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(And where, she hopes, any consequences of her caper will conveniently remain.)
Gone are the hopes of discovery or romance.
What does it mean to be the youthful,charming envoy of a place like that?
It takes nearly 200 pages before Tiller starts to tell us.
My presence did not fundamentally change anything, anywhere, for better or worse.
There has always beena touch of the rogue about Lee.
Tillers voice is casual, raconteurish, racing.
Skeptical though the American narrator may be, Old Wealth is the world she longs to enter.
Pong tells Tiller that his own artist-professor parents were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution in China.
Once Pong takes him under his wing, Tiller eagerly ditches his plan to study abroad.
Lee skewers those college programs in a few lines: Everybody knew the drill.
Tiller shrugs this off: I could practically hear her thoughts of how great but doomed America was.
But I cant worry about that.
I was left at the endofMy Year Abroadwith the suspicion that a trick had been played on me.
I recently returned to the U.S. after six years in England.
I suppose I hoped, in that context, to find a more sophisticated version of myself.
(The one thing I did find was an English man.)
That applies at a grander scale too.
But, as Tiller learned and I know now, theres no outrunning any of it.
So you might as well look around, right where you are: This is what were working with.
