America The Beautiful--essay.
So I submitted this last year to Hyphen magazine and never heard back...guess it wasn't accepted, but I'm now free to post it here for you all to look at :)
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It's 2 a.m. I'm sitting hunched in my old chair from IKEA--no lumbar support so the nights of paper-writing and video game marathon sessions give me terrible backaches, but I refuse to buy a new one because hey, this one is still good and besides "so expensive!" Every time I say that, it comes out in my mother's voice. I haven't decided yet if that's a good or bad thing.
But yes. It's 2 a.m., I am hunched over in my old IKEA chair, frantically translating the words of "America the Beautiful" into Mandarin Chinese. (I may or may not be a little pissed that the freaking Coca-Cola company beat me to it, but I am almost 90% sure I can do a better translation than them.) This is interesting for two reasons, the first being that I absolutely hate singing in public but will now be singing America the Beautiful, in Mandarin Chinese, as part of a spoken word piece. The second is that I am barely fluent in Mandarin, and that has only recently begun to bug me. It never used to before.
Growing up in Singapore, Mandarin classes in school were virtually mandatory if you were Chinese. They weren't something we looked forward to, either. Most of our teachers hailed from China, and they often had strong accents that we weren't used to . Singapore is an odd hodge-podge when it comes to culture. I was able to understand the snappy New York accents on "Law and Order" much more easily than I was able to figure out what Madam Zhang was trying to drill into my reluctant head. In the old days when teachers were allowed to be much stricter with their pupils, punishments were doled out for missing homework, not doing well on spelling tests, or more likely just misbehaving in class. "Ni gei wo zhan zai ke shi wai mian la er duo!" Go stand outside the classroom and pull your ears. The worst one of all because every single person who walked by would instantly realize you'd done something terrible to earn exile from the classroom. I have vivid memories of teachers rolling up notebooks to whack me on the head when I fell asleep, and well-aimed whiteboard markers zinged at my head for asking a silly question in class.
At the time--oh such resentment. I'd go home cursing my teachers in my head. I didn't even realize the privilege I had in being part of the ethnic majority.
Every day of my life here--don't get me wrong, I love this country--but every day of my life here I am reminded that I am Yellow. I am a Minority. I will never be considered part of the mainstream American narrative, not even if/when I surrender Singaporean citizenship to turn my green card into a blue American passport. The hours I've put into building this country--volunteering at schools, shelters, soup kitchens, teaching public school and then preschool till I burned myself out--they mean nothing. They don't show, there is no badge of honor I can tattoo on my skin to immediately brand myself as authentically American to everyone I meet.
I don't even identify with most Asian-American narratives, because I came to this country as a wide-eyed nineteen-year-old who wanted her share of the knowledge, beauty, freedom and justice that she'd been told over and over was found in America. I had no idea what was waiting for me here. I didn't grow up with the burden of having immigrant parents and needing to justify desperately that my parents were strange not me. My classmates called my lunchbox stinky--in freshman year of college. I am the immigrant. I am the strange one. I chose to leave a safe home, and start completely over. I never meant to stay but I did what women have been doing for centuries the world over when they leave home--I fell in love, and had to make home over for myself.
It's because I had to make home over for myself that my Mandarin teachers have had the last laugh. Chinese is no longer torture to be endured. Now I'm proud of myself when I can decipher an entire Chinese newspaper without reaching for a dictionary. I glory in the fact that each Chinese character is a picture that tells its own story within and of itself. Because I was branded by America as Other, I turned around and took pride in my Otherness. I finally realized that my language is intrinsically and inexorably tied to my culture. There are things about me that I don't know how to express in English, even though English is technically my first language. I would have written half this darn thing in Chinese if I were only fluent enough. And now I'm ashamed of how little I know. I'm ashamed when I can't keep up with a conversation when it begins to flow too quickly, and the sounds wash over my nerves and neurons as reminders that I should have paid more attention, that I am still betwixt and between two languages.
It's 2 a.m. I am sitting in front of my computer, a significantly less wide eyed twenty-five-year-old. Grandiose ambitions, like proving that I too am American --they sound very nice in your head and on paper and whatnot. But they boil down to little things, the little everyday things you do. And there is some part of my stubborn self that believes if I keep putting bits of myself, taking them and sliding them wherever they fit into the bigger picture, that I will eventually be able to prove I can be American too. And if there isn't anywhere they already fit, I will make room. I will sing America the Beautiful in the language I used to hate. And for those few seconds at least I will be American.
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