问答题
Every immigrant leads a double life. Every immigrant has a double
identity and a double vision, being suspended between an old and a new home, an
old and a new self. {{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}} {{/U}}{{U}}The very
notion of a new home, of course, is in a sense as impossible as the notion of
new parents: parents are who they are; home is what it is.{{/U}}
Yet home, like parentage, must be legitimized through love; otherwise, it is
only a fact of geography or biology.{{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}}
{{/U}}{{U}}Most immigrants to America found their love of their old homes betrayed:
They did not really abandon their countries; their countries abandoned them, and
in America, they found the possibility of a new love, the chance to nurture new
selves.{{/U}} Not uniformly, not without exceptions. Every
generation has its Know-Nothing movement. {{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}}
{{/U}}{{U}}Its understandable fear and hatred of alien invasion is as true today as
it always was, but in spite of all this, the American attitude remains
unique{{/U}}. Throughout history, exile has been a calamity; America turned it
into a triumph and placed its immigrants in the center of a national
epic. The epic is possible because America is an idea as much
as it is a country.{{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}{{U}}America has
nothing to do with loyalty to a dynasty and very little to do with loyalty to a
particular place, but everything to do with loyalty to a set of principles{{/U}}.
To immigrants, those principles are especially real because so often they were
absent or violated in their native lands. It was no accident in the '60s and
'70s, when alienation was in flower, that it often seemed to be "native"
Americans who felt alienated, while aliens or the children of aliens upheld the
native values. "Home is where you are happy." Sentimental,
perhaps, and certainly not conventionally patriotic, but is appropriate for a
country that wrote the pursuit of happiness into its founding document. That
pursuit continues for the immigrant in America, and it never stops, but it comes
to rest at a certain moment. {{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}{{U}}The
moment occurs perhaps when the immigrant's double life and double vision
converge toward a single state of mind, when the old life, the old home fade
into a certain unreality: places one merely visits, practicing the tourism of
memory{{/U}}. It occurs when the immigrant learns his ultimate lesson: above all
countries, America, if loved, returns love.