Scotland: The Achdran Perspective

The pub we were sitting in was unremarkable for Scotland: low-ceiling, cramped tables, dark wood-paneled walls, crowded, loud. My friends and I huddled around a high bar table, sipping pints and bantering as humanities graduate students do.

Our cohort represented an array of backgrounds drawn together through the University of Aberdeen and a mutual love of being in a different country. There were two Finns, a German, a Scot, an Aussie, and me—the sole American. The conversation had started with a recap of the Aberdeen-Dundee ice hockey game we had just watched (and at which the Finns and I had agreed the Scottish should really stick to rugby and football), but as pub conversations do, we slowly meandered our way through topics and somehow arrived on tracing the origins of our families. Alan explained that as an Aussie of Vietnamese descent, he knows his lineage; and other Australians have a strong sense of where their families came from because it is such a young country. The Finns told us that most people are a mix of Scandinavian and/or Mongolian, but most families had been there so long that everyone was really “just Finnish.” The Scot, Graham, jokingly told us the only people who try to trace their lineage beyond Scotland are the residents of the Orkneys, who still believe they are Vikings. Though, he did eventually admit he has an ancestor on his mother’s side from Poland. At this point, I injected a tad of American perspective, recounting how frustrating I had always found the family tree projects in school because it is nearly impossible to trace the countries my family hails from. For the most part, my ancestors came to the US six or more generations ago, a time when keeping records was not considered important for lower-to-middle-class immigrants.

Lisa, the German girl, who had been following the discussion with rapt attention, finally laughed nervously and said, “It’s funny to hear you talk about this. It’s something we don’t discuss in Germany, because we all know what’ll come up if we look past our parents’ generation.”

We all paused for a moment, taken off-guard by the magnitude of this statement and realizing we had never considered this perspective before.

Graham broke the silence softly, “I wonder if our grandparents ever imagined that in seventy years we’d be sitting in a pub having a pint together: a Brit, a German, and an American.”

Alan smiled. “I wonder if in another seventy years, they’ll be saying the same thing in Iraq.”