Feeling Like a Stupid American

The Hulu series ‘Ramy’ isn’t a travel show, but it could be.

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In 2010, my friend Steffi wanted me to hitchhike with her. We were in Turkey and planned to visit her family in Austria, and she wanted us to carry our bags to the highway, stick our thumbs out, and trust in the goodness of strangers to take us from Istanbul to Vienna.

I thought it was the stupidest idea I had ever heard.

But I looked up to Steffi. She was Austrian Canadian and spoke fluent English, French, and German. She was smarter than me, had traveled to more countries, and had read more books. I was serving in the Peace Corps and beginning to build a more global perspective, and Steffi was so deeply un-American that she took pride in pointing out just how American I was. She argued against many of the cultural values I took for granted or thought were inherently “right.” We debated everything from God to how to pronounce the word marry. Our conversations made me feel stupid in the moment but smarter for having had them. When she suggested hitchhiking, my reaction was to explain its obvious danger, but as usual, she eventually convinced me to reconsider. She had already done it a few times before—alone, no less. And after all, we had met when I was living in northern Macedonia and hosting “couch surfers” traveling through the area who needed a place to crash. Wasn’t I trusting strangers already?

When our first driver, a middle-aged Turkish man, picked us up on the side of the road, Steffi and I kept our bags and sat in the back seat of his car. She spoke with him in Turkish and translated to me, and I tried to hide how afraid I was. After about 15 minutes, the driver said that he needed to stop for gas. The moment he stepped out of the car and shut the door behind him, I turned to Steffi.

Me, a scrawny 20-something hitchhiking in Turkey. Steffi insisted we bring her hula-hoops along.

“He is going to kill us! This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life! He’s gonna kill me first, and then he’s going to kill you, and no one will be able to identify our bodies because he’ll take our IDs and we’re in the middle of fucking Turkey!”

I whisper-yelled that we should grab our bags and run while our driver was still inside, before it was too late. Steffi, meanwhile, was laughing. “Is that why you’ve been quiet? Is that what you’ve been thinking about this whole time?”

“Yes!” I yelled back. “Of course! How could you not be thinking about that?”

I spent those precious last seconds trying to convince her, until the driver came back and sealed our fate: He drove us west for an hour or so and dropped us back off on the road. And then we stuck out our thumbs for the next driver. And the next. And the next.

We drove with 17 strangers across several days through Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Austria, until we finally arrived in Vienna. We got caught in thunderstorms, slept in an abandoned bus, napped in a barn, and walked miles in the middle of the woods when we couldn’t find our next ride. One night, we were in a semitruck that crashed into a herd of wild boar. Another night, we slept in our sleeping bags only to wake up and realize we were on a bed of slugs. But the drivers were wonderful. Most offered us food. Some offered us money. A few insisted on taking us to a restaurant. All of them were incredibly kind, and I feared the world a little less because of them.

The Hulu series Ramy isn’t a travel show. The show is actually about Ramy, a Muslim, first-generation Egyptian American who is trying—and failing—to balance his spirituality with an American culture that opposes it. The friction between Ramy’s cultures is best shown in places like New Jersey, where he attempts to make both worlds coexist, but perhaps most interesting is when Ramy leaves the United States to visit Egypt, where he stumbles through cross-cultural communication. In Season 3, which premiered yesterday, Ramy visits Israel for a business trip and fumbles through a conversation with a Jewish businesswoman who asks him to draw a stick figure of the Prophet Muhammad to prove that he isn’t an overzealous Muslim. The conversation gets even worse from there:

“This is my mother,” the woman said. “She is the only person from our family who survived the Holocaust.”

“Wow,” Ramy stuttered. “Congratulations.”

“What did you say? Are you being sarcastic?”

“No, no, I …” Ramy stammered. “No, no, of course not. No, I meant, uh … surviving the Holocaust, that’s huge. You know, and—and the numbers were not good so … to get out, I feel like that deserves a big … congratulations …”

Later that same trip, Ramy goes to Palestine in hopes of hooking up with a woman he matched with online. When she turns him down, she asks, “Do you think you are the best that I can do because of the occupation?” (Ramy answers that question too honestly.)

Ramy’s family shares his cross-cultural challenges. His sister, Deena, is a smart, aspiring lawyer whose feminism is often at odds with her community’s expectations of her; their parents are from Egypt but have lived in the United States for the past 35 years. In one Season 3 episode, Ramy’s father, Farouk, argues with his brother, Ayman.

Marcus Price / Hulu

“Did you ever visit America, Ayman?” Farouk asked. “All these years you never visited me.”

“And you visited me all the time? You only visited once,” Ayman said.

“I don’t have to visit. I’m Egyptian. I know this land. Wherever I go, Egypt is with me.”

“You’re not Egyptian. You’re American. You’ve lived more of your life in America than Egypt.”

Ramy’s own efforts at being a proud and observant Muslim tend to fail horribly, and much of the show is about his struggles with guilt and shame. (I would have written about that, but I’ve probably said enough on that topic for a while.) Despite his efforts, sometimes it’s hard to root for Ramy at all. He is an incredibly flawed, confused, and hurtful person.

Ramy balances comedy, religion-based trauma, and generational conflicts well. (If you watched Mo on Netflix like I recommended, you might have noticed that Mo and Ramy are both involved in each other’s shows, and their tones are similar.) Ramy’s encounters are often awkward and funny; he’s a terrible communicator, prone to rambling and putting his foot in his mouth. But the series is full of insightful conversations during Ramy’s travels that remind me how it felt when I stepped outside of my American bubble. Ramy usually feels stupid, but I can’t help but hope he becomes better for it. We should all be so lucky.

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Thanks to everyone who responded to my last Humans Being about Shadowland and conspiracy theorists. The responses were too personal to share, but suffice to say that many readers struggle with the conspiracy theorists in their life.