The interview took place in the same office
building where we received the application a year ago and as we sat waiting our
turn, Paige, who wasn’t present for that perfunctory exercise, made an
interesting observation that I’d missed even though I’m better positioned than
she to have made it. She remarked about
the total absence in this Swiss government building of any flags or pictures of
government officials. In the US, you can’t
swing a dead cat in a government building without knocking over an American
flag or endangering a picture of the president, and Paige, who’s never been in
a US administration building other than the embassy in Bern, was somehow able
to see this. What explains this lack of nationalistic
ornamentation? Probably the same reason
why you will only rarely see Swiss politicians with little Swiss flags adorning
their lapels. I can unequivocally say that the Swiss are
just as proudly patriotic as Americans but as with most things, not overtly so
in a rah-rah sort of way. Call it typical
Swiss reserve. Hopp Schwiez! has its place during a World Cup
soccer game but in an office building? What’s
the point?
In any event, this interview is the first
of two, intended, as I said, to subjectively assess how integrated we are into
Swiss society. I would like to note at
this point that we’re more than okay with this expectation. Switzerland is a small country and as such could
be susceptible to significant changes to its cultural norms brought about by
immigrants more interested in making Switzerland meet their expectations than respecting
and adopting the traditions and conventions that make Switzerland what it
is. Change happens here but it’s slow
and that’s okay. Swiss citizenship is
not a right due us or anyone else and it’s incumbent on us, as immigrants, to
demonstrate that we seek to gain the privileges of being citizens of the
Switzerland that is, not of another Switzerland more closely resembling the
United States.
The
interview itself went well. Frau Nonic began
by putting us at ease and kindly asked whether we’d prefer to speak Schwyzerdütsch
or Hochdeutsch. For Paige it doesn’t matter but for Lisa and
me, it makes the difference between comprehension and blank stares and we
gratefully accepted her offer to speak standard German. Her questions were about our backgrounds,
how we interact with Swiss people and why we wanted to become Swiss (still
sounds strange when I put it that way). At
one point, as she was reviewing our file, she asked where our other two
children lived and it occurred to us that because Lindsey had never been
registered here it was, from the Swiss authorities’ perspective, as if she didn’t
even exist. One more ignominy for the poor
child who found herself split off from the pack thirteen years ago when we
dropped her off at Cornell and fled the country. She had the only revenge she can muster when
she did her study abroad in Australia instead of Europe but has since made
peace with this turn of events, no doubt helped by the eventual coalescing of
the greater part of the offspring in the US.
The discussion went pretty smoothly with the only unexpected question coming
when Frau Nonic asked me what my father did for a living, which wasn’t a
problem except I didn’t know the word for Human Resources. Towards the end, she spent a few minutes
giving us pointers on how to prepare for the next interview, which will be more
intimidating because it will be with a panel of seven people. Also, the focus will be on factual specifics
about the government, geography, politics and history, not just about the clubs
we participate in and how we like our jobs or school. This is the test that most of our Swiss
friends say they’d likely fail themselves although, as native language speakers
I point out that they could more easily bullshit their way through it than Lisa
and I could. When she told us that Basel
offers a course specifically designed to prepare applicants for this interview we
let slip, at the risk of appearing a bit too eager beaver, that we were already
signed up. She nodded, seemingly not
surprised then concluded by outlining the next steps and telling us that the
invitation to the panel interrogation would probably not come until after the
summer holidays and that we’d receive another bill in the coming weeks, neither
of which surprised me.
