Saturday morning on Polk Street. People are basking in the sun having breakfast at the cafés along the side walks while joggers are passing by. In Russian Hill, on the border to the Marina, this is the typical way of life here. Helena Simon from Sweden, who has been a member of SWEA San Francisco for one and a half years, sips her Starbucks coffee and starts telling her story.
“My first job in the U.S. was in New York. That is actually the first time I came in contact with SWEA, in a different way than most other members,” she said. "I was working as an event manager in a Swedish restaurant and remember that this organization [SWEA] kept on calling us up trying to get discounts for their events just because they too were Swedish. I found that a bit annoying at the time.”
In New York Simon met her husband, an American and a student in the city at the time. When he had to move to Boston for further education, she commuted between New York and Boston during the weekends for half a year until eventually moving there. But when he was sent to Japan with the US air force, they both moved to Tokyo for the completion of his three year commission there. As they were moving back to the US, they knew they did not want to stay in the military, and since Simon’s husband grew up in San Mateo, they decided to move to the American west coast. “Everybody who is from the West Coast here think that is the place to be.” Simon explains.
While in Tokyo, Simon took up contact with SWEA once again, this time on her own initiative. “But since we lived outside of Tokyo, I could not come to a lot of events, I actually only visited the Christmas Fair during the whole time there,” she says. She moved to San Francisco in February last year, ahead of her husband who was not going to come until August the same year. “I was all alone in a city I had only spent two days in earlier, I did not know anyone. You can not just walk in to a bar and make friends,” Simon says. So she started going to the Girls’ Nights Outs, an event for younger and new members of SWEA, and thanks to that she met some of her best friends here.
Today, Simon is the person organizing the Girls’ Nights Out. “We meet once a month and are between five and fifteen people each time. Most of us are in our thirties.” Since event managing is Simon’s field, even professionally, she also organizes a lot of events for SWEA. She is also part of SWEA’s board of committe. “We constantly try to get younger people to join the organization so that it will survive and keep on growing.” About half of the twelve women on the board are between 30 and 45 years old and the rest over 45. This, according to Simon, is important in order to get fresh ideas and new approaches in the group. Simon says that you can not really generalize who exactly is a member of SWEA. “People with different backgrounds come here for different reasons. Some come because of their husband’s job, others just move here after high school. Maybe they fall in love and end up staying. There are even people who started as au pairs here 50 years ago. Others might have moved here at a very young age and are now trying to reconnect with Sweden,” Helena Simon explains. “But what we all have in common is the need to keep in touch with our heritage.”
On the question why she moved abroad in the first place, Simon says; ”I have a travel bug, as they call it here, I am very curious about things.” After she finished high school, Helena Simon worked as an au pair in Connecticut for one year, studied Spanish in Spain for half a year and then went to Switzerland to study hotel management for three years. When Simon moved to New York, she was 25 years old, and always thought she somehow would return to Sweden. Now she knows she will never move back, at least not until she and her husband retire. “If we will have children, they are going to grow up here and that is part of why SWEA is so important to me. It is a way for them to meet other Swedish people and get to learn about Swedish culture and traditions. I do not think that would work if you do not have an organization for it.”
Simon is from Sundsvall, a city in northern Sweden, and since she moved to the U.S. in 2000, she has been trying to go home twice every year until just a couple of years ago. “I do not know how I made it before, how I could get time off to go that often,” says Helena Simon, who now works for her husband’s dentist office taking care of bookkeeping, marketing and personnel.
When asked if she feels Swedish or American, Simon answers; “Of course I take off the culture here, but I feel Swedish.” She points out that it is hard to know how to identify yourself being a Swedish woman living in the US. She says her friends in Sweden do not have an understanding of what happens here and vice versa. “People are different. Something I found very hard in the beginning is that most people here are very nice, but that does not really mean anything. They tell you that they would like to meet sometime, but most of the time that never happens,” Helena Simon explains. “In Sweden, if you say that, you really mean that you should meet and you will actually do it.” But at the same time, she says, it does not mean that people are false or deceitful, it just works that way here. “You just have to know who your real friends are and who is just an acquaintance.”
What Simon probably misses most from Sweden, apart from her family, is something called “allemansrätten”, the legal right to access to private land and open country. She was amazed when her au pair family in Connecticut told her they were going out to pick blueberries and they had to go to a closed plantation where you paid a fee and got to pick berries for one hour. “I had never seen anything like that. In Sweden you would just go out in the woods and pick blueberries. When I was back in Sweden this summer, that was the first thing I did. I went out in the woods to pick as many blueberries as I could.” Simon laughs. “My husband thinks I am crazy; `You and your berries` he says.”
