City Lights:

I spent a year in England at graduate school from 2002 to 2003, living in a dorm with a dozen or so international students. Halfway through that year, the United States led the invasion of Iraq. Among my housemates were citizens of Libya, Germany, Japan, Lebanon and other countries the United States has been at odds with over the last century, and during that year, I got the most sustained dose of anti-Americanism I ever hope to endure.

It’s not that the people I lived with were cruel or blamed me personally for what they viewed as America’s mistreatment of the world. But many of them had grown up in societies that taught them, at a young age, to perceive the United States as a warlike, imperialistic country intent on crushing their way of life — and they reminded me of that constantly as the bombs hit Baghdad. Toward the end of the year, the Libyan told me something astonishing: Before she befriended me, the first American she had ever met, she believed that 9/11 was a heroic act.

So I was heartened Monday when I met with Asher Saunders, the Coast High School student who competed in the Youth Friendship Games in Austria this month, and found that his experience with other cultures was much more positive than mine. Asher, 17, spent 10 days in Vienna wrestling opponents from other countries, and also toured a concentration camp and joined in other cultural activities.

He finished fourth in wrestling, barely missing a medal, but by the time he flew back to California last week, winning or losing didn’t seem like the most important thing. While in Austria — one of the countries the Allies liberated in World War II — he found himself treated almost like royalty by everyday citizens, who still celebrate the U.S. as the country that saved them from oppression.

When Asher’s team attended a carnival, he said, some officials gave them rides or merchandise for free. Members of other teams asked to trade shirts and equipment. During the entire week and a half, he never heard a single anti-American comment.

“In Austria, they love Americans,” Asher told me, looking a little wide-eyed.

It was a story I had heard before — not from anyone Asher’s age, but from my parents, who honeymooned in Europe in the late 1960s and were treated like guests of honor by people whose fathers had shot at American soldiers a quarter-century ago. One Italian man even insisted that they stay at his house after their car broke down. To the younger generation, particularly in Germany, America seemed like a godsend: the country that had not only wiped out fascism, but then stayed after the war and rebuilt its former enemies from the ground up.

And clearly, it doesn’t seem that way to everyone. One of my housemates in England asked me, point blank, if I could stand to move back to the United States when my graduate year was up. Her own plan was to boycott the country permanently, or at least until Bush was out of office.

I replied that global politics can be a dirty business, and any country as powerful as America is bound to be heroic to some and monstrous to others. I couldn’t defend every foreign policy decision America has made, not by a long shot. But the fact that Austria’s War Ministry flies the American flag along with the Austrian one, as Asher told me it does, shows the reverence that some people still have for the U.S.

And as Asher’s mother, Kimber Saunders, put it: “I hope, if they came over here, we’d treat them the same way.”

City Editor MICHAEL MILLER can be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at [email protected] .