I'm From America

BY CYNTHIA HUONG

I used to be jealous of my white friends, whose ancestors' stories formed the backbone narrative of America, immigrants whose brawn and intelligence built this nation as they escaped religious persecution, political oppression, and potato famines in Europe. As one of the few "token" Asians in my Midwestern hometown, I did not feel marginalized until later, when I moved away. Words like "refugees," "cheap Asian labor," and "illegal immigrants vying for a green card" began leaping out of newspapers and history texts, as though they were bold, red, rimmed with light. In the eyes of my country, my Asian predecessors were coolies, wonton restaurant owners. They operated laundries, restaurants, travel agencies. Mainstream America resented them because they built so much out of so little. In the eyes of America, Asians became Chinatown. We were chop suey, never mind that chop suey wasn't a real Chinese dish. We studied long hours, lights on past midnight, trying to balance being American and wanting to have fun, and being Asian and upholding family honor through our grades and our behavior. As the stereotype took shape--we became the stereotype.

There is a memory from my childhood, buried somewhere, of my father telling me, "Shhh .... don't talk about the Ku Klux Klan. They're bad people." Ku Klux Klan country is 30 minutes to the north, in Martinsville. When I was in elementary school, the Klan held a national meeting there. Years later, driving through the backwaters of southern Indiana, we stop in a small town, one of those innumerable small towns in Indiana, called Brownsville or Evansville or Blossom Valley (home to the annual Bluegrass Festival). We walk into a McDonald's, the only McDonald's in town, and 25 pairs of curious, slightly hostile eyes turn around and gawk, as though we were aliens from outer space, Martians with 12 arms, six legs, and three heads. This is when my father tells me--one of a handful of Asians in a school of 750--that no matter how nice these white people are to me, they'll always harbor some discrimination for me, because I'm a different color. I laugh at him, I want to tell him that it'll never happen to me, I'll never be the object of discrimination. My English is too perfect, I'm too American, I'm too cocky and brazen to ever be a victim. I've swallowed more Coca Cola than tea. Ignoring, of course, those times when friends' parents asked me, a little too interested, "Do Chinese people really eat dogs?"

Or the times when someone asks, "So, where are you from?"

I reply, "America." Where else? I was born in America, I was born right here, in Bloomington Hospital, Bloomington, Indiana.

"No, no, I mean, where were you originally from?"

"Here. Bloomington. I was born in Bloomington Hospital." Their eyes grow large, intense, surprised.

"Really?"

Yes. Really. I can show you the room, third floor, three windows down from the edge. Oh, you meant where did my parents come from? Taiwan.

"Thailand? Wow, I heard they have good beaches."

No, no, no ...

"Is that where they make the little plastic toys?"

Their vacuity is so shocking, I'm not sure whether I'm being mocked--or if Middle America is really such an insular world that its inhabitants still think pizzas are authentic Italian cuisine and Seoul is a misspelling of "soul." These questions are shocking because they're not hostile, merely motivated by curiosity. They're shocking because they come from the people I've long considered my best friends, the same children I climbed monkey gyms and shared milk and cookies with. These are not strangers, but my friends who introduced me to the Beatles, s'mores over a campfire, apple cinnamon muffins in a Girl Scout cabin at dawn. Their questions leave me deeply disturbed because I believed I was American, I believed the only things that set me and my white friends apart was the color of skin and of our hair.

Years later, I move to California and suddenly I am surrounded by a rainbow of peoples, a community so multilingual that walking down a street I can hear three, four different languages--Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean--beside English. My new high school is diverse, much more accepting of cultural difference than the Midwest. I began to believe in the American Dream again, started to think that maybe, just maybe, America was finally living up to its myth of equal opportunities, of being the land of milk and honey for immigrants. And then, something happens, something which forces me to take another long, hard look at my position in society.

In the middle of USHAP, a man interrupts the class and asks for me. Me! Wondering, I follow him out of the room. The man introduces himself, but his name is lost in the whirlpool of emotions that follows as he explains that he is here to test my English, because anyone whose parents weren't born in America must have their English tested. I'm angry, confused, insulted, because there's no doubt that I can speak English, I can read and write, I am literate. I want to stop, collar this man, tell him it's a mistake, please take me back to class now. Instead, I follow him, a stony smile on my face as I fight back the tears pricking the backs of my eyes. I go through a series of stale, repetitive exercises. Exercises asking me to identify actions, word sounds, to tell a story in English, patterning it after a story I just heard on audio tape. Simple exercises that I was excused from when I was in first grade, because I'd been reading several grade levels above my own. I feel utterly humiliated. I understand the need to check immigrants' English proficiency, but testing someone who is obviously a good English speaker--as if my classes and my past academic records didn't count--made me feel sordid. Second-class, as if somehow because my parents don't (and chose not to) hold American passports, it meant I would automatically be lesser or deficient.

That winter, returning to San Francisco from a short vacation in Asia, we are stopped by a nosy customs official who interrogates me on my financial history--whether I have ever taken any sort of welfare benefits, if I had taken money from the U.S. government without repaying it. I am well-dressed, I do not look like a welfare recipient. Again, I felt humiliated, second-class, as if the fact that I am a first-generation American meant that I wasn't as good as the immigrants who arrived in America in the 17th and 18th centuries. Why? Simply because I wasn't white, because I haven't lived in this country as long, because my parents aren't American? That night, perhaps a little too coincidentally, I hear on the evening news that the American government is attempting to subsidize tax cuts (for the rich?) by demanding green-card holders repay what were still government benefits in the 1980s. Just because my family hasn't lived in America for two or more generations and I am not WASP, I'm treated like a second class citizen. That night, I fume in anger, wondering if America will ever be able to look at me as a person, stripped bare of, see me as more than Asian, more than female. Wondering if America will ever be able to see me as an individual and not an amalgamation of race and gender.

Cynthia Houng, 16 wrote the first place essay for seventh through 12th grades. She attends Mountain View High School.

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