To make a prairie, it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
Emily Dickinson (1755)
To be American, you must take yourself seriously. Very, very seriously. I did not understand this when I first set foot on these here shores. It was hard to hear “these here” seriously, although that is, I would eventually discover, serious diction if uttered unsmilingly. So I came, listened, and departed three years later, at the not-so-tender age of twenty, having absorbed a tiny bit of America: Dickinson, for instance, who was serious and whom I liked despite her occasional frivolity, as when she fluttered over feathers or prairies and bees. Must I care about prairies and interspecies copulation, this latter act requiring a ridiculous position, at least according to one American? Dickinson, unlike Whitman, who not only took himself seriously but expected everyone else to do likewise, was not concerned about serious life because what mattered to her was death. See-RYE-ous, says my friend Jenny in syllabic Chinglish (this here is Chinese English to you, my American friend). Jenny arrived in the middle West, got her degree, and fled, horrified, never to return except for brief forays to Manhattan to eat-drink-shop on Fifth Avenue, which is at least fun if not serious. In Hong Kong Jenny surrounds herself with drinking friends like me who have some acquaintance with America and who appreciate that see-RYE-ous can be the correct intonation of a word that translates as “stern weight”—yihm juhng-chung—if you elide the tone, and if you don’t take the business of translating Cantonese into English seriously, that is.
To be American you must at some point acquaint yourself with the nation’s history, this nation that, at two-hundred-plus years, takes its own history quite seriously. I finally did acquaint myself enough to pass a citizenship test, though I could not readily name the second senator in New York State at the time. Was it not enough to have memorized Dorothy Parker’s Algonquin quips or e. e. cummings’s mud-luscious lines? Surely this proved an acquaintance that, if not auld, since two hundred years is easily forgot, counted for something? At the time, the national voter turnout was hovering below 60 percent, which meant many Americans probably could not name their state’s second senator. What flummoxed me more than the test, however, was why no one took world history seriously. I recall one Cincinnati acquaintance loudly protesting the lack of world historical knowledge among the young, he being middle aged and belatedly recognizing that his time spent in such knowledge acquisition now impressed no one save himself; his idea of world history began with the Roman Empire and ended in England, as all other history was presumably negligible. But about Cincinnati, Mark Twain did say he would stop there only when the world ended because everything arrived there twenty years too late, including, no doubt, its inhabitants. I paraphrase Twain, but that is not of “rigid importance,” another almost-translation of serious from Chinese, since the quote is only attributed to him but not fully verified. Why anyone feels the need for verification is perhaps another reason why acquaintance with this or any nation’s history is such a rigidly important and weighty affair. America creates such a lot of history in a mere two-hundred-plus years, what with its presidential musical chairs—not to mention ambassadorial, judicial, senatorial, congressional ones—that it is downright impossible to keep up with its history or even its present. Downright. Now there’s another case of misconstrued diction that was more serious than I realized, even in the academy. Twain didn’t quite make it into the academy, though, at least not the ones I attended, yet no one would deny he was American, even if he is absent from the memory of a goodly number of Americans and even from the canon at some academies.
To be American you must prove you can laugh at yourself in ironic self-deprecation if you are young or wish to be hip and preternaturally young. Irony has nothing to do with laughter, of course, just as self-deprecation does not, but then to be young and American is all about taking yourself deathly seriously while pretending not to. Having departed this country young and returned after a spell, I was surprised to find that America had moved on, that laugh-out-loud laughter (silently now, L-O-L) was no longer the best medicine unless you only read Reader’s Digest, which the rest of the world swallows as real American. To swallow is to be fooled in American, damaging the esophagus undoubtedly, because I swallowed the idea of being American as if allegiance and residence and good standing with the IRS would make me American. It wasn’t as simple as taking patriotic duty seriously because in some circumstances that will get you killed, which seems downright unpatriotic: to be all you can be one day and blown up in Iraq the next because some historical figure playing presidential musical chairs decides to declare war. Do you laugh at yourself if you are American about the fact of starting a war? My friends in Hong Kong excuse me when they loudly protest the war because in their eyes I am not a real American. How could I be since I wasn’t born “over there,” despite the fact that I spell and punctuate American, which these days even some British editors will allow. Will swallow. Have I fooled them all as well as my friends in America because I have become American, which is not quite the same as being American? After all, I can name the president now, along with the second senator of New York State, although her name dances on the tip of my tongue and then disappears, thanks to the fast-moving chair dance and my arrival at middle age, or so the neurologist says. He, the doctor, will not take my desire for early Alzheimer’s detection seriously because I am too healthy, too mentally alert, too readily able to name the president, the state he came from and its subsequent history of shame, and even the vice president, although he slipped off my tongue for a moment but returned, and I did recall his senatorial state of origin. I, on the other hand, must take this doctor seriously because he made it into medical school, a see-RYE-ous accomplishment, spent years practicing his specialty and, now that he has arrived, denounces the state of medical care in these here United States as too drug happy, just as he declares that most people, meaning Americans, would not do as well as I did on his memory and knowledge test, one that was a far, far more difficult thing than crossing the borders into citizenship. That I might be genetically predisposed to Alzheimer’s is probable but difficult to prove. He, the doctor, is the man who laughs a little at me, kindly I think, unlike Victor Hugo’s tragic hero whose deformity freezes his face into perpetual laughter. The French gave America Liberty and the cul de sac, which is reason enough to recall some Frenchman’s words, even if the history of the world no longer makes us laugh.
To be American you must at some stage of your life take medicare (lowercase) seriously, by which I mean medical care and not the semisocialist welfare state senior citizenship brings. It is difficult to take American-trained doctors seriously in Hong Kong. For one thing, British medical standards and practices dominate, and everyone knows real health care is all about balancing yin and yang, for which the Chinese herbalist will prescribe the right concoction if you are too much one or the other. I did, however, take American-trained dentists seriously because American teeth are healthier than Hong Kong teeth, and there is reason to floss whether or not you’re American, a practice the rest of the world, and certainly China, still hasn’t learned, although the young are catching up. It is advantageous being young in a global era because like my friend Jenny, the young will go to Manhattan to eat and drink and shop and witness American teeth, feeling them up as their tongues slide under, over, and around that dental gleam some hormonal night in the wild west of Chelsea, where the young go to party and play now that the East Village is so yesterday. Today is already yesterday in New York City, where history piles upon itself as rapidly as excrement reappeared on sidewalks once the pooper-scooper mayor stepped down. But medical care is serious business because it spawns profitable television dramas, these days down the path of the willingly nip-tucked or verbally abused coupled with their salacious seductions, all of which makes you contemplate the grave with a modicum of desire well before the onset of Alzheimer’s, longevity past its use-by date, or some debilitating, incurable disease.
To be American you must be perpetually exhausted and feel bad about it because no one in the world works as hard as Americans, especially in corporate America, where to desire time off is almost criminal or mortally sinful, but who insisted it had to be so? It is hard for the world to understand why being American presumes the right to desire ungodly amounts of wealth and possessions because you wish some recompense for a twenty-four-seven work life that is all for the sake of profit in this here capitalist economy. Capitalism. Now there is a truly American dream, which loans a home to every family until the subprime earthquake takes it away, not unlike Daddy and his T-Bird. Milton Friedman, a not-so-quiet American (from Brooklyn and a Leo no less) was mightily impressed by Hong Kong’s brand of laissez-faire capitalism, which he says created our postwar prosperity (consequently, Friedman is kindly regarded on these here shores). As a part-time resident and native daughter of the city of Hong Kong, I have always appreciated our low taxes and entrepreneurship, which permit the birth and death of businesses to mimic the life cycle of a fruit fly. (A female fruit fly can only be considered virgin for twelve hours after emerging as an adult.) But I am not sure how correct this American economist was in naming our economic miracle “capitalism,” especially the laissez-faire governmental nonintervention. Intervention abounds to control the price (upward) of real estate, to purchase shares of the largest bank in response to an economic crisis, to regulate life in this highly efficient city with an extraordinarily well-paid civil service (so civil, in fact, that an Independent Commission Against Corruption had to be formed to stanch the graft that bled from the ranks of the service, drowning the public’s trust), to peg a “freely convertible” currency rigidly to the greenback. As well, intervention minimizes democratic representation and perpetuates a class structure favoring an elite that reflects and genuflects to the overlord in power. Nonintervention simply means the government smiles a lot but doesn’t give a flying fuck about you, not really.
Not to give a flying fuck. Now there’s a truly American outlook on life. I am reminded of a pair of flying-while-fornicating vultures, a decal image I would press onto T-shirts for a summer job during my college years, under which read the words: “Fly United.” For such memorable souvenirs would vacationing Americans (and a few Canadians) part with their greenbacks. That was life then in these here United States, where Americans and Canadians comingled funds in an upstate New York resort while temperatures soared and the living was easy.
But to return to Jenny, which is where I began, because to be American means I must split myself in two, being American over here (or is it there?), where I am not with the likes of Jenny, and being something else when I am with her and others in my life who are not Americans. It would perhaps be simpler to be expatriated, a highly American condition abroad where you can either be lost in translation or, in a quaint echo of your colonial forebears, go native. It is so either-or, being American I mean, because to be, for example, Hong-Kong-ian (or Hong-Kong-ese, we are not fussy about nomenclature), you can also be Canadian or Australian or some national of European persuasion and speak Japanese or Spanish in your spare or full time as suits your temperament. For that matter you can even be an astronaut, which many Hong Kong people are, having split their lives between Vancouver and their home city (or London or Toronto or even the Republic of Singapore, which is both city and state, a splittist condition of modern postcolonialism), landing at one or the other as the stars decree. Why is it that to be American you must be first and foremost American and may not pledge allegiance to another nation unless you are born accidentally weird or if in fact you happen to be a traitor? Life is surely not so either-or, although to be American I have found that it is usually best to be clear and straightforward about things, living in one place at one postal address, for instance, as opposed to having several domiciles as I have. Which is why I only accept mail at one post office box on a rural route, which is as sweet as home can be, this singular post office being the reason why I, like Eudora Welty, also choose to Live at the P.O. The rest of the world embraces poste restante, but being American, it struck me as preferable, even desirable, to live at this box, where my mail can pile up for weeks at a stretch (and even months) without anyone making too loud a fuss. This is far more restful than poste restante; believe me, as one who made use of said service during a long-ish stint in Greece, you feel pressured to check daily in case your mail goes astray, which it was often known to do but which in the case of my American post office, it rarely ever does. So here I am, American, even though the sea right now is not shining because yet another typhoon has hit Hong Kong. I gaze across the harbor from my rooftop in Kowloon and ponder an American contribution to the city’s skyline, the tower with chopsticks as spires (erected by I. M. Pei, an American whose name still sounds foreign to many American ears), which is the Bank of China. So now I return full-circle—which is rather un-American I might add, not succumbing to a linear narrative—and recognize my condition as a sort of Chinese who is sort of American while squatting in a sort of home in Hong Kong. It is enough to make you shudder, this neither-fish-nor-fowl existence. Although every time the fish-fowl dilemma rears its curious head, I instantly see the graphic art of M. C. Escher, who is most avowedly not American, although he too was someone who left the land of his birth for the foreign shores of Italy for quite a spell, and for other lands as well, though he did eventually die back home in the Netherlands. Which is finally getting me back to where I really want to be, considering death as Dickinson did, this American whose sensibility was quite Japanese, or so some Japanese think. At this point, I am stumbling over an impossible architecture à la Escher in this reverie on being American. But the point, I suspect, was all about my early American encounter with Dickinson’s prairie. It was so impossible, that prairie poem, I disliked it so intensely when I was eighteen because at eighteen it is still possible to have intense feelings about something as insignificant to the world you came from as a poem by an exceptionally quiet American of whom no one you knew in Hong Kong had ever heard. I disliked it because I had fallen so much in love with Emily’s alabaster chambers and buzzing flies at the moment of demise that I could not accept this same imagination would fritter away time on clovers and bees. There was no one to tell me then, just hang on a spell, you’ll see, she’s got something there. And so I rabbit on (English fashion, the English countryside being littered with rabbits the way the Northeast is not) about being American when what I really want to know, when all I really care about is to know what to take see-RYE-ously before death. Before he kindly stops for me because I too, like Emily, will not stop for him, I ask if in fact “the revery alone will do.”
To have chosen to become American, because it was a choice and not foisted upon me by war, parental design, or the need to escape a seriously oppressive regime (unless you consider the stern weight of four thousand years of tangled Chinese history a form of oppression), has led me to Dickinson’s busy-bee life among the clover. Trying to make prairies, perhaps, or more accurately, seeking the prairie that might one day be home. There was precious little time for “revery” with all this fuckin’ flying and flying while fucking around with life. But I hung on a spell, not knowing what else to do with being American, this thing I had acquired somewhere along my life, and if Monsieur Death would kindly leave me alone for a spell, this reverie might end with a modicum of hope, if not feathers. At least about being an American of this ilk, which, come to think of it, ain’t the worst thing I could be. Ain’t. Now that’s the sweetness of the prairie.