MovieChat Forums > Somewhere Between (2011) Discussion > To Be An American

To Be An American

posted 11 years ago by DisturbedPixie
1 reply | jump to latest

One of the girls said she knows she is not American, and that saddens me because I fear some of these girls don't have the same understanding of being an American that I do.

To me, being American is not about your skin color, or language, or where you were born. It's about being part of a country with no exact culture or general identity. It is ever evolving and changing, and every community is different, and every family is different, and every person is different.

Every generation typically becomes more and more like an "American" and less like what they once identified as, and it's up to them to embrace their past and seek knowledge about it or look to the future, or somewhere in between.

My husband was born on the other side of the world, just like these girls. He came here and we met about ten years later. He is American, and he even has a piece of paper or two to prove it. He still has the cultural understanding of where he came from to understand who he is, but he is more than that.
He is more than his two passports. He is my husband and a wonderful man, and I am glad he is American, because otherwise we would have never met.
And I'm glad to have been to his home country, and to have known all his family that I have met and hugged. I'm proud to be part of their family. I'm proud that our family is a mix of cultures and colors and languages. I think it's beautiful, and that's what being an American is all about.

I hope that other Americans, who have not embraced all our differences, once will. The whole world is our culture. The Human culture. We can separate ourselves and see all the ways we are different, but I also see all the ways we are the same, and how we all deserve love and respect. A close look at our journey as humans shows that we have separated out all over the world, but we all came from the same land, and can all come back together. No family was always American, as we can see when we go back through history.

For me, I see in my diverse part of America, that there are no Oreos/bananas/twinkies. None of us are one color on the outside and another color on the inside. We are all just people, and if you are American that means that you or your family chose to be a part of a culture that is not exact. That has no boundaries. It represents all the world's people in one country, with all our similarities and differences.

[–] lightningcows 7 years ago

old thread, but great post. i would agree that being an American is bit of a hodge-podge, and the story of immigrants can be as diverse to other groups that have come to the US. The irish, the italians, groups from mexico, cuba and so on. Still, it is difficult not to have the sense of odd displacement particularly when from a different heritage - a strange sense of whiplash. It wasn't unusual when I was younger to go to some asian restaurant for dinner, where cantonese chinese is primarily spoken (and some chinglish), and then come back to school the next day where it was english. Though now I am older, it still feels a bit jarring to be watching a few episodes of the '80s tvb "legend of the condor heroes" and then "victoria" a few hours later.

I will say, though, that the feeling of displacement may have had some benefits for me personally. it has probably given me greater insight and interest in foreign affairs and the world as a whole since I was never fully comfortable purely as an "American". i dabbled with learning arabic for a bit, went on a tour of Israel for a vacation, experimented with argentine tango and the rueda dance for a few months in what seems like a lifetime ago. I've probably seen films with subtitles just as much as I've seen american films.

It has probably also given me a better sense of what it does mean to be an "American" as well. A US history course was probably one of the highlights of my high school career; in an ironic twist, I actually did better on that course than a computer science course closer to my chosen professional field .