Remembering 9/11 From the Outside Looking In

It was early afternoon when I got home from school — my last class of the day, French, had dragged on for what seemed like hours, and while groups of students amassed on the front steps afterwards, someone had mentioned America and a plane crash. I was too tired to chat, and walked home. 

As I opened the front door, I heard my mother sobbing. 

The scene is etched in my mind now: From the threshold of our small living room, I see her framed by the large window, the light falling with an orange glow. She was kneeling in front of the TV with her hands clasped, watching avidly with wet cheeks and red eyes. 

On the screen was a tall building with smoke pluming from the top. The bright colors of "breaking news" CGIs were all over the screen. Before then, I hadn't even heard of the Twin Towers or the World Trade Center. I barely knew what The Pentagon was. I couldn't point to Virginia on a map for a million dollars. 

I was American by birth, but had lived in England since I was two months old. My culture was all tea and scones and very little root beer and PB&J. My parents, however, were Americans through and through — even my British mother, who loved the U.S.A. with all of her heart, and brought her children up to love it too. 

At first, the things she shouted made no sense to me: a plane just flew into the Twin Towers. It might be terrorists. Before she could explain that the towers were in New York, she gasped in horror as — live on CNN — we saw a second plane hit the second tower. "It's an attack!" she shouted. "America is being attacked!"

But things were about to get even worse. She flipped through the news channels and returned to CNN, since it was the only American network we had access to. She listened intently to the newscasters and the buzzing phone lines of "experts" and officials, all the while feeding me context. Deep in my heart — my American heart — I started to feel scared.

And then she stood up and put her hands over her mouth.

I looked at the TV. Billowing smoke was swallowing one of the towers. The silence seemed to last forever. 

There were more tears and gasps that day, all while the soft light of an English autumn highlighted my mother's silhouette and played on the TV screen. I think that afternoon may have been the day I became an American. The only time I had ever felt so close to my birth country before was during an England versus U.S.A. soccer match when I was a kid. America had lost, and I had cried.

Now I was crying once again for a country I only knew on a storybook level. But in the weeks following 9/11, our house seemed to glow with red, white and blue. There were flags inside and outside of the house, and our fridge door was covered with a large magnet that said: "9/11: We Will Never Forget." There were new bumper stickers on the car (an American flag next to a British flag) and the TV whirred endlessly with montages put to slow, classical music showing the planes, the towers, the smoke and the people covered with ash.

But it wasn't just us. I went back to school and our new art assignment was to create a montage of newspaper images from 9/11, and then paint our emotions on top. I painted a wispy figure, like an angel, with her arms around all the faces covered in white soot. 

I soon discovered that being an American in England didn't mean I was alone in my grief, sadness and shock. The whole country was mourning. After all, America was the shining light that streamed through our television sets, swam on our radio waves and glistened in every pop-culture magazine. It was the source of so many dreams and fascinations, so many strange ideas and big concepts. 

In the years that passed and as the Iraq war unfolded, things changed. Anti-Americanism grew and seemed to spread. Now, the feelings are mixed. It's a love-hate relationship. But for that one day — September 11th, 2001 — England looked across the Atlantic not as foreigners, but as Americans too.