Hello To All That
What returning to New York after 12 years in Istanbul taught me about America.
OCTOBER 30, 2024
I returned to New York, after living in Istanbul for more than a decade, in September 2019, during a period of the city’s confidence. Donald Trump had been president for two and a half years and nothing had affirmed liberal assumptions more than Donald Trump. My first weekend back, I joined a climate change protest in downtown Manhattan that ended in a park with concerts and speeches. It was a bright, blue-skied autumn afternoon and all the New York children were adorable, holding their homemade signs and talking sense to the adults. The day seemed like my own personal welcome home.
The good feelings did not last long. I was out of step with the times in ways I could not have predicted. At one of the first social gatherings I attended, my friends debated a new book about poor white Trump voters, one that portrayed them with some sympathy. My friends were, like me, educated, urbane, but they were also very much New Yorkers, people educated in a specific way. One woman admitted she had no sympathy for the people in the book. Another friend said that the thing that enraged her most was the rural people’s skepticism about facts: “Facts! How can someone not believe in facts?”
I could not adjust to seeing the world through the lens of American liberal fury at this particular American president. From afar, he hadn’t seemed that different to me from the rest.
How new and strange my old life and the people in it seemed to me at that moment. In my 20s, I had felt somewhat alienated in New York because I was from a place full of people who did not believe in facts, in so-called expertise. After my years abroad, I knew there were millions of foreigners on the receiving end of American power who were skeptical of what they might call specifically American facts. I now felt sympathetic to people who were skeptical of facts. I no longer believed in the superiority of the United States, and I also no longer believed in the superiority of any one group of people within it.
In my first weeks back, few people knew what to ask me about Turkey. That was OK: Turkey is an unfamiliar place to most. Then, in October, the news broke that Trump had endorsed the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, invading Northern Syria and attacking Kurdish forces there. Around that time, I was at a party in a courtyard, and a few people rushed to commiserate with me. “You must be so horrified, are you all right?” they asked. I had rarely seen Americans so upset about a foreign event, and I was surprised: The Syrian war had been going on for eight years, and the United States had caused all sorts of suffering in that war and beyond. I could not adjust to seeing the world through the lens of American liberal fury at this particular American president. From afar, he hadn’t seemed that different to me from the rest.
Those first months were dislocating, but I was still confident that if I simply left one gathering and moved on to another, I would find my place. I had moved to a foreign country on my own and thrived — surely I could handle New York. I did not know yet how hard it would be to make a life in a country I no longer knew, and with which I had become so angry.
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I had left New York in 2007, when I was 29, for reasons political and personal. New York post-9/11 had felt disconnected from enormous geopolitical events, the violence the U.S. was executing beyond its borders. My desire to learn about what was happening outside America was sincere, but I was also fleeing personal unhappiness, a growing fear that the financial, professional and romantic pressures of life in New York would defeat me. I wanted to remake myself entirely, to start over, to become so self-sufficient and well defined that I could survive everything and anything on my own. At the end of 2006, I applied for a fellowship to live in and write about Turkey, a country I had never been to and knew very little about.
Not long after I arrived in Istanbul, during a cold April, I went to meet some American acquaintances, friends of friends, on the Galata Bridge. The lights of the mosques in the Old City shimmered on the water; great plumes of cigarette smoke, including mine, drifted into the dark; every moment in Istanbul was more beautiful and exciting than every other moment in my life. I watched the Americans complain about Turks not speaking English, about the food, about boredom. I couldn’t believe them — look how lucky we were! I was giddy with luck. Every day I learned something new, a state of enforced consciousness and engagement with the world around me.
I told my best friend from the Jersey Shore, where I grew up, that I was home, that I had finally returned to New Jersey. “Princeton is not New Jersey, Sue,” she said.
In Turkey, I had an ironclad sense of purpose. My ambitions and preoccupations were in sync with my daily life. Writing about the country I was living in made every day, and every experience and observation, feel vital. In the American magazines I read, women wrote of the conflicts between their personal lives and their professional lives, as if life comprised only those two parts. For me, there was a third: Istanbul. The city was so much a companion that I never had the feeling of being alone.
Those were Turkey’s sunny, rising years, when Erdoğan, who was then prime minister and supported by liberals, began his triumph over the authoritarian military. Turkey recovered quickly from the 2008 financial crisis, and its economy began to flourish. The country, once so agonizingly poor, began to look shinier, especially Istanbul, where diverse groups of people flocked to its new cultural venues and museums, as well as to its historic treasures. The city felt like the center of the world.
Behind the changes in Turkey was the mysterious hose of foreign money. Everywhere, there were new skyscrapers, malls, bridges, tunnels, palatial mosques. It took time to realize what was being destroyed. Construction and expansion would become Erdoğan’s imperial endeavor, not just in Turkey but throughout the region. He joined the war in Syria and reignited one against his own country’s Kurdish population. By 2015, the violence of the Arab Spring and the war on terror had spread to Turkey in new ways. Bombs began to explode in the country, first outside of Istanbul and then inside it. The Islamic State (IS) moved across Iraq, arousing a fear in the region and beyond that wasn’t only about terrorism but about the dissolution of countries, of borders, and of nation-states. IS seemed to expose the damage that American power had caused in the region, and to undermine everything the 20th century once had been.
To go from the happy, forward-moving years in Istanbul to this dark, punitive mess gave us early exposure to the soon-to-be Western phenomenon that took hold with Brexit, Trump and endless climate change-related disasters: the feeling that progress was being reversed.
Everything I saw seemed crumbling and dilapidated, especially compared with Istanbul’s shiny new metros and refurbished hospitals — the newly modern East. So many things about American life felt punishing, and all anyone spoke about was inequality and precarity.
In the run-up to the primaries for the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Europeans and Middle Easterners around me couldn’t believe that the Americans would consider an establishment candidate like Hillary Clinton. After the war on terror, surely the U.S. would want an alternative? To some, even Trump made more sense. I, too, was confused by the enthusiasm for Clinton — maybe I had stayed away from America for too long? I began wondering what I had been missing in the U.S., and whether going back might help me understand this mess of a world.
Then, after many years of rejection, I won a few fellowships. The amount of money suggested I could spend one year in New York and survive. This was totally wrong, of course, but I went. It was only for a year: 2019-2020.
When the pandemic struck in March 2020, I had left New York and was living in Princeton, New Jersey, where I was teaching journalism on one of those fellowships. I told my best friend from the Jersey Shore, where I grew up, that I was home, that I had finally returned to New Jersey. “Princeton is not New Jersey, Sue,” she said. She was an emergency room doctor and for the first week of the shutdown my main worry was that she would get sick. I braved the post office to mail her some of the masks handed out to us at Princeton because, it’s strange to remember now, the American hospitals didn’t have enough.
I had struggled during those first weeks teaching at Princeton, before the pandemic. I had not worked in an office or at an institution in 12 years. I didn’t know, for example, that when you’re asked how everything is going at an Ivy League university, you’re supposed to answer that everything is awesome. I had been a foreign correspondent — we only knew how to complain. I was undeniably off-kilter. In New York, I hadn’t known the subway stops anymore, kept getting lost. I had loved the subway in my 20s, reading a whole magazine from Brooklyn to Manhattan, watching the breakdancers hang from the subway poles by their ankles, feeling so completely part of that great polyglot city. Now everything I saw seemed crumbling and dilapidated, especially compared with Istanbul’s shiny new metros and refurbished hospitals — the newly modern East. So many things about American life felt punishing, and all anyone spoke about was inequality and precarity. I often wondered how anyone survived.
The feeling followed me to Princeton, where safety was on my mind even in this safest of towns. It was only a couple of years after #MeToo, but at night, the floodlights pointed at the gorgeous old buildings on campus instead of the walkways. Someone told me that this was because the university’s patrons wanted to highlight the buildings’ grandeur. I fixated on such details, looking for confirmation of my suspicion that those with money and power had left us on our own.
I had come home directly to the American way of death. The Americans were not exceptionalists anymore, only nihilists, something I had started to understand while living out in the world they made.
But when the pandemic struck, I was grateful to be at Princeton; these wealthy American universities were like small nation-states, and they were certainly doing a better job than the U.S. government of responding to the crisis. I finally grasped the depths of what Americans had been experiencing with Trump. Seeing someone so incompetent and careless run an entire country made you feel as vulnerable and exposed as a child. I watched TV every night with great sympathy for everyone who had been going through this while I was away.
Many said, “I guess you have been living with this for a while,” referring to Erdoğan, but Trump was so much worse than Erdoğan, who for much of his tenure, after all, had been good at running a government. In those first chaotic months of the pandemic, health officials in Istanbul were showing up at the apartments of people who tested positive, offering medication and explaining quarantine rules. I had come home directly to the American way of death. The Americans were not exceptionalists anymore, only nihilists, something I had started to understand while living out in the world they made.
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In May, I moved to upstate New York. I didn’t know anyone there, but New York City was too expensive, and I thought somewhere in the country might be good both for me and for my friends, who were trapped in small spaces in the city. “No outdoor space” was the lament of the time. I was right; we had a good summer. I knew how lucky I was to be healthy and employed, and that all my loved ones were healthy, too.
At night I found myself going through the years of my life since I had graduated college, trying to ascertain when exactly I had set myself on the course that had led to living alone in the middle of nowhere during a worldwide plague. Why had I not been prepared for this inevitable turn of events?
The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter protest movement also brought a renewed sense of engagement with the outside world, even a feeling of hope. The pandemic had not shut down people’s desire for something better. But the inevitable backlash arrived as the 2020 election approached. The days grew shorter and darker, which compounded the sense of doom. Now that it was no longer possible to be outside as much, everyone was afraid of COVID again. Fewer friends visited, but I told myself I would be fine. I had a book to write.
It took some time, but slowly, I found myself dreading waking up only to sit at my computer all day. I grew restless while reading books. I didn’t even want to read the news and I am a journalist. Of the three parts of my life — Istanbul, my personal life and my professional life — only the last remained, and I despised it. At night I found myself going through the years of my life since I had graduated college, trying to ascertain when exactly I had set myself on the course that had led to living alone in the middle of nowhere during a worldwide plague. Why had I not been prepared for this inevitable turn of events?
I watched people in Brooklyn dancing to Joe Biden’s win on a screen, from my couch. It was the beginning of my inability to feel much. With the approach of the holidays, I was closing my eyes and pretending I was back in my Istanbul apartment, with the view of the minaret, the seagulls and the world-spanning sky. At times, the fading of the day felt to me like dying.
Against liberal New York’s wishes, I got on an airplane and went to see my family, who now lived in North Carolina. I felt judgment emanating from friends, and I could not explain why there was nothing that would stop me, that I could not be alone one second longer. When I arrived, I saw my family had all been together in a warmer state with the windows open and workplaces operating almost as usual. People in rural North Carolina simply did not fear COVID as much as those in New York did. They had been reviled by those farther north as anti-vaxxer crazies, but they were doing much better than me. I decided that the real problem was that neither North Carolina nor New York were my homes anymore, and that was why I could not find relief.
And so the following February I returned to Istanbul. I found my view of the minaret, the seagulls and the world-spanning sky. When I arrived back at my apartment for the first time, I dragged a chair onto my balcony and smiled at the salmon-streaked sunset, the many neighborhoods I could see from my vantage point and, in the far distance, the sea. This was my happiness, I thought, my view of this world.
But there was a partial lockdown in Istanbul too. Erdoğan had imposed restrictions in the Erdoğan way, and the streets were empty and forlorn. In the past, to me, even Istanbul’s ugliest parts were beautiful. Now whatever darkness had crept into my mind cast its gloom on the narrow, cobbled streets, the ancient marble fountains, the once-sparkly sliver of the Bosphorus glimpsed from an urban hillside. Beloved friends lived close by, but they, like everyone, had children they struggled to keep healthy and in school, and risks they simply couldn’t take. I found myself in a repeat of my upstate New York life: days and nights spent continuously without social contact. The view I had loved so much — just like reading and writing and film and television and music — lost its succor. I could stay in Istanbul for only three months because my visa had expired, but that was OK. For the first time, being away had not made me feel better.
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There was, astoundingly, nowhere to go but New York. Every time I tried to find and settle on an apartment there that was more expensive than I could afford, I canceled at the last minute, unable to comprehend that I might be moving into an apartment alone, with no guarantee that the whole world wouldn’t end again. My brain was flickering constantly, a state of alertness I could not relieve. I left the house 20 times a day, to smoke or to mimic the thrill of a getaway. Maybe the pandemic had simply been too isolating, and maybe the country had become a lonelier, harsher place. It is also possible that it had been easier to be a stranger in a foreign country than to accept the terms of living in one’s own.
Gradually, though, I did come to accept those terms. The pandemic began easing up. Social life returned to New York City, and I was teaching in a classroom, gloriously in-person, with students whose youth forbade the adults from being so pessimistic about the future. I fell in love with someone and moved in with his family. I also fell back in love with work. One evening, I attended someone’s 90th birthday party at the New-York Historical Society. It was a very New York crowd, so I was thrilled to find some people from abroad with whom to talk about foreign affairs. I felt like the old me.
Then I began to feel faint. As I turned toward the door to find the bathroom, I passed out, crashing headfirst into someone’s table and taking the glasses and tablecloth down with me. I quit smoking after that; I lived in America. My long escape had come to an end. One of the elderly guests offered me their wheelchair. A crowd of strangers helped me to my feet.
✺ Published in “Issue 21: America” of The Dial
