Real Americans

by Rachel Khong

I imagined certain women, women raised differently, constituted of different stuff, running blindly into love, not afraid of what might happen afterward—how things might end. Could I be a woman like that?

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.

A big part of adulthood seemed to be checking email repeatedly.

My mother never described herself as an outsider, she just was one—that was obvious to me. From the perimeter, she could see what was invisible to everyone in the middle.

Biology fascinated me, the astonishing intricacy of who we were born as and became. Invisible codes made us. Our cells carried the instructions with which we formed ourselves.

wasn’t until years later that I would understand that just because I could win an argument, it didn’t mean I was right.

What seemed obvious to us, to our naked eyes, was anything but. We were blind to so much. It thrilled me: that what was invisible to our eye could be so rich.

Our lessons covered what it meant to be an American. In American households, they watched hours of television. In America, families ate large amounts of meat and overcooked vegetables until they were soft all the way through.

Wealth gave the impression of transcending status, but it was only an impression. In the end, she was a woman. In the end, she looked the way she did.

Charles wanted a family, but I didn’t want to be a mother. I had known this since I was a girl—had seen the way my mother’s time belonged to everyone but herself.

He’d wanted a boy, because a boy would carry on the family name. This was so stupid, I’d always thought. What was in a name? It was only a sound. Silently, men carried on their mitochondrial lineage: information from their mothers, and their mothers before them.

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.

We were told what to want: 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?

So much of my life I have let slip by, because I have not attended to it. All this while, instead of seeking more time, I could have been paying attention.