Real Americans

by Rachel Khong

They probably didn’t care—everyone had their own private universe of concerns; they weren’t as nosy as I was—but it was hard to shake the feeling.

I wished I were more like him: someone for whom the effort of connection was simple, even natural.

You can fall in love with a person, watching them sleep—and I did. I loved him, already. I hadn’t been careful, like I’d intended to be. It had happened in spite of me—without my permission. But I didn’t tell him. I withheld it. I could feel the words, like physical weight in my mouth, wanting to spill out.

It was a habit, with my parents: omitting information, not wanting to worry them unnecessarily. Though they’d raised me so American, I could never manage the sorts of American relationships my friends had with their parents, where they talked to them like friends.

You shouldn’t be allowed to be a doctor if you aren’t a good person, I thought. For certain professions it should just be a rule.

Once she had believed that connection meant sameness, consensus, harmony. Having everything in common. And now she understood that the opposite was true: that connection was more valuable—more remarkable—for the fact of differences. Friendship didn’t require blunting the richness of yourself to find common ground. Sometimes it was that, but it was also appreciating another person, in all their particularity.

Could love between a mother and child be anything less than completely overwhelming?

As people we interrupted one another’s lives—that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up like me: living life without interruption, totally alone.

Later, I learned that life lay in the interruptions—that I had been wrong about life, entirely.

Propaganda was universal. Especially in this country, where the propaganda was that there was none—we were free. But were we? When we were made to value certain lives more than others; when we were made, relentlessly, to want more? What if I had seen through it? What if I had understood that I already had enough?

Hearing a story—what did it accomplish? Nothing and everything.

“I want to be less afraid of friends’ judgment and more enthralled by their perspectives.”