Dialogue: You can take the girl out of Down Under but ...

DEBORAH GARDINER* says the patriotic outpouring of Americans after the terrorist attacks has reminded her uncomfortably of her New Zealand-ness.

Since September's horror in the United States, feeling anything beyond grief seems self-absorbed. But while I mourn along with the rest of the US, what the terrorist attacks did was remind me of my foreign-ness.

I don't wear a scarf. Nor am I Muslim. I'm a New Zealander, born on a farm on the Canterbury Plains. I moved to the San Francisco Bay area in May, 1996. My passport reads New Zealand, but San Francisco and the US are my home.

I have my green card, pay Californian taxes and sport my own college debt. While I might baulk at Cheez Whiz and sodas, I enjoy Californian foods from tofu to hot dogs, garden burgers to crab cakes. I drink Napa Valley wine. The comfort packages of Vegemite stopped years ago.

I omit the "u" from color, humor and honor when I write to my family. I even adore rodeos.

But whereas before I felt that my funny accent was all that distinguished me from Americans, now I'm not so sure. I'm seeing patriotic fervour all around me and cannot relate to it. I see the desire for revenge, for justice - and it doesn't resonate. It makes me feel alone, an outcast, more foreign than I've ever felt before.

For the first time in five years I feel afraid, distrustful of Americans and their volatility - not my friends, teachers or classmates but the masses I see in the suburbs, the malls, on the freeways and on television.

Back in New Zealand I used to think the US was scary. The news stories were about random shootings, riots in Los Angeles and sloppy gun-ownership laws. I thought every American neighbourhood was a setting for the television programme Cops.

The media in Japan, where I lived for five years, was no better. A slew of stories on gun control convinced me that every American stashed weapons in their trunk (boot), bedside table or vanity bag.

So convinced was I that America was the untamed land of the Wild West that when I first arrived in San Francisco I was terrified to walk around at night. I thought I'd be mugged, raped or gunned down at a corner store if I stepped outside to buy milk.

And when these feelings passed weeks later I joked with my new American friends about how wrongly I had fretted. Today I live in a ghetto where drug shootings happen five blocks away. It doesn't faze me.

New Zealand's media had it all wrong, I thought. But since the attacks, my anxieties have returned in one nauseating wave.

It started with the flags. Associated Press said that 250,000 of them were sold nationwide and now stores are short. Thousands arrived in San Francisco. Driving around downtown San Jose the weekend after the attack, I saw prepubescent girls in Gap sweatshirts wave life-sized flags while motorists honked, whooped and hollered.

A couple looked lovingly at their 5-year-old boy dressed in camouflage gear playing war outside their two-garage home.

When I see the flags, I don't feel a surge of patriotism. I see glazed-eyed, glowing faces of people on the verge of losing control. It reminds me of a bad zombie movie.

And the US Government's reaction has only made it worse. When President Bush declared at the Pentagon that he wanted Osama bin Laden dead or alive, I feared his words would provoke violence in what I had grown to think of as a safe nation. I wanted to hide under my bed and cry.

It's not just the fear of violence and mayhem that makes me realise how un-American I really am. It's also my ideals.

Like most New Zealanders, I don't believe in war. My country is a nuclear-free zone. I don't believe in guns. Last month, I had more arguments with random folk over nuclear weapons, war and peace than I have had in the past five years.

When I read that 82 per cent of Americans want to go to war with Afghanistan, I cringe. True, if it had been the Beehive that was hit last month, perhaps I would be more receptive to war. But I don't think so.

In 1985, when French secret service agents stole into the Waitemata Harbour and planted a bomb on the Rainbow Warrior, New Zealanders were outraged. When the boat sank with the loss of one life, it was huge - a national emergency.

Even so, few New Zealanders wanted war; most wanted only justice. I feel the same way about this tragedy in New York.

I have moved around a lot, but the US has felt the closest thing to home I have had. I love this country, the people and the life I have. It deeply saddens me to feel this divide between me and them.

And as spring arrives in New Zealand, I wonder for the first time if I should go home.

* Deborah Gardiner studies at the University of California's school of journalism at Berkeley.