On Being an American Citizen
May 3, 2006
The summer before I left China for America in 1996, my sister made me watch a rerun of Baywatch so that I could get myself better prepared for the new country. It was a quick lesson of not believing what you saw with your own eyes, as the impression that Americans were all attractive, with proud bodies and toothy smiles, was shattered soon after I arrived in America. The handsome men and beautiful women in Baywatch, after all, were chosen as I had once been chosen, for my round face and rosy cheeks, to be photographed with other happy children for a propaganda poster for the school district.
What represents America for me, then, after ten years? A few years ago, I taught a college composition class in Iowa. In my class, I had a Guatemalan student who had immigrated to America a few years before, an Indian boy who was born and grew up in London, a Japanese-American out of North Carolina, a Philippine-Chinese-American from Hawaii, and, common to the heartland, a very fair share of very blond and very pale students.
The second week of the class, during a discussion about stereotypes and discrimination, a student stood up and proclaimed herself to be a white supremacist and complained about being discriminated against for her beliefs.
It was a situation I was not prepared for, and I was, for a short moment, speechless, as most of my students were, until one young man commented, very rightly, that it was rather an intriguing thing to be discriminated against as a white supremacist. As a writer, my first reaction was to ask questions about the young woman's life and belief, to get to know everything about her (I did learn quite a bit from her essays and journals: her pride in her very homophobic, Catholic, white supremacist family; her fear of death and of losing her hair, because of a traffic accident; a bar fight she and a few friends had with a group of African-American girls over the right to repeat the word "nigger" after a hip-hop star; the Thanksgiving dinner gone awry when her grandparents and her parents got into a drunken wrestling match.)
As a teacher, I felt the responsibility to direct the conversation to a better discussion, but I failed for that initial class. Later I gave my students two essays to write, one on fear and one on curiosity. It was interesting to see that the fears they wrote about — of death and aging, of unexplained depression and eating disorder — were all genuine, touching, and rather similar. Similar too was the lack of curiosity — most of my students, when asked to list five people they were curious about, could not come up with better answers than the jocks they had a crush on, or Britney Spears and Eminem.
I remember once talking to an American coworker, and when I asked him about his impressions of the rest of the word, he bluntly said, "Why do I have to care about the other countries? America is the best country in the world." The class, in a sense, represents the country to me in both a good way and a worrisome way. America is the place where a boy growing up at the back of an Indian grocery store in London easily started a friendship with another boy who grew up in Morning Sun, Iowa, population 872. America also churns out a young generation that, despite their different backgrounds, are interested in only media sensations. Even though some of my students openly disapproved of my white supremacist student, in the end, I found them equally uncurious. It was hard to make many of my students realize that the disabled guy handing out advertising by the street corner might have an equally important story as they themselves did; it was harder for them to understand, when I taught a book on genocides, of the importance of looking at history, and at the world.
My mentor and friend James Alan McPherson grew up in the segregated South and had never sat down at the same table to eat with a white person until he was in his twenties. Among the writer friends I made in America were a woman from an Orthodox Jewish family who grew up in a Chassidic community, another woman who grew up in various compounds of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and a guy from a small rural town in Ohio. In the end, the difference in our origins, colors of our skins, or religions mattered little in these friendships; what is more important is our love of literature and how it reveals the most absurd and most endearing human natures to us. To teach writing and literature in America, to me, is to teach my students how to become more curious about others, as the lack of curiosity is among the first signs of a country that is closing its door to the outside and starting to live on the dream of being a superpower, as had happened for centuries in China.
Lastly, to quote Mr. McPherson's definition of an American citizen, "I believe that if one can experience diversity, touch a variety of its people, laugh at its craziness, distill wisdom from its tragedies, and attempt to synthesize all this inside oneself without going crazy, one will have earned the right to call oneself 'citizen of the United States.'"
This is the wisdom that comes from America, to which I hope more Americans are paying attention. I would also add that only when one does all that was mentioned above will one have earned the right to call oneself a "citizen of the world." In the last week of April 2006, I will be attending the PEN World Voices conference in New York City, and I will, among other things in my suitcase, bring my eyes and ears and curiosity to experience all the voices from the world.
