I felt different and, as a child, didn't like it at all; I wanted to be like everyone else; I wanted to be"normal". I wanted to go home for lunch and eat risotto or polenta like my friends did. I wanted to come to school in the morning and talk about last night's movie, the one aired on the Italian language channel (we only had three channels back then) but my parents insisted on watching the German channel, with the movies that "weren't cool." By the time I was a young teenager I had had enough of the whole thing. I decided I was going to belong clearly to one group and stop this "cultural schizophrenia." I rejected my Swiss German heritage completely. I had decided that if I drank coffee it had to be "espresso" not that washed out brew that my family was used to drinking.

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My clothes had to be in the Italian style (whatever that meant) and just to be sure, I bought all my clothes in Italy (which was only a mile or so from my home). I spoke Swiss German only when absolutely necessary and I definitely would never ever listen to Swiss German music. I laughed at jokes about the "Zucchini" (Swiss Germans were referred to as Zucchini because the license plates for the canton of Zurich start with ZH) and even told some myself.

 As is often the case when we try to fool ourselves into pretending we are something we are not or, as in this case, pretending we are not something that we in fact are, fate stepped in and gave me a little kick, no, actually a big kick. It came in the form of a scholarship with AFS, an intercultural/international student exchange organization that allows high school students to spend a year abroad with another family. So in the summer of 1980, at age 17, after spending a few days at CW Post College on Long Island together with about a thousand students from all over the world (talk about a cultural mix) waiting to be "shipped out" to our respective families, I finally landed in the beautiful San Francisco Bay Area.

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All of a sudden I was supposed to speak neither Italian nor Swiss German but English. It took me weeks to even find a place that knew what an espresso was and I practically had to go all the way to Northbeach in San Francisco to get one that tasted right. Italian clothes? How about Ocean Pacific beachwear instead? And high school!? Help! Culture shock!