Citizenship

In the autumn of 1995, I lost my American passport. It was shortly before a trip to Myanmar, so I was frantic about not having a travel document. Having recently moved back to Hong Kong after living in Singapore for a year, no place felt like home. Which was why I had been carrying my passport with me, along with my Hong Kong identity card and U.S. driver’s license, both also lost in the same wallet when I got out of a taxi late one night after getting royally drunk with a client.

I realized my wallet was missing as soon as I reached home, which required a short uphill walk to my flat. Taxis simply refused to drive up the narrow path, and I had stopped arguing the point. I ran down to the foot of the hill, but the taxi was gone and there was nothing on the ground. It was past midnight. No one was around. I must have dropped it, but if so, why had it already disappeared? Visions of my reconstituted passport, my photo replaced by a stranger’s, swarmed through my brain, and I knew I needed to report it missing to the consulate as soon as possible. I cursed the state of nations that did not allow dual citizenship—if only I still had my Indonesian passport then there’d be no panic about my upcoming trip! But Indonesia disallows dual nationalities, and I surrendered that citizenship when I naturalized, and the United States only permits dual citizenship under specific conditions for which I did not qualify.

To date, I’ve traveled on eight passports of two nations and held a ninth of a notion in the form of a World Passport, unused, acquired in my early teens. It still astonishes me, even though it shouldn’t, that there are millions of people around the world who have never been issued (and likely never will be) even a single passport.

Each evening after the local news on Hong Kong television, Earth goes live. For about three minutes, cities of the world grace the screen in real time. Here is Budapest’s morning traffic. In Dubai the afternoon temperature is blistering. The city of Los Angeles slumbers but its highways never sleep. It’s a crap shoot because you never know which corner of the world will illuminate your home. On one of our weekly Skype calls, I told my guy in New York of this daily visual interlude, which both startled and intrigued him. In recent years, “Earth Live” has been my passport to world citizenship, solace for having to live in Hong Kong, apart from my life partner.

To be a citizen of any country, all you have to do is acquire that nation’s passport. Right now, in 2017, nation-states are veering precariously toward a new idea of citizenship, one that defies globalization, one that retreats to borders with walls, real or imagined, one that believes citizenship is a birthright only of those who belong, which increasingly seems narrowed to mean a cleansed ethnicity or believers of the “true” religion or those with the “correct” sociopolitical-cultural, even gender-biased vision of what life in that country must be. Yet right now, in 2017, there are likely many passports, real or imagined, crossing national borders at a rate unprecedented in history.

There is an obsolete meaning of passport that is, in effect, a license to beg. In sixteenth-century England, military patients discharged from a hospital were given a permit to head to their destination and ask for alms along the way. Such a practice would relieve a person’s temporary misfortune. The alarming refugee crises circumnavigating the globe might be well served by a similar form of passport. To be a child tossed around on an open sea, your citizenship pinned in clear plastic to your chest until the waves swallow it and your parents—what could be more horrifying? Or to almost suffocate inside a truck, padlocked from the outside, in your journey toward a hoped-for new citizenship—what could be less humane? The very nature of passport suggests a rule of law, this document “issued by a competent officer (as a secretary of state) of a country,” according to Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged. The OED doesn’t demand competence, but both dictionaries more or less agree that it is a country’s government that issues passports, and one that, we trust, is competent, even though the history of the world evidences how often this is not the case.

Citizenship is more broadly defined, as lack of a passport does not necessarily prevent you from being a citizen of a particular country, thus giving you the right to live there. In most nation-states, it would be difficult to strip an individual of citizenship so as to deny the right of abode, unless, perhaps, the person were an immigrant. Even so, what if the immigrant’s country of origin no longer exists? To where would they be banished? A stateless person without passport can not necessarily enter any other country. Purgatory, it should be noted, is not yet a nation-state.

You are born in [fill in the blank] nation, and in most instances this means you become a citizen of that state, unless the circumstance of your birth does not meet the requirements that make you one. Citizenship really is that simple and that complicated.

My various citizenships have umbilical ties to my rights of abode. A postwar birth in the British colony of Hong Kong granted me a “permanent” right of abode as a Hong Kong “belonger,” although how this is defined has evolved over time. This entitled me to a Hong Kong British passport that did not grant me the right of abode in Britain, presumably because it was issued by a colony and not the nation-state. However, given that I could claim at least partial Chinese ancestry, the People’s Republic of China, which was then Hong Kong’s geographical reality and former sovereign ruler, would not recognize me as British.

Meanwhile, as my Indonesian-national parents’ firstborn, I simply had to travel back to Indonesia, where I was not born, to be shown off to adoring relatives. My parents had each ended up in Hong Kong after the war. Then, the city welcomed new arrivals of Chinese ancestry, and borders were porous enough for Asian nationals in search of better lives who knew English, which they both did. Their Indonesian passports proved no barrier to obtaining either the rights of abode or to work, and their citizenship ensured they could always return to live and work in Indonesia. This is not at all true today for Indonesians or other nationals who arrive in my populated-to-bursting-point city. Postwar, Hong Kong needed people and readily granted citizenship to the city in the form of right of abode. Today, it cannot afford its ever-increasing citizenry and may even regret the admission of mongrels like my family.

So there I was, a minor on my mother’s passport. If during that trip of my infancy I had been orphaned or abandoned—my parents lost in a sea of oblivion, say—I would likely have had a right of abode in Indonesia. Of course, had I been born a few years earlier in Hong Kong when it was still under Japanese occupation, who knows what my options might have been?

Meanwhile, the city of Hong Kong had its own ideas of ethnicity. This took the concept of citizenship, which can be defined as belonging to a community, to a whole other level. Despite my obvious Chinese ancestry, albeit mixed with Indonesian blood, I am not officially considered Chinese by the government of Hong Kong. There are two reasons for this state of being. First of all, my parents did not register a Chinese name on my birth certificate, even though my father gave me one as he did all my siblings, and both my parents do have Chinese names. More significantly, I elected to take an Indonesian passport shortly after I turned sixteen, about a year before my departure for college in the United States, which meant I “belonged” to Indonesia rather than British Hong Kong. In fact, to ensure I could return home after graduation, it was necessary to obtain a stamp from the director of immigration certifying my right to remain “unconditionally” and that no visa be required for reentry to the land of my birth. Such was the state of unconditional love by my colonial mater, the bureaucratic answer for a modest fee payable to the Shroff.

This did not become a problem until I began traveling on my second passport book, issued in 1977, because I was unable to obtain a new book in 1979 when I had finally run out of pages. The latter problem is not unique among frequent business travelers of many nations. In my case, it was less the professional need to travel and more the desire I harbored to be a citizen of the world. The World Passport I obtained as a teenager was real, issued by the World Government of World Citizens established in Paris in 1948 by Sol Gareth “Garry” Davis, an internationalist and peace activist. Davis was an American who renounced his U.S. citizenship. His dream was to become a “free human being without benefit of any national credentials,” who could travel the world without passport. He lived a long life, and before his death in 2013 at the age of ninety-one had registered more than 950,000 people as world citizens. This is a larger population than in any of the thirty least populated nation-states in the world today, the largest being French Polynesia at fewer than 280,000.

However, back in 1979, my concern was as much practical as it was philosophical.

The Indonesian consulate told me they had run out of passport books. I was working for an airline and took advantage of the free and discounted tickets to travel as much as possible. This was in addition to my job that required me to travel to most of the online and a few offline locations of the company at least twice each year. The forty-eight pages of my passport were filled with visa and entry stamps. How, I demanded, was it possible for a nation to run out of passport books? As my late aunt would have said, the consulate was simply useless! She worked at the consulate as a secretary and was my passport to navigating its bureaucratic muddle.

The solution other nations, the United States included, used was to affix additional blank pages to the back of your book. By the time the consulate finally had new books to replace mine, it was 1983, and my passport had transformed into a motley collage of not one but two sets of added pages, glued to the back of the book and further extended, accordion-like, by scotch tape. It looked fake.

It also meant Hong Kong Immigration could never find that stamp, the one declaring my right to land in Hong Kong without a visa, because it was buried on the back page and hidden by the extra pages, which have long since come unglued from the spine. Unconditional love had become a thing of the past, lost to a memory of a stamp in my first, youthful passport book of 1970. The current stamp only allowed visa-free entry, and my right of abode in my birth city could therefore be interpreted as conditional. Often, I had to wait while immigration officers checked with supervisors about this, the situation made all the more precarious by the seemingly impermanent nature of my passport.

In the twenty-first century, technology has improved citizenship. Today, I zip into Hong Kong with only my permanent identity card, one with a chip and a metallic arrow to direct its insertion into a reader. My thumbprint assures my identity and voilà, the gate pops open into Customs. Today, I look Hong Kong Chinese enough for Hong Kong Immigration, but fortunately not mainland Chinese, because Customs invariably waves me through the green channel while mainlanders with too much luggage get stopped and searched.

Officially, however, I am still not Chinese in Hong Kong because my card lacks the three stars designation. Since Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty, I require a visa to enter the People’s Republic, while other Hong Kong belongers privileged by three stars on their ID card can enter with a permit or 回鄉証 to “return to one’s village.” I long ago gave up on that bureaucratic ethnic claim and pay an immodest fee once every three years to the Chinese government’s travel bureau for a multiple-entry visa to my country of origin. During Obama’s presidency, the United States and China negotiated a reciprocal agreement that extended ten-year multiple-entry visas to qualified citizens for crossing each nation’s borders, but the announcement came right after I had just renewed mine for three. The next time I renew, who knows if the rules will have changed yet again or whether or not I’ll even qualify.

When I became a U.S. citizen in 1987, it was easier to be an American than an Indonesian. For a start, I did speak English and had lived in the country a total of nine nonconsecutive years, four on the F-1 foreign student visa and the remaining five on the infamous green card held by legal aliens. An alien’s ethnicity (or class, religion, or gender identity) is not really an issue, especially not if citizenship is obtained through a real marriage, as mine was. However, friends of various persuasions who had acquired citizenship by other means were not treated differently. This, I decided, was the meaning of democracy, where legal aliens were equal in the eyes of the government, regardless of ethnicity, class, religion, or gender identity.

As an Indonesian born outside that country, I was a kind of alien, although not officially so. I did not speak Indonesian except for the language of food or irritation (babi, kambing, soto, satay, gado gado, ayam, etc., or ah doo!). I had never lived in Indonesia. My only claim to citizenship was the ability to sing the national anthem. Recently, at a Balinese dance performance in Jakarta when the anthem was played, I stood beside my Indonesian hosts and sang “Indonesia Raya” with them, surprised that the lyrics could be recalled from a childhood of August 17 celebrations, the commemorative day of the country’s independence from Dutch colonial rule. Of course, I can still also sing the Dutch children’s songs my Indonesian aunt used to sing to me, the same aunt who dismissed the consulate as perpetually, eternally, undeniably hopeless. Musical memory, it appears, crosses national borders at will.

In the early eighties, I once had to go to the Indonesian consulate in New York City to renew my passport. Indonesia is not nearly as trusting as the United States, and passports are only renewed for two years at a time, while Americans are given ten before having to worry about renewal. It was the first time I had done this without my aunt’s assistance, and I was nervous. I entered the consulate, passport in hand, and mumbled something about renewal. The man at reception immediately began speaking to me in Indonesian. Tida besa Indonesian, I said, a truncated sentence construction to indicate my inability to speak, adding in English, I was born and raised in Hong Kong—hoping to justify my ignorance—and only besa Kina, meaning I only could speak Chinese as my Asian language. The dark-skinned, ethnic Indonesian looked me up and down and said in fluent English, are you sure you’re an Indonesian? He was half-joking, teasing me in the way I recognized my Indonesian Chinese family would when they tried to make me be more Indonesian. But I also heard in his voice the nationalist critique of my citizenship: ethnicity was not the issue, but language and culture clearly were.

The day I pledged allegiance to the American flag in New York, I was surrounded by people of multiple ethnicities. The pledge I needed to learn, along with the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” as neither were part of my upbringing. I applied for my first blue book that same day, the passport I later lost, the travel document I coveted for so long that would ease travel and life. In 1991 I flew internationally for the first time as a U.S. citizen from New York to Hong Kong and China. This was a decade after my second entry to the United States on the F-1 visa with a right of abode but no right to work except at my university, as long as I remained a full-time graduate student. My reentry to the city of my birth was extremely swift and uncomplicated, and it was only for the trip to China that I needed a visa. It was also the first time I could visit the Chinese mainland. Previously, when I was an Indonesian citizen, it was not possible. This has changed now that China welcomes visitors from all over the world. Both my uncles who ran travel agencies in Hong Kong did a huge business booking tours to China for Indonesian Chinese and ethnic Indonesian citizens.

Why did I not consider British citizenship? As a girl, the Hong Kong British passport did not feel real, which was why I chose Indonesian instead. My first husband was British, and I would have qualified as a spouse for a real British passport, one with a right of abode in the United Kingdom. The marriage was short-lived, which was partly the reason I did not apply. But it is only now, essaying on citizenship, that this refusal to do so puzzles me into reflection.

It is strange to say I did not covet UK citizenship since I chose to marry a citizen. He was Scottish, and I did very much want to visit Scotland. At the time, I had never been to England or elsewhere in the British Isles. My now-ex, then-husband and I were living in a village in Hong Kong’s New Territories, and we even considered moving to New Zealand, as rural life appealed to us, which British nationality would have facilitated for life in the Commonwealth. I had even elected to remain in Hong Kong to be with him instead of returning to the United States for graduate school. I had been accepted at the University of Utah to do a PhD in English but declined the offer. There were financial constraints, and I also wasn’t entirely certain about an academic career. However, it was likely the question of American citizenship that was really at the heart of my decision.

In the summer of ’74, shortly after graduating with my BA in English, my F-1 student visa was revoked, and I had to leave the United States voluntarily if I wished to return again. My American Indonesian Chinese Dutch uncle was frantic. You’ll be deported! You’ll never be allowed back! His American wife, one of my favorite aunts, tried to calm him. She was mostly concerned with problem solving, as in, so what do we do now? It is remarkable to recall how calm I was despite this rather drastic reversal of fortune.

In the early seventies, foreign students could apply for a permit to work during summer vacations. While F-1 students were allowed to stay in the country in between school semesters, the right to work during these times was not automatic. You could work on campus in, say, the cafeteria or at the library or as a lab research assistant, although the better-paid work-study jobs were reserved only for U.S. citizens. I worked on campus during the school year as a dorm resident assistant and in summers slung trays as a waitress and rang up sales at cash registers in a resort town along with other Chinese foreign students who had introduced me to those jobs. Without that income, I could not afford college. For the first two summers of my three undergraduate years, this passport to work during vacation was granted.

Once I graduated, however, I was supposed to leave the country unless I was headed to graduate school. I had received an acceptance to the University of Utah and, given my desire to remain in the United States, said yes to starting in the fall. As I had each year previously, I went to the Foreign Student Office and applied for a work permit for summer, intending to earn something toward the looming expense ahead. Then I headed back to the resort town for the jobs that awaited me, as the permit usually came through soon afterward. Unfortunately, 1974 was the year President Nixon revoked that right, and suddenly, foreign students all over the United States were unable to work off campus on the F-1 student visa. My right of abode was not revoked, as I could legally remain in the country on my visa for the summer before moving to Utah, as long as I did not work.

Looking at the Dreamers today, who, as of this writing, may see DACA revoked, I sympathize with their plight. What good is an abode you cannot afford? Even your employers regard you and say, that’s ridiculous, what do you mean you’re not allowed to work, all students should earn their way through college! The greater irony is when those same employers say, I want you to work, you don’t steal from the register like those other kids. Those “other” white American kids at the resort town in upstate New York. The owner of the gift shop I had worked at for the past two summers asked me to keep an eye on new employees. It was not about ethnicity or passport, simply about who was a hard and honest worker and who wasn’t. Who needed the money more. The American kids he regularly fired didn’t seem to care whether or not they had the job, as being fired never seemed like a big deal to them. At twenty I was terrified of being fired and did all I possibly could to ensure I kept my job. Citizenship is odd; it really is that simple and that complicated.

Bureaucracy was my undoing. Despite the denial of a permit, the word from the government, at least according to my university, was that we all probably should stop working for the moment until their appeal decision came through. The haze around that denial enveloped us all with its lack of clarity. When I told my employers at the gift shop and restaurant—I always worked double shifts to make enough money—both the Jewish American shop owner and the Italian American restaurant manager said, but do you want to work? Yes, of course, I said, and they responded, then come to work because neither would ever tell. But a Hong Kong Chinese student from my college, one who had been picked up by Immigration, did tell. He gave Immigration all the names of the other Hong Kong students and told them where we worked. Later that summer I too was picked up by Immigration. The two officers were civil and actually rather apologetic. They had to remove the F-1 visa from my passport and told me to get it back in Albany at the end of summer so that I could stay on for graduate school. You’ll be fine, they said, it’s no big deal. We just have to do this. When I asked what I should tell my employers, they looked at each other and shrugged. We don’t really know. No one told us anything about that. One of them finally decided, you might as well keep on working and then go to Albany at the end of summer. That’s all we can tell you for now. As a fiction writer, I know you absolutely cannot make up real life, so you may as well not.

I imagine a dreamer today, someone who has known virtually no other life except one in America, being told they must return to Mexico or Guatemala or some other nation. They might not even speak the language well, likely have no relatives or friends they really know, and understand nothing about how to go to school, work, or live in that country. Would they even know which city or town or village to go to? Where would they live? Does the government in question even recognize their citizenship? At the end of that summer, I did as I was told and headed to Albany, and there I was shocked to be given eleven days to leave the country. Can I appeal? I asked. Yes but you have to go to Buffalo. I went. My appeal was denied, and the countdown to the deadline ticked ominously louder.

There appears to be nothing about this voluntary departure, which I did before the deadline, that besmirches my record. The University of Utah reissued an I-20 acceptance for the spring semester, which, if I had chosen to go, would have renewed my F-1 visa. In later years, I was able to apply for and receive tourist and business visas for travel to the United States, as well as a second F-1 student visa in 1981 when I was accepted for the MFA at the University of Massachusetts. I was initially denied that second F-1 by the American consulate in Hong Kong. The reasons the officer gave me were these: I was a divorced woman and therefore probably only going to the United States to try to get married, and secondly, she had never heard of the MFA degree in creative writing and doubted its veracity as a real academic discipline. So no, I could not become even a temporary citizen of America’s academic community because my gender profile and career aspiration were questionable. Of course, had I been a sexy European model who was hired in New York, the way the current president’s wife once was, why, then I might readily be granted a visa to enter the country where I could meet a rich American to marry and obtain citizenship. My appeal against that denial was successful, otherwise I might not be penning this essay today.

But in 1974, faced with the prospect of returning to the country that had asked me to leave, I decided to take my chances on Hong Kong and my Indonesian citizenship. In ’79, my Indonesian green book passport got me into East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie, which the American blue book would not have done. Two years later, I found my way to Moscow because Indonesia was an ally of the Soviet Union. I was glad to have seen Russia pre-Glasnost and, more importantly, pre-Putin. These, these are the joys of citizenship in the right country at the right time.

Britain, however, did not seem like the right country at the time. The United Kingdom allows dual citizenship, and prior to Brexit, it would have been advantageous to hold both UK and U.S. passports. But the world around me was and is forever rife with irrational postcolonialisms. My Indonesian citizenship did not allow me visa-free entry to the Netherlands, not even for transit on board a train, which seemed ridiculous given how many Indonesians, including many of my relatives, had settled there. The Nepalese Gurkhas in Hong Kong, who had fought valiantly under the Union Jack, would be confronted with a cultural and political statelessness when the United Kingdom and Hong Kong denied them proper citizenship. Koreans in Japan cannot become “real” Japanese despite their former colonization. After the handover of Hong Kong to China, Britain offered a large number of “real” British passports to Hong Kong Chinese citizens, but few applied.

So there I was, a mixed-race Asian who was not considered British by the Chinese or Chinese by the British Hong Kong government or a real Indonesian by the country of my nationality. The future of our city’s postcolonialism and the state of immigration laws were at best murky, given the evidence of both world and personal history. For all I knew, if I did become British British, as opposed to Hong Kong British, I might lose right of abode anywhere in the world if some future prime minister decided to change the rules for immigrants by marriage or the Hong Kong Government no longer welcomed “real” British citizens. I chose the path of least resistance. As a young married woman with little money to travel for the moment, what difference did it make which citizenship I held? As long as I could work and make a life, which I could in Hong Kong as a permanent resident, what more did I need?

For years, my U.S. citizenship has been a boon. If necessary, I can seek consular protection as a writer in China because I travel there on my U.S. passport. I am able to live and work in any American state or territory and can enter numerous countries without a visa. I can even travel to Israel, which I have done, and Jerusalem remains one of my more memorable global moments, astounded as I was to encounter the religious multitude of its history. This was the one country I could never have entered as an Indonesian. At the Hong Kong International Airport prior to boarding my flight to Tel Aviv, I was pulled aside to answer questions about the Indonesian surname on my U.S. passport. Was I Muslim? Did I live in Indonesia? No, no, definitely not, but what I couldn’t say was, and what if I am or do? El Al security were polite but clearly had a job to do.

Since 9/11 I have been vigilant about maintaining my Global Entry citizenship, this passport that eases reentry to the United States, this bureaucratic fast track for global Americans. You fill out a long form that proves a history of frequent international travel, subject yourself to an interview, and are fingerprinted like a criminal, after which you too, for a fairly hefty fee, may zip through U.S. Immigration by presenting your passport at a card reader instead of standing in line. It is convenient, yes, but more significantly, my registration ensures I will not as likely land on a watch list of suspected Islamic terrorists because of my surname.

Many years earlier, I once got into a debate with an advocate for Islam in Amherst, Massachusetts, where I was a graduate student. He was proselytizing; I was resisting. As an Indonesian Chinese, I said, my people had been victimized by nationalistic forces in Indonesia who were Muslim, so no, I did not have a desire to convert. He was undeterred, and it soon became evident he was flirting as well. He was handsome, this highly articulate brother. In other circumstances, the conversation would have continued over coffee. But what sticks in my memory is how unaware he was of the global nature of Islam, since he knew very little about Indonesia, the most populous Muslim nation. Yet now, when I am far less vehement than my youthful, religiously defiant self—I was raised Catholic, grew up among Buddhists, associate with Islamic, Jewish, Protestant, Taoist, Mormon, et al. folks, and am not held captive by any one religion—my citizenship cannot prevent the misperception of my possible religious leanings.

These days, China does occasionally grant real Chinese citizenship to non-Chinese businessmen who have made a lucrative life in Hong Kong and who choose to renounce their other nationalities. This gives me pause, given China’s inward-looking history as the Middle Kingdom, as do the nationalistic, jingoistic declarations of the current American administration. It is painful to imagine the United States as a country in which deplorable citizens live in racial-, religious-, and gender-biased isolation, armed to the teeth, as if warring is the solution to living. I eschew this image because I haven’t yet given up on the democratic evolution that underpins this nation’s history. Citizenship is malleable and transformed by a citizenry, regardless of national borders. We can elect Schengen or Brexit, DACA or tightened borders, civility or cruelty, common sense or unreason. In the end, we are all citizens of this one world we inhabit. Till death, or heaven or hell, do us part.