American is as American does

What does it mean to be American, and is it a good thing? We think about this a fair amount in our household – partly because we are very proud Americans (that’s not very interesting… are you sure you’re really smart?), partly because my wife was born in Taiwan, and has had the chance to really understand this, and partly because my brilliant sister-in-law is making me think about it now.

My wife is the seventh of nine brothers and sisters, and is Taiwanese (born in Taiwan, ethnically Taiwanese). She came here when she was 13 years old. She still speaks fluent (but American-accented) Taiwanese and Mandarin, along with lovely, intelligent, and slightly quirky English.

(Side note: my wife and I met in college, when her “mistakes” with the English language were much more common. She has an amazing gift for expression; a naturally poetic and powerful speech. When she is angry, and her expressions become “heightened”, I am often struck with a sense of admiration for her brilliantly effective tongue, and her presence and charisma. She coulda been a great politician. Of course, sometimes that sense is not uppermost… But in college, I had the greatest time when she would recount stories to me of going to the “liquid store”, or other similar things… Who could not be charmed by such talk? Why, it IS a “liquid store”, isn’t it? Endless hours of fun, that one. Rather like the fun of mondegreens, which are the especial, albeit unintended gift of my wife’s entire family.)

Line up her brothers and sisters, from oldest to youngest, and you will immediately see one aspect of being American. The oldest ones, who came here as adults, LOOK Chinese. They ARE Chinese. Plop them down on a street in Taipei and no one would give them a second glance, or over-charge them, or look at them funny when they order something weird and “ethnic” from a street food vendor. The youngest ones look completely American, just with slightly differently colored skin and flatter noses than most. It would be sort of ludicrous for some American bigot to get all ethnically racist against them – they are just as American as anyone ever was. It is remarkable to me how this difference from oldest to youngest is obvious at a moment’s glance – as if the very bones under the skin and the shape of the features and the color and texture of the skin have been remolded by upbringing in America. Not to even mention what music they like, or whether they can dance, or what they think about (shhh) sex.

And of course, I’m familiar with this from long experience even before meeting my wife. I grew up in San Francisco, and went to schools that were mostly first or second generation Asian kids, and then went to Berkeley and lived on Northside, which was heavily Asian and Indian. Same thing was obvious then – the difference between foreign students that had just arrived, and kids of the same ethnicity that had been raised American was immediately clear, and one came to unconsciously perceive the American-raised ones as just different “flavors” of American. That’s why racism seemed so especially misguided in their case – put these kids down in some all-white enclave, and suddenly their unreal ethnic difference was emphasized in a cruelly unnatural way.

That’s one of the reasons we like Irvine, and why it’s hard to move to an all-white part of the country, even though we love Rocky Mountain-type locales. Here, our mixed-race daughter looks like everyone else here, and very few of her peers – of all sorts of blends of races and backgrounds – have the slightest thought about “ethnicity”, except when the school system makes them think about it. They are unabashedly and completely American. Just check out her iPod. Same with us – we don’t CARE about ethnicity, we ARE American.

And I think that most of the country, even supposedly redneck backwaters, basically think this way. My wife and I recently spent a week in Kentucky and Tennessee, mostly in small towns, mostly very white, and we pretty much never had any sense that anyone had even a second thought about my wife’s ethnicity. (Well, there was that one sort of backwoods eatery where she seemed a bit exotic to the natives. But we thought they were exotic too).

But I’m not sure that’s so true on an everyday, all-day basis. My daughter really has grown up as just a plain-old American, with a funny mom that has funny stories and ideas and experiences from a foreign land, and a crazy family with similarly interesting backgrounds, that all can speak another language (and do, much of the time, so she has learned it too). It adds to my daughter’s depth of experience and influences, but doesn’t make her “different”, certainly not negatively so. And that’s really important, and I’m not sure it would be true in less diverse places.

And on my end of the story? Well, in some ways, my background has predisposed me to be less American than my wife. My parents were very active Socialists and atheists and the kind of “vehement intellectuals” that find middle-American culture to be stupid – and thus, were very out of the mainstream, almost like having a terrible secret, that would make one outcast if discovered. And we were ethnically Jewish, and sometimes ran across anti-Jewish sentiments, and certainly had occasion to think about being different from all the “regular Christian kids” when we lived in Protestant enclaves like La Mesa and Concord for a few years.

But nowadays? Well, sorry, ethnicity purists, but I just feel no need to actively pass along any ethnic background nonsense to my daughter, or retain it myself. She knows where we came from, and she’ll do with that what she will. What’s real is that she’s an American kid, and that her religious beliefs are up to her.

I don’t like talking about my religious beliefs much, because I find it not to be a subject that is accessible to give-and-take discussion – it’s very personal. But suffice to say that I am not Jewish in belief, that many people would consider me atheist, that I admit that there’s a lot that I don’t know, that I’ve learned a lot from (but certainly don’t “believe”) Eastern religions, and that I love Christianity – from the music to the “feeling” to the philosophy – but that I am not Christian. My wife has almost exactly the same views. So although nothing makes me happier than a good old gospel hymn, we’re not churchgoers, and my daughter will have to figure it out for herself.

But beyond all that (my goodness, how long it takes me to get to the point – is anyone still here?), I must say that I love America, and being American. I love our Constitution and our history. Those Founders were some of the greatest men AND the greatest philosophers that have ever been. The American story is wonderful – from the Spanish west to the English east to the glory and tragedy of the Native Americans, from the Pilgrims to the old west, from Washington to Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt to Truman and Ike. I love American writing, American music, American style. Mark Twain, O’Henry, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, and the wonderfully American Nabokov. More bluegrass and folk and rock music than I can name. The kick-ass culture of my youth. Gilligan’s Island, Star Trek, Twilight Zone, The Brady Bunch (oh come on, it was a nice show), Taxi, Cheers, and Seinfeld. I remember once being in a kind of hippie café, and overhearing one artist talking to another about a year-long trip to France.. “We went over there, and we were American, and we didn’t care about all their old bullshit,” he said, “and we just blew them away.” I love the pioneer, make-it-now spirit of America. I love how we’ve invented the modern world, for good and ill. I’m proud of the strength and grit and toughness and clarity that made us heroic when we were heroic, like in our Revolution, or in World War II.

And America is a gloriously beautiful place, incredibly so. I have traveled all over the world, and through most of the American states – and we in America are truly blessed, with a range of natural beauty and of every kind of place and culture, unparalleled anywhere.

Now this is not to say that I approve of everything American – far from it. I can’t stand where American TV is going. I think our political system is broken. I think our school systems are dysfunctional. I don’t like seeing all the fat people waddling around Costco, whose values are “I want to eat, and I want to buy”. I think American anti-intellectualism has its downside, and that we’re losing much of the core strength and vitality and inventive intelligence that made us great. But the last thing we need is for Americans to start thinking they are “hyphen Americans” – some other ethnicity, who happen to be located in America. No, we’re Americans, and if we had half a brain, we’d be glad of it just as is.