CV Nilsson

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 My great grandfather, Carl Viktor Nilsson. Born Aug. 30, 1846 in Döderhult. Died Aug. 17, 1926 in Oskarshamn.

This is Carl Victor Nilsson, the father of my grandmother Herta. I don’t know much about Carl Victor, but I do know that he was a sea captain, and that he kicked his own son off the boat (more than once) for being drunk. It looks to me as if you wouldn’t want to have messed with Captain Nilsson, but according to a his great grandson, my cousin, he let the drunken son back on the ship pretty quickly.

Both of Carl Victor’s parents had deep roots in Kristdala north of Oskarshamn. Many of his relatives were related to each other in several ways, and as a result I have a disproportionally high number of DNA matches with Carl Victor’s line. Many of his emigrant relatives settled in the mid-west, in Kansas, Illinois, and Nebraska. But I also have mysterious matches on the Northeast coast of England, in the area of West Hartlepool, where Carl Victor apparently spent some time.

Why Twinkies? We thought it was funny

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There is a Fresh Air interview with John Oliver that they re-broadcast with some frequency. It’s from a few years ago.

In the last couple of minutes of that interview John Oliver tells host Terri Gross about working in the US, on The Daily Show, before he had a green card. Terri Gross incorrectly assumes that means John Oliver had been working on TV, right under everyone’s noses, while being undocumented.

So, John Oliver explains to Terri Gross the difference between a working visa and a green card.

In my experience, however many views Americans have on immigration, very few understand what visas (the right to cross a border during a certain time period, sometimes also the right to work in the foreign country), green cards (the right to live and work permanently in the US), and citizenship (the right to vote, and various duties to serve), really mean.

One of my colleagues became an American citizen some years ago, and to celebrate that event there was a little lunch-time party for him. Everyone was asked to bring a small “typically American” gift. My friend and I wrapped a box of Twinkies since the new American was something of a food snob. Someone else gave away one of his own pay stubs, adding, “Well, I guess it’s time for you to start paying taxes!”.

Really? You think people who are not citizens pay no tax, when they have regular jobs? If that was the case there would be fewer new citizens, I’d imagine.

In the radio interview John Oliver talks about traveling to London to renew his visa at the American embassy every year. One year the person interviewing him made a joke, stone faced, asking him for one reason why he should be let back into the US if all he was going to do was continue criticizing the country?

The point of this entire story is that at that moment, John Oliver said, his blood froze.

As an immigrant, or a foreigner, you are incredibly vulnerable. Even if you crack jokes for a living, there are times you’ll find jokes highly inappropriate, and your fear just takes over. Even if you are highly educated, or highly successful, you are still vulnerable. Someone behind a glass window gets to make the decision whether or not to stamp your passport, and there is very little you can do about it.

I did my interview for my green card at the American embassy in Stockholm. When I was done I was going to meet a friend for lunch. My sense of direction is poor under any circumstances, but even I know the difference between walking towards the city center, and walking away from the city, out onto a picturesque island. I had walked a mile in the wrong direction before I realized my mistake.

That could have been you, my dear

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I was visiting in Sweden a couple of summers ago, and had to get up early for an appointment. On my way back I passed through a park. It was still early, probably before nine, and the air was cool the way it is in the summer when you know the day is going to be hot.

There were a couple of blonde girls raking leaves in the park. They looked like volleyball players, tall, and strong. I couldn’t figure out what they were doing until I remembered that Swedish high school and college students often have summer jobs filling in during the regular staff’s summer vacation. (Swedish employees have around 6 weeks of paid vacation time, and usually take 4 of those weeks back to back during the summer.) Outdoor summer jobs are the best, because, well, you get to spend all summer outdoors. When I was growing up you’d only get the outdoor jobs through connections.

Right now I’m also remembering an affluent young woman, one of my students in Silicon Valley. She had grown up on a ranch in Morgan Hill, in the south end of the San Francisco Bay Area. As an undergraduate she spent a semester studying abroad in London.

When she came back to school in California I asked her about her time in London. It soon became obvious there was some part of her experience she didn’t want to name. It took some prodding, but finally she told me and her classmates that in London had been the first time she’d seen white people do manual labor. White people, looking just like herself, had cleaned, sold tickets to the Underground, worked in the supermarkets, and swept the streets. She’d never before experienced anything like it.