Real Americans

by Rachel Khong

She is in love, which feels, to her, at once easy and hard, elemental and ungraspable—like vanishing and eternity at the same time. She wants to ask of every person she meets: Is it this way for you?

I 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.

Whatever they were doing was easy to dismiss as inconsequential. It was something I did, back then—disregard what I didn’t understand.

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

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.

What was I so afraid of? I worried that I was doing things in the wrong order: entering a relationship without yet knowing the trajectory of my life—who I was supposed to be. I was afraid to form a self around a person who might disappear from my life as easily as he’d entered it.

and in that moment, what love was seemed so clear to me: the need to guard against loss.

It was one of my errors, I knew right away. Time had stopped, and I was outside of it. If I could turn every worry over, I might come to the correct decision.

We were both carbon, my mother might have said. Yet this shining stone was, somehow, over a billion years old. Being worn by me—even if I wore it my whole life—would only be, for this diamond, an instant in time.

The world always seemed to be ending, not even in one specific way but all the ways: climate change, gun violence, war, coronavirus. In the quiet mornings it didn’t matter: The world would go on without us.

Every Christmas I couldn’t help but wonder if other families, gathered, were better at this. If other families, I mean, were better at being families.

I wanted to do well in the conventional ways—having no other metrics, not knowing how else to measure myself.

It was so weird, that a heart could just go on beating—the same one—for years, until it stopped.

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

Somehow I was self-absorbed without even knowing who I was, or who I should be—an exasperating combination.

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.

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.

What did it say about me, that I could only understand myself in relation to another person? Alone, I was a blank.

She’d been my entire family. It was as though she’d grown me in her hand.

There were two types of people, from what I could tell. In the first group were people who felt like they had to earn their existence. The other group took life less seriously. I envied the second category but couldn’t help that I was a member of the first.

America was a place that made promises. In America, a farmer’s daughter could become a scientist. In America, parents hid their disappointment in their children.

I don’t take it, of course. I know its value but have no use for it. To someone with no use for it, it is garbage.

Whereas eyes follow him, as if it’s easier, gravitationally, to affix one’s attention to the young and beautiful.

Without time, ambition is worth nothing: It is only frustration. Time was what I wanted, more than anything.

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

That my happiness was tinged with the fear that it would disappear was, I would understand only later, central to the thrill of love.

For as much as I claimed appearances didn’t matter, of course they did. It was obvious: Beautiful people were treated more kindly.

Wen was a brave man, but he was brave in proportion to what he had experienced.

The protests came to a boil and then, as quickly as they had come, they died down. It was the same story as always: The powerless were no match for the powerful.

American faces seemed to me so different from Chinese ones. Americans wore uncomplicated expressions.

Imagination was pleasurable, because reality was difficult.

You envied what you felt was possible. I’d never thought living like this was within reach, but now I saw that it was.

Hearing that, I felt sorry for her. She’d become a star, in spite of the color of her skin, and yet even with all the money she had, she had been trapped. 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.

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.

Science requires patience, and I have always been an impatient person.

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

It had been our dream, Otto’s and mine: to give our children the best possible futures. But it was a mistake, believing you could choose for someone else, no matter how well intentioned you might be. And what did we choose, really?

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.