From: shaw@au-bon-pain.lcs.mit.edu (Andy Shaw)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.asian.american
Subject: What it means to be an American
Date: 4 Sep 92 02:07:07 GMT
Distribution: soc
Organization: MIT Lab for Computer Science, Cambridge, Mass.


Well, quite frankly, I'm not quite sure what it means to be an American,
but I read an interesting essay this morning by James Baldwin about this
entitled "The discovery of what it means to be American" -- let me quote
from the intro.

=========

"It is a complex fate to be an American," Henry James observed, and the
principal discovery an American writer makes in Europe is just how complex
this fate is.  America's history, her aspirations, her peculiar tripumphs,
her even more peculiar defeats, and her position in the world -- yesterday
and today -- are all so profoundly and stubbornly unique that the very word
"America" remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely
controversial proper noun.  No one in the world seems to know exactly what
it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.

I left America because I doubted my ability to survive the fury of the
color problem here.  (Sometimes I still do.)  I wanted to prevent myself
from becoming _merely_ a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer.  I wanted
to find out in what way the _specialness_ of my experience could be made to
connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them.  (I was as
isolated from Negroes as I was from whites, which is what happens when a
Negro begins, at bottom, to believe what white people say about him.)

In my necessity to find the terms on which my experience could be related
to that of others, Negroes and whites, writers and non-writers, I proved,
to my astonishment, to be as American as any Texas G.I.  And I found my
experience was shared by every American writer I knew in Paris.  Like me,
they had been divorced from their origins, and it turned out to make very
little difference that the origins of white American were European and mine
were African -- they were no more at home in Europe than I was.

=========

With the remarkable claim from Joe Wang that he does not consider himself
an American, it has been made much clearer to me that my struggle to find,
understand, and identify the Asian American identity arises from my firm
belief in the idea of America.  Not necessarily the melting pot, but the
knowledge that I share many things with other Americans, including values,
beliefs, and even culture, and that this American culture -- although I
can't put my finger on it -- is NOT white culture, just as James Baldwin
discovered for himself thirty years ago, but something that transcends it.

And just as James Baldwin realized, there is no contradiction between being
black, being aware of being black, and being active in the definition and
discovery and identification of what it means to be black in America, and
being American.  For me, there is no contradiction between finding out what
being Asian means in America.

Although Joe Wang was born here, he considers himself a Chinese, and he
relates a story about how he could "pass" as Chinese, even in a discussion
with a mainland Chinese.  I don't doubt that that could happen, but my
mother told me the last time we were in Taiwan (this February) that she has
slowly realized that she can't go back to Taiwan, where she was born, and
where she lived for the first half of her life.  She said quite plainly
that the US is her home, and it is where she feels comfortable, and what
she understands now -- she is an American.  To me, that was a big surprise,
even though she's lived in the States for over 25 years, without
particularly _trying_ to assimilate.

For me, part of being an Asian-American is saying: look -- my mother is an
American, and her experience and life is a legitimate facet of American
culture.  American culture is NOT equal to the Waltons, despite what some
people want to tell us.  I refuse to be marginalized, dismissed or ignored,
simply because of the color of my skin -- I want to work to stretch the
concept of American culture to include me and my family and those of us who
are not the "traditional" (i.e. white) conception of America.

-Andy
Newsgroups: soc.culture.asian.american