Ahmad Fadam left the Baghdad Bureau in May to take up a visiting fellowship at the University of North Carolina.

It has been more than two months since I arrived in the United States, and I’m starting to wake up from the culture shock everyone warned me about. Or at least this is what I’m thinking, because there is still so much for me to see and learn in this country. I have been seeing things and learning about things that no one in my country will believe. Some of it is so beautiful and some is so crazy that even I, the one who saw it, cannot believe it.

Being in another country makes you get acquainted with a new culture, traditions, habits. Most of the time, it is very different than what you have experienced all your life when you still lived back home. You were used to doing things there that you cannot do here, because you know it is different. You have to force yourself not to do so now and to start acting like the people in this country. You don’t want to be looked at as a stranger. No one wants to be in this position.

I was talking to a journalist from Pakistan named Umar. He is very smart and polite, very thoughtful too. We were talking about how a person starts to behave differently when he leaves his country. He starts saying things and doing things that he didn’t do when he was still there. You become very polite and sweet when talking, very organized, obeying the rules and dressing well. You would do anything to make others look at you in a good way, to have the same respect that you had in your country even if it is in a different way.

It is amazing how we act when we are out of our country. We start to feel like we were assigned to represent it, to show the good image of our culture, to try to make people know about the best of us. If people have heard bad things about our countries — and that is the position I am in now — we start explaining that what they have heard is not the full truth and in fact it is very different. We try to defend the name of our country and feel sad whenever we hear someone saying bad things about it.

At the same time we have to live with the fact that this is a total different civilization than ours.

Both Umar and I were thinking in the same way and we both were finding it strange. Why didn’t we act the same when we were back home? Why didn’t we look at our culture, traditions and history in the same way as we look at it now? Why didn’t we defend it when we were there rather than wait to come here to do it? Umar is from Pakistan and I’m from Iraq , and we both felt the same way.

But I can talk about myself and my country. I have been trying to reflect a good picture of Iraq since I first came here. But at the same time, I’m fighting myself because I’m basically in the country that invaded mine. It’s complicated, and I have to live with it. I talk to Americans – who mostly don’t know much about Iraq, except that their troops are there, and there is killing and violence going on – and I answer their questions. I cannot help but feel many of our problems were the result of that invasion, and I try to explain to them what a great history and culture we have and how we used to be before 2003.

And this tears me apart, because I have to remember all of this and keep smiling to them. How more difficult can it be?

To be honest, I had some doubts because when I first came to the United States, I had this fear inside me about the way I was going to be treated. In Iraq, Iraqis are often treated as possible enemies by American soldiers. You cannot get close to them or talk to them until they check you out and make sure that you are OK. I myself was shot at several times in Baghdad just because I was driving my car close to an American convoy. So I thought that I might be treated the same here in America.

But I found it surprisingly different. Ordinary Americans are kind and welcoming. Many of them in fact don’t like what their government is doing in Iraq. Many of them feel sorry and sad for what is happening and some of them apologized to me when they learn that I’m an Iraqi.

But still, they are all busy with their lives, their work, how to spend their day and decorate their kitchens. Iraq is their last concern. Maybe those who have lost friends or relatives in Iraq or even still have someone serving there would care.

So how can an Iraqi like me live in America? I came here looking for peace, and this means to forget even for awhile about the violence I lived through in the last five years in Iraq. I have to find myself again and to know who I am. I have to find the part that I lost because of getting used to the violence. I want to find the human inside me again. But this time, in another world, I have to belong to something and have an identity. But how? How can I find my identity? What is a man’s identity? Could it be by what he does? Like being a journalist? Or could it be by his religion or nationality? Like saying that he is a Muslim Arab? These are all possible. But the greatest of all is when he belongs to a country, like to say that he is Chinese, or French, or Pakistani. For me I will always say that I’m an Iraqi, and I’m proud of it.