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Maria de Conceiçāo, 32, was born in Portugal and worked for six years in Denmark creating tapestries and clothing that she calls "wearable art" before moving to Washington, D.C., four years ago. She has had twelve shows of her work, including the chasuble she made for then Dean Francis Bowes Sayer Jr. of Washington Cathedral; the garment is on exhibit this month at the Vatican. Maria, who is married to American Patrick Heininger, a lawyer for the World Bank, has a contract for a book on her design and collage techniques. Says she: "This is the fourth country in which I have made a home, and definitely the last." Ali Daghighfekr, 30, comes from an Iranian family that owns the Middle East's largest manufacturer of home appliances. Uncertain of the future of private enterprise in Iran, he set up an import-export business in Los Angeles last year. Says he: "I don't think Americans really appreciate America. If I marry and have children, I think they will thank me for allowing them to be born American."
These worldly wise immigrants do not necessarily share what Novelist Saul Bellow called the "kiss-the-ground-at-Ellis-Island attitude." Many are the shards and barbs on the road to becoming American. U.S. television is a big turn-off for Europeans. So, at least initially, are permissive child rearing, much so-called gourmet food, gun-toting cops, blah-blah cocktail parties, football and baseball, bubble gum, littered streets, first-naming on first encounter, and such other indue -ers of culture shock as the warning on a hotel dressing table that greeted one European couple on their first night in New York: YOUR DAY ENDS AT 1 P.M.
Generally, though, the first days settle into exciting weeks and rewarding months, and the most tentative of new citizens begins to sound like a charter member of the D.A.R. Ask David John Bickerstaff, 32, a British automotive engineer who moved to Detroit in 1973, owns a four-bedroom home with swimming pool and a vacation cottage in northern Michigan. "When I meet a cynical guy in the U.S.," says Bickerstaff, "I tell him: 'Why don't you go to England and live? You'll come back a happy American.' " —Michael Demarest