America

I don’t think people generally regard me as a loving Patriot. I rail against our glorious military and trash our renowned police force. I’ll deliver biting criticisms of anything with the slightest trace of imperialism, from tourism to white people wearing Henna. I could shit on any of the three presidents I’ve lived through for an hour at least. I want the electoral college burned at the stake, I think nearly every face featured on American currency is the devil personified, and capitalism can eat my-- casserole. But a very disgusting and poorly prepared casserole.

And yet, I love love love standing for the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem. If a vet approaches, I’ll readily give them my utmost respect (regardless of the imperialist ideals they may have partaken in). My favorite holiday is Thanksgiving. I will punch anyone who uses the British form of words (there’s no “u” in color) or who generally claims anything British is superior to anything American. You know what? That applies to any European country, really. My pride for the states is overflowing. Despite my many tirades against this country, I am, first and foremost (and maybe only) an American.

See, my heritage is Indonesian. Indonesia is a giant archipelago between Australia and continental East Asia. We’ve got coffee, tropics, beaches, poverty, hobbit fossils (Google it), and the fourth largest population in the world. But I’d bet good money that I’m the first and only Indonesian person you know. Or one of very, very few. And it’s for that reason that it’s difficult to think of myself as Indonesian. Think about your identity, your culture. How do you identify with it? Through the food? The clothes? The art? The community? Of those, I’m betting the latter is pretty damn important. Thing is, there aren’t a whole lot of Indonesian-Americans. It’s more likely to be born on February 29 than to be an Indonesian living here. I asked my dad, who's lived in this town longer than any other Indonesian person, how many of us there are in the C-U and he said less than 200. To the best of my knowledge, I’m the only Indonesian kid my age in all of Champaign-Urbana. There’s no one I can have conversations with about typical teen angst while also discussing our love of bakso. There’s nothing for me to latch onto, no one to relate to, no sense of a group to which my identity can point to and say, “That’s who I belong to.”

I realized this pretty early on, so I went looking for other tribes to call myself apart of, since the one I should belong to was essentially nonexistent in the immediate area. As a kid who worshipped Harry Potter, Spider-Man, and Jedi Knights, my first attempt at finding a new group was with white men. For obvious reasons, this didn’t pan out quite as I’d hoped. Not only was my pigment a little too melaninated to qualify, turns out the strength of their identity relied on the otherization and exclusion of people that looked like me or something like that. Go figure.

So my next attempt was with the Asian community. Which seems like a logical step because, the fact is, lots of people don’t have a group to identify with that fits their exact specific identity. Even white people are usually of varying ethnic and national backgrounds, but are still able to bridge those gaps with their overarching pale skin. But it never felt quite right. My skin, my facial features, my hair, none of it matched with being Asian. I never had to deal with being made fun of for my eyes or being good at math like many of them did, because I didn’t look like them. And at the end of the day, they went home to communities that came from the same country, which was still something I lacked.

What probably struck the deepest line between myself and other Asians was the fact that I was Muslim. Even if we could bond over the few traits that all first-generation kids share, they’d never understand how it felt to walk through the grocery store with my mom and her headscarf or wait for various “Allahu Akbar” jokes to ensue every September 11th. But I couldn’t turn to being Muslim either. I wasn’t Arab, as most Muslims are, and I’d taken on too many sinful Western values in my time here that I wasn’t welcome among their circles.

So there I stand, not Arab enough for the Muslims, too Muslim for the Asians, and too much in favor of preserving my sense of self-worth for white men. So there’s only one choice left, to be an American.

America is a contradiction in terms. We want to be free without bounds and yet we want protection from all harms. We want to champion human rights while also being an ever-expanding dominant power. WE are nothing and everything, at every instant ready to burst at the seams. We are an unsustainable impossibility. And such is the nature of people like myself, who can find no true identity. And so I turn to the American identity, which is, truly, the identity of those who have none.