Real Americans

by Rachel Khong

With each other they spoke loudly: Their voices periodically rose to excited shouts, and they laughed raucously. In English they were milder mannered, polite. My mother had always spoken English to me. Now I wondered if, in doing so, she had not fully been herself.

“I want my own life. Not theirs, whatever their bullshit is. A life that belongs to me.” Timothy laughed, like he couldn’t believe me. “Nobody gets to have that.

I would always feel guilty toward her. Was guilt the right word? I just mean there could never be a righting of the scales. Why did parents perform all these un-repayable acts? Was it because they felt guilty for bringing us here in the first place? It was a chain of guilt, like daisies, unbroken. How could I say that I was afraid of who I’d be if I stayed? If I didn’t leave, I would stay trapped in a life as small and static as hers.

We were an American family, my mother and I, and yet it wasn’t American, I thought, for her to love me as much as she did. Was it Chinese? It was some synthesis of the two—elements brought together, combined to form a new compound. So often I felt it was a burden, to be loved by her. Yet, here, without her, I missed her.

I’d thought transporting me to another setting was all that was needed to render me normal. I’d failed to consider that I might be the same person here.

Now I wonder if learning to extinguish small lives was a first step toward greater cruelty. Killing sparrows was how it began, how an entire generation developed callousness to the suffering of others.

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” We made choices in our daily life, I wrote. But countless other things had already been chosen for us.