In Honor of APAHM: Why I Fight
We came to the United States when I was three and a half years old.
I didn’t see much of my dad in my early childhood. By then, he was already in the States trying to finish up an engineering master’s degree and find a job. He made his way to New Jersey right after I was born to pave the way for the rest of us. Taiwan, after all, was not a democracy as late as the 1980s, and my parents saw America as the place where their kids could eventually flourish.
I wasn’t particularly patriotic growing up, probably something common for young immigrants who feel neither totally American nor totally foreign. For example, I used to never say the Pledge of Allegiance out loud, even though everyone else did. It felt disingenuous and mechanical: Why was everyone all pledging allegiance to the flag? What does it mean? What were the consequences? Did we kids know the meaning of the words we recited every day? In short, why do we do what we do?
Since no one ever explained “America” to me, I came up with my ideas about the country organically. I started picking up my parents’ Time and Newsweek magazines probably around age 8 or 9 to look at the political cartoons, and only really took an interest in politics after the First Gulf War and when Bill Clinton took office. No one explained tying a yellow ribbon or the two-party system to me, since my parents didn’t really know much about it.
The public high school I attended in New Jersey helped formalize this process by allowing honors students to take AP U.S. History as sophomores. As a 15-year-old, I started to learn a lot more about the founding of the country, the debates and issues around important historical events like the Three-Fifths Compromise (you mean people agreed at one point that all men aren’t created equal?), the violence over Kansas-Nebraska in the lead up to the Civil War, and social movements such as women’s suffrage and temperance.
I started to say the pledge toward the end of my junior year in high school. Somewhere along the way, I began to personally interpret the pledge as a promise to fight for a country that not yet was, but could be. I even wrote about this change as the main topic of my college admissions essay. A lot had happened in the year before I put those thoughts on paper. I had not quite felt like a true citizen a few times before then, but a couple events around that time really brought this home for me.
I had seen my dad lose his job and get passed up for promotions for not having the strongest command of the English language, despite his qualifications and his job as an IT specialist rarely requiring much interaction. My mom and I were in a car accident near our house at a notoriously busy intersection, and during the emergency response, we were treated rudely by police, who presumed we were at fault because my distraught mother could not adequately explain herself, exacerbated by the language barrier (she normally spoke excellent English, but the accident shocked her). The frustrated officer grew more and more impatient, and when I pointed this out, I was almost arrested for doing nothing more than defending my mom. I don’t recall the exact words now, but they were something to the effect of: “Get the f — away from me boy. Go sit your a — over there.”
Simultaneous to these events, I was taking AP U.S. History II, which covered the latter part of the U.S. story, including the Vietnam War. I learned that Captain Ronald M. Mayercik, who grew up in New Jersey, never came home from a mission flying over Cambodia. I learned about the Pentagon Papers, Agent Orange, and mission creep — and that our country still had a long way to go to even come close to the ideals that set the Founding Fathers in motion. I also began to better understand the kind of devotion that would lead someone to leave the relative comfort of New Jersey to fight for their country in a faraway place.
All of this led me to the conclusion that I could not take being an American, nor the promise of America, for granted. I began to say the pledge, having come to understand that it was about making a promise each and every day to try to live up to the ideals in our founding documents. My family had left a dictatorship, but I didn’t know what that meant since I left at such a young age. I had been taking my freedom in the United States for granted. It was only when I came to realize that these freedoms could be easily taken away and that they often didn’t apply to “minorities” that I started to get more politically active and civically involved. Hence the pledge, and my college essay.
9/11 happened soon after I began college, and I resolved at that point to join the U.S. military. I didn’t know where the journey would take me when I started Army ROTC. Eventually, I would serve a year-long tour in Korea, a fifteen-month tour in Iraq during the 2007–2008 surge, and a six-month tour in Iraq as a Defense Department civilian in 2011. I spent my entire four and a half years on active duty geographically separated from my spouse, who herself has spent her entire U.S. government career — including two deployments to Iraq. And despite this, we consider what we’ve done to be, simply, what is required of us.
The sacrifice we made is both the price of admission and maintaining a subscription to the idea of a more perfect union. So many others, like Captain Humayun Khan and his family, have sacrificed so much more. Yet others, such as Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator John McCain, could have easily avoided service in Vietnam and the sacrifice that this entailed, but they chose to put nation above self and continue to serve today.
Nowhere is this point made clearer than by the late Senator Daniel Inouye, who served in World War II as a member of one of the most courageous front-line units: the 442nd Infantry Regiment. Composed almost entirely of Japanese Americans, the unit earned 9,486 Purple Hearts, and 21 Medals of Honor were awarded to members, including to Senator Inouye. These brave men fought for the U.S. abroad while most of their families were confined behind barbed wire in internment camps at home in America. Historian Richard Norton Smith contextualized Inouye’s service in this way: “… what we should remember is the extraordinary love of country that he displayed, even when that country didn’t love him back. The fact of the matter is he distinguished himself on behalf of a country that had not always accepted him.” True sacrifice means standing up for the ideals that make America great, even when there are those in America who do not.
Sacrifice also means being uncomfortable when comfort is within reach; it means doing what is right when it isn’t convenient; and, in some ways, it even means going and fighting in a distant land simply because that is what your country requires of you. Patriotism shouldn’t blind us to our country’s flaws, but it should make our ears perk up when we hear it being used as a bludgeon or as a way to divide people into camps of “real” vs. “not real.” The promise of America means fighting for this country despite questions such as “do you speak English” and “no, where are you really from” persisting to this day (I’ve always responded Jersey). As an immigrant like Captain Khan, I feel stung when hearing politicians denigrate the meaning of sacrifice and service and smear entire ethnicities and religions. The truth is, as immigrants — and especially as immigrants of Asian descent — we do have to work harder to be accepted as true Americans. It starts with the process of attaining citizenship and continues with those never ending stares and questions about our perceived national identity.
Along the way, many of us develop a better understanding of what this country means for so many, both native born and yearning to reach our shores. We should be proud that our country continues to attract the best and brightest from around the world, not fearful. Because while we might be foreigners today, in a generation or two, we’ll be an integral part of the social fabric — the patchwork quilt that is America.
The American identity continues to be strengthened by immigrants, like the many strands of a rope intertwined, becoming stronger and stronger in order to carry the weight of American ideals. I’m still fighting for a better America that embodies its founding ideals, and I intend to keep fighting. Anything less would be, by my understanding, un-American.
Welton Chang is a Fellow with Truman National Security Project and co-director of Truman’s Philadelphia Chapter. He is a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Views expressed are his own.
