To Be American

To make a prairie, it takes one clover and one bee,One clover, and one bee,And revery.The revery alone will do,If bees are few.

Emily Dickinson (1855)

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 it was, 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 20, having absorbed a tiny bit of America. Dickinson for instance, who was serious and whom I liked despite her occasional frivolity, 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 200 plus years, takes its own history quite seriously. I finally did acquaint myself, enough to pass a citizenship test, although 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 that proved acquaintance that, if not auld, since 200 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 20 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 200 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 wasn't American, even if he is absent from the memory of a goodly number of Americans, and from the canon at some academies.

To be American you must prove you can laugh at yourself, in ironic self...