Dounia Choukri
N OW SHE minds the mud.
Before that woman had come around the corner, the sludge had just been plain brown mud and now it stands for everything that's going wrong. It's not just mud, it's Matsch.
Matsch, she repeats to herself, buttering her tongue with the sound of her parents’ language.
Mud, muck, sludge.
Americans have a horseload of words for one and the same thing, she thinks, and something compels her to open her fists as if she had kept this thought there for a long time and were releasing it now. Germans are less wasteful—with words, with everything.
On the few occasions her parents had taken her to a fast food restaurant, her mother had packed the plastic containers and cutlery and washed them at home. Americans stared at them, but her mother did not mind. Americans were not real. They had no consciousness. Being watched by them was like being watched by a cat or a hamster. She did mind. We are German, not poor, she wanted to tell everybody at McDonald's, and when her mother loudly complained about all the Müll on the tray, she quickly picked it up and threw its contents into the trash can that said THANK YOU instead of WASTE because Americans do not like to spell out their failings.
, her mother said, the moment they set foot in America. Plastic, Nancy Drew, television. All of it . And once her mother had slapped the sticker on something, it didn't matter how much she scratched at it, there would always at the bottom of his all-American soul.
