expression others have now noticed whenever they’ve caught her in a contradiction. Your confusion is always outmatched by hers. When I’ve tried to put myself in her shoes, I’ve imagined continual panic at the thought of being caught, or of trying to keep the lies straight. But she doesn’t even try to keep them straight. And there is no panic in that expression of hers: there is just distaste that her stories aren’t aligning, as if they simply should. Her confusion is so much more confident than your own; it demolishes your disbelief, because she simply doesn’t believe in your disbelief. Her belief in her lie is unwavering.
What Katie has done bears resemblance to Jessica Krug, also an academic, who pretended to be African American. Though certainly not as grave nor as racial an offense, Katie has still adopted a national-cultural identity that isn’t her own. Why wear poleface? These lies in part seem intended to add an extra veneer of legitimacy to her academic work, and to an extra little hint of hardship to her life story that hasn’t been genuinely endured. Though I suspect she has suffered in some manner too. Bruno Grosjean, who published a fabricated Holocaust memoir under the name Binjamin Wilkomirski, was revealed by Stefan Maechler’s investigation to have built his lies around real memories in his childhood (leading to the concept and diagnosis of “Wilkomirski syndrome,” with more currency in the German Sprachraum). Are cases like these a way of reframing childhood trauma in a context that the liar feels is more truly worthy of sympathy, betraying an emaciating insecurity?
Still, you don’t get to subsume your own personal trauma under a whole national identity like it entitles you to a pity passport. There’s more to Polish identity than suffering. And though certain Americans would be well within their rights to say, “I’m Polish American” or “I’m of Polish descent,” as this would be accurate—simply saying “I’m Polish” conflates the two, usually in order to erase the latter.
What is this kink some Americans have with flouting their heritage anyway? It’s irritating to natives, and often accidentally racist. It has the whiff of old obsessions with racial purity: why did Katie describe the paramedics as “Slavic,” a racial term, rather than “Eastern European”—and why was this assumed from their physical features? Some white Americans, for example, seem to find it particularly titillating when there’s American Indian in them, as if it shows their ancestors were incredibly progressive, rather than anything more sinister. (I recall a white American in a bar in Berlin once screaming at me when I asked her name: “I’m Maddy! My grandfather was American Indian!”)
In my first week in the US I walked to my nearest barbershop, which was an African American barbershop; talking with the barber, I brought up that my wife is Polish:
“So am I,” he said, and the guys around him laughed.
I said, “Oh, cool.”
I then thought about saying something to him in Polish—there are black Poles, it isn’t necessarily a ridiculous thing for him to say—but it did seem like a joke I wasn’t getting, so I didn’t. We both went quiet, and the conversation soon moved on.
It took a few months living here to realize what had happened. When certain Americans insert that “I’m Polish,” “I’m Italian,” they are often making a needless ethnic comment. The barber thought I was dropping in my wife’s racial heritage like I couldn’t wait to tell him, and so he sarcastically offered identical needless racial information to mock this. That’s hilarious. I assumed he was talking about nationality, so couldn’t spot the joke.
With a more generous framing one could call all this a romantic yearning to have a deeper, rooted connection to an “old world.” That’s perhaps fair. But it’s one thing to fall in love with a culture, to move there, commit to learning the language, and so on. You can have more than one identity: no one is just “this” or “that.” And, best of all, if you pursue your passions, learn something and live it, that lived embodiment can tie your passion to your identity over time. America always got this right: it has been a country of immigrants, where you could move over and then become “American” in addition to your previous identity. Most European countries do not have this: you may immigrate, but you will always remain a foreigner “who learned our ways,” or something like this. This is most definitely a fault, and it’s something we can learn from the USA.
The problem is that Katie hasn’t gone to that effort.
What has hurt Kasia the most has been the implication that Katie also shared the immigrant experience. Even if Katie has suffered in other ways, she has not known specifically what it was to have people laugh at your accent, or your grammar mistakes, and throw eggs at you for it. Being an immigrant child is a specific, lonely experience: Katie never had to adjust fundamental things about herself, like her name, or how she spoke, only to find that she still hadn’t found belonging. As an adult you grow into a person who leads a liminal existence: you’re in-between places, and neither of them really wants to claim you. Kasia looks at the lives of people she went to school with in Poland and wonders where she would be today if she had stayed. Would she have gone to university? What would she have studied? What would her values be?
Katie pretended she experienced so much of the same, which made Kasia bond with her emotionally so much more than she had with anyone else in a really long time. And all through this, while Katie was insistent she had had the same experience, Kasia filled in the gaps of what she didn’t say, as if these things were too hard to say. Because they are.
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