Joan Is Okay

by Weike Wang

You don’t have to care about people to be a doctor, but you do to be a nurse.

You don’t need a sense of humor as a doctor, but it helps as a nurse.

So, othering, did that term apply to me and was it what I’d internalized? Whenever I heard news of deportation or the line that people must enter the legal way, fear of my own removal would start to reflux. Then I had to remind myself that I was born here, that this land was as much mine as it was theirs. But were these facts written on my face? Was my being born here and my parents’ legal arrival carved into our facial features or the color of our skin? And even if I hadn’t been born here, had I been one of those kids brought over by her parents at age two, five, twelve, then naturalized, what made them and their families any less American if they were the most American of all things—fresh off the boat, in search of better days?