Read an Excerpt

[Section intro]

Section Two: That Which Holds Us Together, That Which Pulls Us Apart

We each have our own sense of what it means to be American. This sense is derived from a vast and shifting catalog of influences, including cultural and social messaging, the constant pressure of normative behavior, everything we see, hear, and read, prejudices and preferences, and our individual experiences. Everywhere we turn, we’re bombarded by sometimes subtle and oftentimes bombastic messages about what it means to be an American, how to act like an American, how to defend America, and who and who isn’t a “real” American. We all have to contend with constantly competing ideas about what defines the great experiment that is the United States of America. This social and cultural noise can make it difficult to critically reflect on our own experiences, our sense of self, and what shapes our identity. Most of us have, to some extent, multiple identities, and we’re often pulled in several directions at once when someone asks us who we are, what we are, where we’re from. The stories, poems, and prose in this section explore the lives of individuals who find themselves at intersections, places where one sense of self clashes with another, where one individual or group tries to gain control over another. The work here simultaneously defines what it means to be American and defies any easy definition of that label. The United States is a living organism, never at rest, and never the same thing twice. It exists because of the dynamic play between unity and tension. This same sense of tensegrity is what holds up the work in this section, with each piece defining, in moments of clarity, an individual’s sense of an American self, filled with conflict, confidence, and a myriad of unanswered questions.

[Contribution to Section Two]

The Secret to Life in America

by Ed Bok Lee

My brother sits me down and tells me
the secret to life in America.
I’m twelve years old when this happens.
He grabs my shoulders and says:
No one likes an immigrant.
It reminds them of when they fell down
and no one was around to help them.
When they couldn’t talk.
As children when they got lost in public.
Cold and wet, everyone hates an immigrant.

So don’t trust nobody.
The whites, they’ll teach you to hate yourself for being silent.
They’ll punish you for fighting back.
They’ll love the taste of your food and culture, and sister...
and yet spit you out.

The Blacks, at first you’d think they understand loss.
But to them you’re just another cracker with a bad case of jaundice.
Don’t expect shit from them,
they can’t afford to be generous.
Latins laugh at you behind your back.
Do you know this? I’m trying to tell you how it is in the city,
he says.

I ask my brother if I can go outside now.

No!, he screams. Our father is dead
and now I have to teach you how to survive
in America.

Fags are everywhere.
And they want you. ‘Cause
to them you’re exotic and cute
and will do all the dirty work.
The Chinese look down on you
for using their alphabet. The Japanese have raped your women through the centuries
and will do it again. In fact, never do business with other Asians,
‘cause they’re the greediest people alive.
Next to Jews.

Now I’m crying, because my brother has pulled off his work shirt.

Open your eyes!
This is where that black boy pulled the trigger
over twenty dollars and a candy bar! Here is where the whites punctured my kidney in a parking lot outside of Denny’s
And the Mexicans just kept drinking their beers.
This is the bruise on my soul where every American girl ever looked at me
like I was still the enemy.
This is where agent orange first set in.
This is where the DMZ line is still drawn!
Taste the barbed wire on my tongue!
See where that fat white teacher called me a freak for getting a B in math! Feel
my broken immigrant’s throat
that couldn’t tell him to Fuck Off!!!
These are my yellow hands!
This is my cock!
These are my eyes wide open!
This is my heart filled with cigarette smoke!
This my aching back which brought you here and buried our father!
This is the cheek mother slapped
for the way that I called her
ignorant.

This is the GQ subscription sister gave me for Christmas.

Here is my blood, which tastes just like tears.
These are my dreams for the future
dead and shriveled in the corner.
This is my broom. This the face
I couldn’t save from myself.
Are you listening to any of this?

Yes, I tell him. I’m listening.

You’re lucky, he says. You’ll go to college
when you grow up.

I don’t know, I tell him.

Work your ass off and move away from this shit hole out to the suburbs. Maybe marry a white girl.

I don’t know, I tell him.

Go off and write.... Poetry.

I won’t, I say.

Yes you will. And when you do,
do me this one favor.

What, I ask.

Lie.
And make our father and me

the heroes

you always needed us to be.