Ten years ago, I moved to America.
I was born here, but not raised here. The most recent ten years of life here, plus the 3 first years of my life here now add up to half my lifetime. Very soon, the scale will tip and I will have spent more of my life in America than anywhere else. This makes me cry.
There are many things that I am grateful for in America and that I appreciate about being an American, but it is hard for me to find it in myself to say that I love America. Perhaps in the same way that I wrote about my struggle to feel emotional fondness for children at times, I do not have emotional fondness for America most of the time, though I love it in a sort of fierce, visceral way and because I can not escape it, even if I were to move away.
In many ways, I am an immigrant, having moved to America from somewhere else that was once home. I think I can say that I share the immigrant's experience of being grateful for the promises that America holds and that in many ways, life for me here is "better" than it could be elsewhere, but I also harbor the immigrant's wound of feeling that I don't fully belong and I see with immigrants eyes that much of what America promises is a half-truth at best.
I am resisting the urge to apologize for this cynicism, because while I recognize and appreciate the good things, I am ever more aware that my sometimes-perception of America being "the best place" isn't the America that most people live in. I suppose that if you get to know anywhere well enough, you'll discover that it's not quite the same as you expected.
When I didn't live in America, America was always the Shining Place, where everything was better than wherever else I was in the world. The water was clean enough to drink from the pipes, the streets were paved and without trash, there weren't amputee children lying in the middle of the sidewalks,
and everyone had money to spare. This is both true and untrue. It is true that in most regards America's norms are of a higher standard than in other places. It's good enough on the surface that we can claim that it's good enough. I experience a lot of "grey" America, where everything is middle-of-the-road enough that we can get by without ever doing good or doing evil. You can also get by here without resisting evil.
I haven't traveled very much within the United States, but the little bit that I have seen astonishes me with its variety. Some people here don't have clean water, or enough water at all. There are unpaved streets and plenty of trash. There are more and more people begging for a living, and for most people, the thought of "money to spare" makes them laugh and cry at once. It is true that if we compare to rural China, for example, most Americans don't have much to complain about.
But I don't live in rural China anymore, I live here. I'm not a woman in Saudi Arabia "where things are really bad for women", I live here, where things aren't good enough for women. I don't live in a country where I will very likely be killed for my faith or my politics, I live here now, in a country where religious freedom is confused about itself and the religious don't take their faith very seriously but it's also commonplace to act on the most heinous of beliefs. I don't live in Yemen, where children are literally dying of hunger, but I live here, where fresh food costs more than poison.
I said before how life in America feels like grey-area to me much of the time. I think that is often a result of the America that I can see, but the more I am curious and the more I peek around corners, the more I have a sense that for many people, life in America is actually dark. I read somewhere recently that, "the world isn't getting darker, we're just pulling back the veil."
I live in a country where at 26, and within the time that I've lived here, I have outlived at least seven of over 5400 people shot by police officers (as of May 1, 2013 when such a list was created. The list below is from I Am Not Your Negro).
Tamir Rice 2002-2014 (age 12)
Darius Simmons 1998-2012 (age 14)
Trayvon Martin 1995-12 (age 17)
Aiyana Stanley-Jones 2002-2010 (age 8)
Christopher McCray 1996-2014 (age 18)
Cameron Tillman 2000-2014 (age 14)
Amir Brooks 1997-2014 (age 17)
I didn't expect it to be so hard to do good here. Sometimes it feels impossible to recruit people to see my America, and sometimes people are too busy to love or be loved.
In many ways, I believe that President Trump has cut me loose, as a white woman, from what I thought I knew or what felt familiar here in America, and forced me to forge new bonds and recognize old rifts. I'm extremely grateful to his presidency for that. It has made my heart feel raw and exposed to elements I did not know existed, but I am grateful.
Ten years in, I still don't feel a sense of "where I'm from", but I do have this sense that I have a unique opportunity to understand and define what it means to be an American. I get to choose my identity to a greater degree than someone who was born and raised here, and that does make me feel invested in what it means to be American. I am from here, so I must be a part of here, and learn how to manipulate the potential for good here. I think that coming from outside gives me both a fierce love for what is good, and a less calloused view of what is rotten. I know where my loyalties are not, when it comes to Americanism.
Being American encompasses a lot more than I'll ever know or see, and the more I understand that, the more I realize that as much as I get to define Americanism for myself, I can't do that for everyone in this country. There isn't one right answer to what it means to love this country or be a part of it, or even to dislike being a part of it. But I do get to offer a counter-narrative when America is held up as something that I revile, because I am also American which means my view of Americanism counts for something.
Lately, my struggle has been to separate my identity as an American from my experience as a white woman. As I keep saying, being American looks different depending on who and where you are in this country, but I'm beginning to see that for me, it isn't right to stay in my America when other versions of America suffer for it. What I mean by this is that by not breaking away from the narrative of America, land of the free and brave, where everything is cleaner and better than elsewhere, I am complicit in perpetuating the version of America that is oppressive and warped. The warped version, where racism, sexism, imperialism, and religious oppression are deeply rooted generally isn't my America, which means that I can pretty safely ignore it (consciously and unconsciously). But if someone else lives in that America and I deny the truth of that, am I not perpetuating it? And if I can not deny it, how can I rest without challenging it?
If you live in America and you don't often find yourself angry and heartbroken, I do not think you are paying attention. I'm not saying that as a political slogan. Honestly ask yourself, if you think that life in America is "pretty good", not only for yourself but for other Americans that you might never have met, then what have you removed or not let in to your circle of influence? People are dying unnatural deaths here and suffering here, in America, and that shouldn't sit easily with any of us. Nor should we say we are upset by it, but then not change the very foundations of our lives and beliefs and understanding in order to prevent it from continuing.
I frequently become overwhelmed when I think of all the ways in which I am unsatisfied with America. But in the wise words of Mrs. Frizzle from the Magic School Bus, "if you have a problem that is too big to solve, solve a smaller problem first."
I have a fear that my life will be boring, lack meaning, or otherwise be average. I admit that sometimes I am motivated by my own search for glory, but I also think of who I admire in this world, and on a more relevant scale to this particular subject, which Americans do I admire?
I admire people who overcome great odds, I admire artists (who's job is often to unsettle the settled), and I admire the people who are willing to be called "crazy" or "fringe" and even not be taken seriously because they decided that being middle-of-the-road wasn't going to cut it. It's hard for me to rationalize "a quiet life" of domesticity (however necessary or worthy or even rightly enjoyable) and reading and vacationing as "good enough". For those of us that have the option of that life, we must recognize that leading that life requires ignorance of or disinterest in the fact that most people can't live that life. I don't mean that pursuing those things is wrong, I only mean that I think we're falling short of our potential as citizens if we stop there.
When I've challenged people who seem to have stopped short of realizing their social potential, sometimes I hear, "I care, I just don't talk about it". Please talk about it! Talking about it helps us to engage with what's going on around us and opens us up to being challenged either to tweak our behavior or to defend it. Talking about it lets those who are struggling know that we are not complacent about their suffering.
As I struggle with looking my America in the face and coming to terms with belonging here, for better or worse, I find that my passion for changing the things I can't live with here leading me to invest in the communities around me. That makes it feel like home. I belong here, and therefore I am allowed to be upset when it falls short. I don't believe it is wrong or should even be frowned upon to be unsatisfied or even angry with our surroundings, our government, and our nation sometimes. I makes me personally invested in seeing it get better.
In writing out these thoughts, I have been taken aback by the depth of sadness and darkness they conjure in me. To have come to America, imagining it to be the place where everything is made right (Heaven? Haha), and then find out that not only is everything not right, but we refuse to admit that it's
not right... well, it's disenchanting to say the least. It feels like betrayal, and it confuses the concept of home, if home is a place where you're supposed to feel safe and happy.
I am still recognizing and warming up to my right as an American to be unhappy with America and to challenge common narratives of the good we do, when it's not good for everyone at all. I have realized something terrifying and exhilarating at once: America is not the best country in the world.
There is no "best" country.
I am just from this country, and it's not "the best".
I believe that thinking of America as the best can actually keep us from even being "good". Logically, if one is from/in the "best" place, than everywhere is less-than-best. Even my children understand that there can only be ONE "best", despite my attempts to convince them of 1st winners and 2nd winners. Even though we rarely admit that we think America and Americans are not only "the best" but consequently "better than", that is the generally unspoken byproduct of believing and acting as if we're the best.
I don't have a super tidy way to wrap up these thoughts. This wasn't even really about the specific ways in which America is not what I thought her to be. I do, however, have a few small takeaways and hopes about what home means and what it means to be American, or even at home in America.
1. Naguib Mahfouz wrote, "Home is not where you are born, home is where all your attempts to escape cease." I've found that in a community - even a very imperfect one - if not a country. I am grateful for that sense of home and that it's somehow both bigger and smaller than the nation itself.
2. Home is where you are known, and that's worth holding on to. More and more, the space in which we are known can also be in a state of transience.
3. America is unique, to my knowledge, in that citizenship (or extended time spent) makes you American, not your ethnicity. Anyone can be American in time, whereas if I moved to Sweden or China, even if gained citizenship there, I would never be Swedish or Chinese. I cherish the fact that being American isn't based on ethnicity, and I will fight to make sure that that stays a defining characteristic of being American.
4. As ridiculous as this might sound, I've found solace and joy and in the cream cheese wonton. It's certainly not Chinese, but most people probably associate it with Chinese food if they don't give much thought to it (which they probably haven't). These hybrid bundles of delight have come to encompass my experience as an American-Chinese-American - maybe a bit confused about its identity, "but good. Yeah, still good."
Image credits:
1. Unknown, possibly an artist called Kim Kim
2. By Ron Wimberly
3. Match cover, found here
I was born here, but not raised here. The most recent ten years of life here, plus the 3 first years of my life here now add up to half my lifetime. Very soon, the scale will tip and I will have spent more of my life in America than anywhere else. This makes me cry.
There are many things that I am grateful for in America and that I appreciate about being an American, but it is hard for me to find it in myself to say that I love America. Perhaps in the same way that I wrote about my struggle to feel emotional fondness for children at times, I do not have emotional fondness for America most of the time, though I love it in a sort of fierce, visceral way and because I can not escape it, even if I were to move away.
In many ways, I am an immigrant, having moved to America from somewhere else that was once home. I think I can say that I share the immigrant's experience of being grateful for the promises that America holds and that in many ways, life for me here is "better" than it could be elsewhere, but I also harbor the immigrant's wound of feeling that I don't fully belong and I see with immigrants eyes that much of what America promises is a half-truth at best.
I am resisting the urge to apologize for this cynicism, because while I recognize and appreciate the good things, I am ever more aware that my sometimes-perception of America being "the best place" isn't the America that most people live in. I suppose that if you get to know anywhere well enough, you'll discover that it's not quite the same as you expected.
When I didn't live in America, America was always the Shining Place, where everything was better than wherever else I was in the world. The water was clean enough to drink from the pipes, the streets were paved and without trash, there weren't amputee children lying in the middle of the sidewalks,and everyone had money to spare. This is both true and untrue. It is true that in most regards America's norms are of a higher standard than in other places. It's good enough on the surface that we can claim that it's good enough. I experience a lot of "grey" America, where everything is middle-of-the-road enough that we can get by without ever doing good or doing evil. You can also get by here without resisting evil.
I haven't traveled very much within the United States, but the little bit that I have seen astonishes me with its variety. Some people here don't have clean water, or enough water at all. There are unpaved streets and plenty of trash. There are more and more people begging for a living, and for most people, the thought of "money to spare" makes them laugh and cry at once. It is true that if we compare to rural China, for example, most Americans don't have much to complain about.
But I don't live in rural China anymore, I live here. I'm not a woman in Saudi Arabia "where things are really bad for women", I live here, where things aren't good enough for women. I don't live in a country where I will very likely be killed for my faith or my politics, I live here now, in a country where religious freedom is confused about itself and the religious don't take their faith very seriously but it's also commonplace to act on the most heinous of beliefs. I don't live in Yemen, where children are literally dying of hunger, but I live here, where fresh food costs more than poison.
I said before how life in America feels like grey-area to me much of the time. I think that is often a result of the America that I can see, but the more I am curious and the more I peek around corners, the more I have a sense that for many people, life in America is actually dark. I read somewhere recently that, "the world isn't getting darker, we're just pulling back the veil."
I live in a country where at 26, and within the time that I've lived here, I have outlived at least seven of over 5400 people shot by police officers (as of May 1, 2013 when such a list was created. The list below is from I Am Not Your Negro).
Tamir Rice 2002-2014 (age 12)
Darius Simmons 1998-2012 (age 14)
Trayvon Martin 1995-12 (age 17)
Aiyana Stanley-Jones 2002-2010 (age 8)
Christopher McCray 1996-2014 (age 18)
Cameron Tillman 2000-2014 (age 14)
Amir Brooks 1997-2014 (age 17)
Not only have I outlived them, but I was born before all of them too.
I don't bring this up to demonize the police. I understand that it is a difficult job, and sometimes officers shoot in self defense. I bring it up because it helps me to see that there is more than one America, and I'm trying to understand my place in all of them.
In many ways, I believe that President Trump has cut me loose, as a white woman, from what I thought I knew or what felt familiar here in America, and forced me to forge new bonds and recognize old rifts. I'm extremely grateful to his presidency for that. It has made my heart feel raw and exposed to elements I did not know existed, but I am grateful.
Ten years in, I still don't feel a sense of "where I'm from", but I do have this sense that I have a unique opportunity to understand and define what it means to be an American. I get to choose my identity to a greater degree than someone who was born and raised here, and that does make me feel invested in what it means to be American. I am from here, so I must be a part of here, and learn how to manipulate the potential for good here. I think that coming from outside gives me both a fierce love for what is good, and a less calloused view of what is rotten. I know where my loyalties are not, when it comes to Americanism.
Being American encompasses a lot more than I'll ever know or see, and the more I understand that, the more I realize that as much as I get to define Americanism for myself, I can't do that for everyone in this country. There isn't one right answer to what it means to love this country or be a part of it, or even to dislike being a part of it. But I do get to offer a counter-narrative when America is held up as something that I revile, because I am also American which means my view of Americanism counts for something.
Lately, my struggle has been to separate my identity as an American from my experience as a white woman. As I keep saying, being American looks different depending on who and where you are in this country, but I'm beginning to see that for me, it isn't right to stay in my America when other versions of America suffer for it. What I mean by this is that by not breaking away from the narrative of America, land of the free and brave, where everything is cleaner and better than elsewhere, I am complicit in perpetuating the version of America that is oppressive and warped. The warped version, where racism, sexism, imperialism, and religious oppression are deeply rooted generally isn't my America, which means that I can pretty safely ignore it (consciously and unconsciously). But if someone else lives in that America and I deny the truth of that, am I not perpetuating it? And if I can not deny it, how can I rest without challenging it?
If you live in America and you don't often find yourself angry and heartbroken, I do not think you are paying attention. I'm not saying that as a political slogan. Honestly ask yourself, if you think that life in America is "pretty good", not only for yourself but for other Americans that you might never have met, then what have you removed or not let in to your circle of influence? People are dying unnatural deaths here and suffering here, in America, and that shouldn't sit easily with any of us. Nor should we say we are upset by it, but then not change the very foundations of our lives and beliefs and understanding in order to prevent it from continuing.
I frequently become overwhelmed when I think of all the ways in which I am unsatisfied with America. But in the wise words of Mrs. Frizzle from the Magic School Bus, "if you have a problem that is too big to solve, solve a smaller problem first."
I have a fear that my life will be boring, lack meaning, or otherwise be average. I admit that sometimes I am motivated by my own search for glory, but I also think of who I admire in this world, and on a more relevant scale to this particular subject, which Americans do I admire?
When I've challenged people who seem to have stopped short of realizing their social potential, sometimes I hear, "I care, I just don't talk about it". Please talk about it! Talking about it helps us to engage with what's going on around us and opens us up to being challenged either to tweak our behavior or to defend it. Talking about it lets those who are struggling know that we are not complacent about their suffering.
As I struggle with looking my America in the face and coming to terms with belonging here, for better or worse, I find that my passion for changing the things I can't live with here leading me to invest in the communities around me. That makes it feel like home. I belong here, and therefore I am allowed to be upset when it falls short. I don't believe it is wrong or should even be frowned upon to be unsatisfied or even angry with our surroundings, our government, and our nation sometimes. I makes me personally invested in seeing it get better.
In writing out these thoughts, I have been taken aback by the depth of sadness and darkness they conjure in me. To have come to America, imagining it to be the place where everything is made right (Heaven? Haha), and then find out that not only is everything not right, but we refuse to admit that it's
not right... well, it's disenchanting to say the least. It feels like betrayal, and it confuses the concept of home, if home is a place where you're supposed to feel safe and happy.
I am still recognizing and warming up to my right as an American to be unhappy with America and to challenge common narratives of the good we do, when it's not good for everyone at all. I have realized something terrifying and exhilarating at once: America is not the best country in the world.
There is no "best" country.
I am just from this country, and it's not "the best".
I believe that thinking of America as the best can actually keep us from even being "good". Logically, if one is from/in the "best" place, than everywhere is less-than-best. Even my children understand that there can only be ONE "best", despite my attempts to convince them of 1st winners and 2nd winners. Even though we rarely admit that we think America and Americans are not only "the best" but consequently "better than", that is the generally unspoken byproduct of believing and acting as if we're the best.
I don't have a super tidy way to wrap up these thoughts. This wasn't even really about the specific ways in which America is not what I thought her to be. I do, however, have a few small takeaways and hopes about what home means and what it means to be American, or even at home in America.
1. Naguib Mahfouz wrote, "Home is not where you are born, home is where all your attempts to escape cease." I've found that in a community - even a very imperfect one - if not a country. I am grateful for that sense of home and that it's somehow both bigger and smaller than the nation itself.2. Home is where you are known, and that's worth holding on to. More and more, the space in which we are known can also be in a state of transience.
3. America is unique, to my knowledge, in that citizenship (or extended time spent) makes you American, not your ethnicity. Anyone can be American in time, whereas if I moved to Sweden or China, even if gained citizenship there, I would never be Swedish or Chinese. I cherish the fact that being American isn't based on ethnicity, and I will fight to make sure that that stays a defining characteristic of being American.
4. As ridiculous as this might sound, I've found solace and joy and in the cream cheese wonton. It's certainly not Chinese, but most people probably associate it with Chinese food if they don't give much thought to it (which they probably haven't). These hybrid bundles of delight have come to encompass my experience as an American-Chinese-American - maybe a bit confused about its identity, "but good. Yeah, still good."
Image credits:
1. Unknown, possibly an artist called Kim Kim
2. By Ron Wimberly
3. Match cover, found here
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