Being an Immigrant

For John, BLUF:  We all carry our past, as in a knapsack.  However, part of being an American is knowing when it is time to discard the knapsack and make yourself a new person.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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When Your Inheritance Is to Look Away

Here is the sub-headline:

My parents, immigrants from China, depicted our pre-America lives as mere prologue. What I got was a mythology of the future.

From The New Yorker, by Writer C Pam Zhang, 7 April 2020.

Here is the lede plus three:

My dad died and I didn’t look at the body.  The decision made a kind of sense, considering the rules of my life up till then, and considering how my dad was found:  a few days after his death, decomposing on the couch of his office, in a squat gray building in Albany, California.  “A few days” was what they said when I showed up in the parking lot, having rushed from San Francisco in the middle of a workday.  As usual, the fog had lifted as I crossed the Bay Bridge from west to east.  Less than a mile from where my dad died, I had gone to high school, lived in a series of cheerless rentals, seen my parents get divorced.  The light in that part of California had always felt too clear, imparting a bleakness that lays every flaw bare.  There was no disguising the meanness of my father’s death:  the bare concrete, the ugly building with its smeared glass doors, and beyond them (I imagined) the stained couch that my dad used as a bed, the hot plate where he cooked desultory meals, the office furniture littered with receipts and takeout containers.

The light was clear, the day a blur.  I don’t remember which officials milled in the lot.  I don’t remember if the person who asked if I wanted to see the body was short or tall, gentle or stiff; I don’t remember the color of their shirt, the cut of their hair.  I remember only that they said “a few days,” suggesting that in that indefinite period my dad’s body had changed.  Did I want to look?

I hadn’t been afraid when I got the call, but now I was—a vague fear, by which I mean a fear of specificity, a fear of seeing too precisely and having that sight haunt me.  I answered automatically, by force of lifelong habit.  “No,” I said, and lost my chance to look.

Obfuscation is my inheritance.  My parents, like many immigrants, depicted their pre-America lives as mere prologue, quickly sketched. Once, we lived in China.  The winters were cold.  You were small.  Now we live here.

That unwillingness to plumb one’s past is unimaginable to me, but, then again, I’m American.  I grew up devouring cold cereal and sitcoms with plots that revolved around girls who preserved the details of their lives in pink satin diaries.  I owned such a diary, in America; in America, every life is an exception, every person worthy of a story.  “Oh!” someone exclaims at a party when I name some American city I’ve lived in.  They have a cousin or a friend from the area, and have I eaten the local food, and what do I feel about the local sports team?  In Lexington, Kentucky, circa 1994, very few questions followed when my parents answered, “China.”  That was the goal, to some extent.  The past became easy to overlook.

"Obfuscation" may be her "inheritance", but she is now an American.  Shouldn't that give her a certain sense of hope, hope for the future?  Her thinking makes me think of the People's Republic of China.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff