Real Americans

by Rachel Khong

often wondered what percentage of things I said were truly original, and how much of what I said I’d heard said before and was only repeating.

He seemed able to do more in a day than I could, as though he had access to more time.

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

knew, then, that I had disappointed her irrevocably. I adopted her belief in me: that I was small-minded—and would be for my entire life.

I was beginning to think it might be fine with me—being ordinary but happy. But this would never be acceptable to her. She had always longed for more. She had always wanted more than one life could contain.

I liked meeting dogs and children, with their low expectations.

This was the thing he said that I craved the most. More than I love you, I wanted him to say that he knew me.

On the ultrasound I saw the baby’s outline. Was love so flimsy? Was I so easily suggestible? I hadn’t met this person—only knew his shape and felt his movements—but already he was everything to me.

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.

I missed the paintings Kong Tee had done before: the mountains shrouded in mist, the jagged trees. Paintings that lacked people entirely, or that depicted them as insignificant in contrast to the rest of the natural world. His perspective reminded me how vast the Earth was, reminded me that I was a speck, that there was so much more to existence than what immediately surrounded me.

“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.”

I’d always resented that my brothers’ names meant “clever” and “intelligent,” where mine meant “beautiful.” It had always angered me. But now I was the clever, intelligent one.

She never told me she loved me. It wasn’t the Chinese way. She showed her love to me in the way she defended my studies to my father, who would have preferred that I stay home and be married. She showed her love when she scolded me the most harshly.

Maybe he believed his calling to be higher than mine, his thoughts to be more important than my thoughts; most men did.

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?

If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up like me: living life without interruption, totally alone.

Here were two adults making choices. But was it a choice, Nick wondered, when you were told, all your life, before your life, what it was you should want?

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.