you, too
a fantasia on national themes
I’m writing this post somewhat spontaneously on the 4th of July in the Bellevue Square Mall, while I wait for the evening to descend on the park just south of us, setting the dark blue backdrop for the explosions of sounds and colors that we use to mark another year of one of the world’s longest-standing constitutional democracies.1
I’ve just had lunch at one of my favorite restaurants in this area, Me + Crepe,2 which sells Tianjinese jianbingguozi, a kind of savory-crepe-turned-wrap that is a beloved breakfast food in Tianjin, where my mom is from, originally. I’ve been to Tianjin a few times in my life, and the breakfast culture there has never failed to astound me. The quantity and variety of food people wolf down before 10 in the morning delights and astounds me, and I have never really gotten over it.
But this is not a post about Tianjin. Instead, let’s talk a little bit more about my parents.
My parents came to the United States in the late ‘90s, early ‘00s. They had met in Shanghai during their college studies, both polymer chemists by training, and they came to the US to get their PhDs at SUNY Binghamton. At the time I was born, they were both still PhD students studying materials of various kinds, and, most importantly to our story, on temporary, F-1 visas.
Early this week, in Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court ruled 5-43 that the 14th Amendment grants birthright citizenship to all children born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ status.4 This came in response to an Executive Order from the Trump administration that would have excluded children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visa-holders from receiving citizenship at birth.
Set aside the charade of textual interpretation vs. policy concerns. Court defenders will tell you that the Court is concerned with the interpretation of law, rather than the making of it. They will say, “well, Alito and Thomas aren’t stating what they would prefer, but rather what they think the law says” while the justices spew pages and pages of offended dicta on their topic of the day. Spare me. In the view of a substantial portion of the judges on the highest court in the land, it would be better if I were not an American citizen from the day I was born.
I don’t know how to have a conversation with that. I don’t view myself as having really any other place to be except this one. This country, for all its faults and flaws, is mine. How do I have a coherent conversation with someone who believes otherwise?
I haven’t always viewed myself as that American. It’s hard to not feel alienated growing up Asian in South Dakota, and for a long time, I thought of myself as “living on the hyphen,” stuck in this sort of in-between space between “Chinese” and “American,” certainly never Chinese enough for the Chinese, and never American enough for the Americans.
Over time, though, I have come to reject that frame. That frame requires some kind of purity, some property or prerequisite for “Americanness” outside of living here and having an attachment to the values which we claim to stand for—democracy, freedom, equality, opportunity. My stance, frankly, is that there are no other qualifications. And, in that sense, I view myself as almost quintessentially American: I have lived not just in the US, but all around it, from the Great Plains to both coasts, and I have lived in all the stories I have heard from the people I meet in place to place, who themselves come from further reaches. I have seen and heard a lot more of this country than many people who have claimed to speak for it.
I am fascinated and enamored with American heterogeneity. I am fascinated by the way its cities range from the large to small, the stories its communities tell, the wide range of cultures and religions and languages of the people which inhabit every corner of this country. I am fascinated by the landscapes, from the tropical islands of Hawai’i, to the evergreen mountains of Washington, to the sweeping winds of the Great Plains, to the red-yellow-orange fall trees of the East Coast. I think what makes America special is this inclusiveness—its expansive ability to sweep from the stories of small-town farmers who have lived in the same state generation-over-generation to the newly arrived big-city immigrant. It is the ideas we are taught in our civics classes, of the melting pot—that is to say, anyone could be an American, could be part of that story.5
You could say, and you might be right, that this diversity of stories is something you could say about a lot of countries. That, indeed it is something that could be said about humanity writ large. That, well, frankly, America is not so special in this regard, and I should get outside more.6
—and I would say in turn that perhaps this is what makes me love humanity. That we each have our different story to tell. I find it endlessly frustrating when I hear my friends from bigger cities argue whether a city of five hundred people counts as a city, or a town, or a village, as if somehow the smallness of a place makes the place or the people there matter less. It does not matter to me at all what we call it; each of those people has their own new, fascinating, and interesting story to tell; their own relationship to the place we all call home in different ways, whether that be the United States or the world at large. It’s probably true that some of the people in those towns would look at me and say that I’m not American, or that I’m not American enough, and at the same time, I would say, regardless, that I care about them in the same way that I care about any other human being, and in that equality of care, in its democracy, I am, ultimately, American.
At the end of the day, what frustrates me most about this Supreme Court case is not the poorly executed intellectual gymnastics, but rather its short-sightedness. Am I not your idea of the American dream? Am I not the victory lap you should be taking, a child of immigrants with a touch of talent and a love of this country? Certainly, I have been immensely privileged, and certainly, I am not arguing that success or talent or anything else be a prerequisite for a place here. The point is rather that I am a victory of a broad immigration policy—that general, previously unassailable right to citizenship by birth—and there are many like me, and many others unlike me, who are willing to love this country, if you let them. There are many who have kept the bones of the nation strong, who have paid into this dream we have built and broadened slowly, over these 250 years, and there are many more to come, if we can bring ourselves, day-by-day, closer to and not further from keeping the American promise.
I want to be clear here. I am not being naive. I am well aware of the intense crimes and abuses of this nation’s past, present, and likely future, and I am not trying to paper over them. I grew up on land promised by treaty to the Lakota Sioux, a treaty that was torn apart the moment the slightest glint of gold showed itself on the Black Hills. This is a country built on slave labor, economic exploitation, and the decimation of its native inhabitants, the descendants of whom it continues to radically mistreat.
What I am arguing, however, is that the principles are strong. That, when the Declaration of Independence declares that it is “self-evident” that “all men are created equal,” and that that each and every one of us is endowed with the unalienable rights of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” it is ultimately not incorrect, even if the authors at the time may not have meant, women, slaves, or queer Chinese-American immigrants like me. That, when the Fourteenth Amendment says “no State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it expresses a strong and valuable principle, even as those principles were abridged by segregation in the Jim Crow South.
And so what I am concerned with is how this country lives up to those principles. How we move towards them, and not away. In Hadestown, we are told that the beautiful thing which Orpheus does is that he makes us “see how the world could be, in spite of the way that it is.” How do we imagine what America could be, and then how do we map our course towards it? It may require systemic upheaval—I don’t take a particular stance on that—but the principles are the same, nonetheless. That is what I think I will be celebrating today, and it is what I will be hopeful for.
Two and a half years ago, during the MEng, a few friends and I went down to El Paso, Texas, to visit the collection of National Parks in that general vicinity. At the top of a hike in Big Bend National Park, we met a group of young, tall, fit Texans who were reading the Bible aloud, in community with each other. And, in that moment, they felt familiar to me, from a childhood surrounded by friends going to morning seminary and summer church camps.
I know you. You are my brothers.
Last summer, I visited Olympic National Park with a few college friends of mine. We made it to the top of our hike, and there, on the rocky outcropping, overlooking a pine-fringed lake, a loose collection of groups watched as a Steller’s jay swooped down onto the rocks, each chattering in their own languages. And, in that moment, they, too, were familiar, all of us celebrating the beauty of nature,7 that magic that binds all humans together, regardless of origin.
I know you. You, too, are my brothers.
This summer, in just a few hours yet, I will go down to Bellevue Downtown Park, and I will “fall down / into the grass,” and I will read, and I will wait for the sky to darken in the late hours of the Seattle summer, and I will listen to the Bellevue Youth Symphony Orchestra—these young musicians, these too—and wait for the fireworks with all the other families on the grass.
I know you. You, too, are my brothers.
We are so beautiful, each of us, so full of stories to tell in a world that values us each equally, in a world that grants each of us that sacred right to pursue happiness. My friends, arrayed like stars in the night sky, each different but bright in their own way. My friends, stars on a banner of red, white, and blue, an American constellation.
This, I think, is what America could be.
We simply don’t have time to get into the technicalities of what qualifies the US here, and, besides, the Constitution itself wasn’t established until 1789, so whatever 250th birthday party is going on here is not for the Constitution itself, but for the concept of “America”.
#notsponsored
The ruling on the judgement itself was 6-3, but this was a result of a baffling concur-dissent from Kavanaugh that basically states, “the Constitution is a living document, but a law with the exact same text as the Constitution is frozen in time based our understanding of the Constitution at the time of passage.” This feels like an intellectually untenable position, but I digress. I am focusing on the Constitutional question here.
There are some exceptions here—the 14th Amendment includes the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which the Court has interpreted in Wong Kim Ark to exclude, most jarringly, Native Americans (due to quasi-sovereign status of that jurisdiction), as well as children of ambassadors, who are offered diplomatic immunity.
There exists discourse about this melting pot as a metaphor for assimilation, rather than mere unification. I prefer this phrase because it is the commonly used one—perhaps a complicated soup might be a better metaphor, literally speaking—but my larger point is that there is nothing to assimilate towards except for the values; the Americanness that I believe we are heading towards is a non-uniform one, and intentionally so.
Which is probably true.
Paid for, notably, by our nation’s tax dollars.