That is the gist of my 9-11 story. As someone who had lived in the U.S. as a young child and had loved the country and so many of its people, I can't say it wasn't personal to me. We turned on the TV that evening (in Japan, it was nighttime) after I got home from my ballet lesson and saw black smoke billowing out of the first tower. My mother called my father (a journalist) to make sure he was watching this at work. And while she was still on the phone, the second plane crashed into the second tower on live TV.
As the night went on, and we heard about the Pentagon and the other plane, I was worried. Worried about our family friends who lived in Northern Virginia and worked or went to school in D.C. And another who lived in Jersey, not too far from the city. But as shaken as I was by an attack on a country that I felt had formed part of my identity, I was still an ocean and a full length of a continent away. It could never have been as personal as it was for so many of the people I would meet in the following years.
My father moved to New York that January. My mother and I waited until I finished middle school (which goes through 9th grade) in March (the school year starts in April) and joined him in moving to the suburbs of the city that was still reeling from the effects of 9-11. And I was thrown into a community that was full of people who at the very least knew someone who was there or knew someone who had lost someone. As a teenager torn from my comfort zone into a new to town in a small and tight-knight community (at least I spoke the language and was familiar with the culture), I was grappling with a host of other problems. But I still remember feeling like an imposter when we were assigned to produce some piece of work regarding the personal experiences of 9-11 around the time of the first anniversary. I remember hearing about the Japanese girl who moved back to Japan with her family because her father died in the towers. I didn't even know her or experience her pain vicariously. I lived in the New York suburbs in 2002, but I wasn't there in 2001. I wasn't there, so how can I claim it to be personal?
And I can't. At least, not to the degree that so many of my friends do. But I do remember where I was, what I was doing, and what I felt when the towers fell. It's a hell of a lot more personal to me than to the children who learned about 9-11 in textbooks. It was a life-changing event. It was a world-changing event. It was the event that reminded everyone in the world what determined hate can do to even the most powerful nation on earth. Never forget? In addition to the memories of those innocent and brave souls lost that day, let's never forget that last part either.
