The Idea of America
My family comes from the Old World. As far as cultural and historic areas are concerned, it’s hard to get older than China and Germany. In one corner, you have a society possessing thousands of years of unbroken cultural heritage. In the other, a section of Europe that, regardless of what peoples lived there or occupied it, was of critical importance since the days of Rome. These are lands steeped in history, in the development of mankind, where works of art, philosophy, and science abounded. However, these are the same cradles of human civilization that have been subject to the less savory aspects of human evolution.
These were lands where warfare and squabbling nobility were all too common. These were lands of Holy Roman Empires and Mongol dynasties, border wars with France and Opium Wars with Great Britain, Prussian dominance and Boxer Rebellions, ruthless Empress Dowagers and unhinged Kaisers. Much had happened in these countries, too much even. Land had changed hands, people had suffered, and governments had risen and fallen. Despite having massive expanses of land separating them, the countries I can trace my heritage to were both stained through and through by the spilling of blood. Human suffering was cheap in this Old World.
My grandparents on both sides grew up in times of war. The Imperial Japanese invasion had already been underway for years by the time my Chinese grandparents were in elementary school. My German grandparents were hardly adolescents when the Nazis began their conquest of Europe. There was no victory to be had for their sides with the end of the Second World War. Though the Japanese had been forced to withdraw, a world war gave way to a civil war and the communist People’s Liberation Army swept the country. The promised 1000 year Reich had vanished in a fraction of that time and the hubris of the Nazis had destroyed a nation. As Mao’s red army marched on Shanghai, my Chinese forebears fled to Hong Kong. As Allied troops continued their occupation of a defeated Germany, my ancestors lived in the bombed-out city of Hamburg.
However, amidst all the chaos of their home countries, one nation stood out among the rest in the earliest days of the Cold War. This country had no Emperor and no Kaiser, no Führer and no Generalissimo. Its soldiers, its bombs, and its tanks had found their way to every theater of the Second World War and yet the globe-spanning conflict had spared this nation of much of the destruction that comes with war. As the world began to reorient itself toward a new ideological conflict, one ostensibly between communism and capitalism, the Soviet Union would loom large in one corner, and in the other would be the United States of America.
With the options they had, limited by conflicts both ongoing and past, this land removed from the madness of the Old World seemed the best choice. The Old World had immolated itself and its citizens, there was no future for them there anymore, only the past. Just the chaos of old rivalries and grievances wielding the weapons of the modern age. America, the land of the free, was the place they would find a future. Beyond the purging of counter-revolutionaries and the looming shadow of the Warsaw Pact, they would cross oceans to get away from the still-burning fires of the Old World.
And so they arrived in America in due time, homeless and tempest-tossed as they were. The Chens arrived on the West Coast, maintained an odd stint in Oklahoma of all places, and ultimately settled on the East Coast. The Siewertsens found themselves in New Jersey and decided to upgrade to New York. Ultimately, they found much of what they were promised. They found education, work, and community. Affordable housing in friendly neighborhoods, an economy poised to grow for all eternity, and safe places to settle down and raise a family. They also found no war in America. Yes, the Cold War raged in the 1950s but my grandparents had known true war so this was a footnote to them. They had found all this, in America.
But they found much more in the New World. They found segregated buses, missiles in Cuba, the assassination of a president, and a draft that was poised to conscript their sons. America certainly had surprises in store for them. America and the New World had their own history and they were now part of how it unfolded. Not unlike the Old World they had departed, America was burdened with its own vices, sins, and scars from centuries of settlement and development. The promised land that had stood triumphant after the Second World War was not exactly what had been pitched to those overseas.
What does that say about the rest of the world? What makes a country that had, up until 1943, upheld a law explicitly prohibiting Chinese nationals like my grandparents from immigrating to the United States worth moving to? Why move to a country that had no qualms about discriminating against German-Americans in times of war? The word desperation comes to mind. Even if the America they had heard only tales and stories of were remotely similar to the one they discovered in reality, they would be leagues ahead of where they might have otherwise been in their homelands. In an Old World that had just finished destroying itself, why not risk packing up and leaving for America?
An immigrant bets everything on the idea of America, often in the face of terrible alternatives, and that’s important to understand. What do potato famines in Ireland, pogroms in the Russian Empire, both world wars, civil wars across the globe, and organized crime in Central America all have in common? They all drive people to America, in hopes that they might be able to escape the suffering endemic to their own homelands. This story — the story of the fleeing immigrant — is never one of certainty, to begin with. The journey to America is one fraught with danger and risk. While more contemporarily, expanses of Mexican deserts have served as the primary obstacle to those most likely to flee to America, but for most of history, it was an ocean on either side of the country that kept immigrants from finding refuge in the United States.
Reaching America, the land promising freedom, equality, and liberty, has rarely been easy for those fleeing strife. Why people leave their homelands is clear, their future in their nation of origin is bleak. It takes a truly dire situation to drive someone from the land of their friends and family, of their culture, and of their home. The decision to journey great distances to America is one made under duress, ultimately, and is done with the knowledge that they may never get the chance to return. Immigrants will often leave everything behind for the mere chance that they may make it to America.
Much to the chagrin of a certain political faction in this nation, the persisting reputation of this country among the downtrodden, forgotten, and ostracized the world over is that the United States is the Mother of Exiles, and will welcome them with open arms upon their arrival. Despite its systemic flaws and the endless list of contradictions that permeate this nation’s history and its present, this has not kept many from viewing America as a beacon of hope and possibility, extending worldwide welcome to those with nowhere to go. Even as this nation has been gripped by nativism, xenophobia, and racism at varying levels of intensity since its inception, the idea of America as a nation offering refuge persists.
I know of a story, a man places his life in the hands of criminal smugglers to leave China and come to the United States. This man is then arrested in the US, held for several years, and deported back to the Middle Kingdom. The story ends with the man risking his life again to illegally enter the United States, despite the immediate and legal danger. This is a similar story to what will be told of parents in Central America sending their children, unaccompanied and vulnerable, to the United States’ southern border in hopes that they may gain entry. Immigration policy, quotas, exclusion acts, these things are all temporary, the idea of America remains.
The idea that the United States of America is a land where we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Where you are innocent until proven guilty, you have a right to speak your mind, and associate with whom you chose. The idea of America is that the freedoms and opportunities permitted to you will allow you to chart your own course in such a way that is effectively impossible in some countries. America — with its expanses of land, vibrant economy, political liberties, and centers of education — is the nation in which those yearning to breathe free can do so and live prosperously. That was why my grandparents, disparate in their backgrounds and countries of origin, came to the United States of America.
That is why someone in my position has a more romantic perception of the United States of America than someone who does not have such tales in living memory. This is the land that gave my grandparents a place to begin again, as it has for the desperate, huddled masses going back centuries. Though this nation is far from the idyllic land of opportunity that it is often held up to be, enough about the idea of America carries over into reality for the immigrant dream to also become reality.
Were it not for the idea of America being at least partially based on truth, my grandparents would have never found stable employment and the opportunity to raise a family. Were it not for America being the melting pot it is held up to be, the Queens-born son of a Chinese insurance actuary might not have fallen in love with the Long Island-born daughter of a German volunteer firefighter. Were it not for America receiving my grandparents as it did, I would not be here. As far as my own family’s history is concerned, the idea of America was ultimately not that different from the reality of America.
I am not the only person who has benefited from the lofty values of America actually bearing fruit, but I know that there are countless people whose American experience was not quite as rosy. The promises made by the idea of America are grand but those promises are not always kept. There is a disparity between the idea of America and the reality of America. It is the difference between finding respectable employment and being driven to crime out of desperation, between raising a family and being deported to a land purposefully abandoned, between being accepted as American and being attacked by a nativist mob.
Of course, my family has known this disparity too. Thank you to the great state of Oklahoma for reminding my grandfather he was to sit at the back of the bus, with the rest of the colored folk. Similar thanks to the suburbanites of Long Island who ridiculed my German grandparents for their accents and asserted that they were Nazis by virtue of their national origin alone. America struggles with equity in all things and this extends, ironically, to how much it discriminates against those who arrive at its golden door. If the idea of America was a perfect representation of the American reality, what an ideal world we would live in.
But even this disparity, the often harsh reality anyone who ventures to the United States must confront, cannot diminish the power of the idea of America. Enough people have found sanctuary in America that the narrative can’t easily be rewritten. Enough families like my own exist, enough rags to riches stories have been told, and people have escaped suffering by way of America that the idea of America will not just go away. All in all, not that much has changed since World War II. America still remains distant from the salted earth of the old world, from the hundreds of years of grievances that continue to motivate violence, and the iron grip of despots. As challenges to liberalism intensify, civil wars ravage countless nations, and a changing climate threatens to upend much of the world, America still appears to be a safe harbor for those in need. Just as the idea of America lured my forebears to the United States, so too will it lure immigrants to our borders for years to come.
This idea can’t be undone now. No amount of bigotry, fear-mongering, or draconian policy can undo the idea of America. America could return to being a second-rate world power, turn utterly inward as it had for much of its history prior to both world wars, and the idea of America would more than likely endure. This version of America, generous in its spoils, endless in its opportunity, and benevolent in its rule, has utterly permeated the globe. As long as there is a kernel of truth in the idea of America, the tired and poor the world over will look to the United States as a gamble worth making. As long as there are huddled masses yearning to breathe free, they will turn to America as the preeminent nation to take them in. Almost 200 years of accepting the wretched refuse from other nations’ teeming shores cannot be ignored. Even if the official policy of the United States government were to shut out every homeless, tempest-tossed immigrant that sought entry to the country, the driven would still do everything in their power to enter the promised land, chasing the possibility of freedom.
In truth, the reality of America is that this country will always have those seeking refuge here. This is the American obligation: to welcome these immigrants and deliver on the promises made to those who successfully journeyed countless miles so that they might have a brighter future. To do anything less would be to betray the idea of America. This is one of the most crucial areas where the idea of America and the reality of America intersect. We should not shrink from this responsibility as a nation, we should welcome it.
