In Limbo

I call two countries home yet neither will let me vote.

Anna Duan
Anna Duan
Sep 5, 2018 · 4 min read
Dmitrij Paskevic on Unsplash

I’m abruptly stopped as I make my way down UPenn's Locust Walk.

“Are you registered to vote?” asks a bubbly voice behind a set of thick, rimless rectangular glasses and a blue lanyard. Before I can respond, a hotdog-folded, navy blue card-stock voter registration form slides between my fingers. “I Uh…,” I mumble. She smiles reassuringly.

“I’m not eighteen yet,” I clarify.

“But you will be by the midterm elections, right?”

“Yeah but I’m also not a citizen,” I explain just as I myself remember that fact. She nods, utters a sympathetic Oh, and lets me go.

Nobody in my family votes. See, my family’s Chinese. Not the kind that lays out a spread of spring rolls and roast turkey on the thanksgiving table, nor the kind that resides in a stone-faced suburban house and sends their kids to Chinese school on the weekends.

Full-on Chinese, living in China, all perks and hot water thermoses included. And this has always entailed a lack of ability to vote. Between the Great Firewall of censorship and the enigmatic one-party government in Beijing, Chinese citizens know almost nothing of our country’s government and politics, save for the occasional rumor of yet another American site being blocked or of the internet being slowed down ahead of a big meeting in Beijing.

But then, in 2005, my family immigrated to a lively suburb in Maryland: Rockville. There, summers and weekends versed me in the joys of Americana, from making Christmas tree-shaped rice crispy treats in my basement, to screaming and barreling down the driveway during neighborhood-wide soccer games, to stacking igloo after igloo at the base of the pear tree in our yard.

Come the Fourth of July, I downed endless charred beef hotdogs and rocket-shaped popsicles in their red-white-and-blue glory. I binged classic 2000s shows like iCarly and Victorious, dexterously switching to the Nature Channel the second my mother walked by. I came to know, by heart, the pledge of allegiance and I recited it as if it were scripted by my own forebears.

For all I knew, I was American and I couldn’t remember it ever being any other way.

But one day, November 5th 2008, something strange happened. Racing into Mrs. Thompson’s third grade math class in our puffy neon coats, the kids around me carried blue pens and wore blue pins, bows, and headbands. An assortment of red, white, and blue starred, stripes, and plain stickers dotted their stationary, boasting, “I voted!”.

It was the morning after Obama won. That day, Mrs. Thompson pushed aside the day’s geometry to talk to us about civic duty and what it means to be a citizen (hint: to be able and obligated to vote). Around me, toothy, breathless eight year olds bragged about their families’ election night parties, lacing in the latest gossip about who likes who in our class.

Amid the frenzy, I sat silent. I had heard nothing of the election from my parents. For them, two not-quite-citizens-yet first generation immigrants, voting was not part of their dictionary; for us, it had just been a regular night. That day, it hit me: we were not American.

This incident sticks with me because it was the first time I was unable to hide my un-americanness.

When we first arrived and I spoke no English, that problem was quickly resolved: a year of ESOL classes filled with singing sock puppets and vocabulary coloring worksheets later, my English disguised me among hundreds of my American peers.

The time my mother packed my brown paper bag with a fish stick sandwich, to the disgust of my scandalized six year old peers, that predicament, too, was easily remedied by telling my mom I didn’t like fish sticks.

One by one, I hid each flaw, each a fissure in the image of a Chinese-American girl that I wanted to portray, behind layers of peace sign hoodies and butterfly face paint. I silenced them with Taylor Swift’s songs and my refusal and ultimately, inability, to speak Chinese. But nonetheless, the issue of citizenship was not one that eight year old me could fix.

And so it remains today.

On one hand, I know little of the country where I have full rights as a citizen, not that those comprise much. On the other hand, I am barred from participating in the politics of the country I call home; the country of the cozy brick-faced townhouse at 10368 Procera drive. At times, it feels like I'm in a limbo of sorts between two countries to whom I kind of belong; two countries in each of which I only have half of a voice.

So now, as Americans and the whole world pore over the coming midterm elections, supposedly the most consequential one ever, I, once again, can only watch.

For I am not American, nor do I have franchise.

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