Red, White, and Blue Blooded
Searching for America
If you slit my veins, certainly blood would pour out. Remarkably fluid and rustier than the stripes on the American flag.
Could you find America there?
Red
My senior year of college was two years ago at this point, but I have this vivid image of tracing my fingers over a map “Союз Советских Социалистических Республик”
I found it in my grandmother’s apartment in Warsaw, tucked away in some back cabinet, wrinkled and yellowed and all the same I took it home with me to America where it hung on the wall of my dorm directly across from the Polish flag over my bed. My dream then was very different, I wanted to go to the Mongolian Steppe, ride the trans-Siberian railroad across to Europe to understand what it must have been like then, during the war. To see what the landscape looks like now. To understand what my family left behind.
Red is associated with communism. The Red Scare.
But red is also the bottom half of the Polish flag, the stripes on the American flag. Red is my heritage.
The Fulbright is based on such a simple premise – a cultural exchange – promoting America abroad. And now Chris and I sit next to each other at the table and stretch to find out where our Americanness is. He has spent six of his 21 years outside of the country, one in Taiwan, three in Tajikistan, One in Abu Dhabi, and this one in Uzbekistan. But the American in him is from the Deep South. Tabasco, Cajun Seasoning and swamplands. My America is the Midwest. Flatlands, roadtrips, and Lou Malnati’s pizza. But my childhood was also shaped by woman who didn’t allow peanut butter or softball in our house. We spoke Polish at home and spent our weekends gardening. We couldn’t be any more different, but somewhere in our intersection lies the United States of America.
Something sets us apart obviously. Is it that we don’t smoke? I wasn’t sure where to find it. I stood looking around at the Fourth of July party at the U.S. Embassy (in May) and try to find something to unite us. The cupid shuffle? Barbeque?
A passport.
Blue
It has taken me nine months to find America.
Are you a full bred American?
Yes, my father was a Bald Eagle and my mother was a Big Mac.
In a taxi from Khiva to Moynak, my mother begins to interrogate our driver. He says that his wife wants to get a driver’s license and he thinks he will allow her to get one after they have been married for ten years. My mother’s eyes nearly bulge out of her head. She inquires if he thinks his wife is smart - he says no. But there are other little things that are hard for her to comprehend here. I explain that it’s best she uses the bathroom at home - the ones at the lyceum are really not up to any kind of sanitary standard. I get into a fight with the director of the American Corner. I talk to my students about food poisoning, how few people in the United States have to worry about getting sick from the food they eat whereas here in Uzbekistan even my local friends get sick two or three times a year. The director at the American corner tells me I’m wrong, that in the U.S. our apples are full of GMOs and am I suggesting that Uzbek apples are worse? I have to explain that food poisoning is usually bacterial or viral and sometimes even parasitic - related to hygiene practices and not the genetic composition of the apple…
I find that even my mother is American. Though she prefers to speak Polish if she can and insists we shop at the Polish deli, my mother too is American. Violently so.
Boiled down from months of late night discussions and frustration over my inability to wear the clothes I want, it dawns on me.
I am American because I am free and I believe in freedom.
The freedom to love who I want.
The freedom of the press.
The freedom to practice any religion I choose.
The freedom to protest the government without fear of retaliation.
The freedom to chase a dream.
The inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The freedom to have a little blue booklet full of stamps and visas, the freedom to travel the world if I so wish. The kind of freedom many of my Uzbek counterparts will never have. Because it turns out that where you are born does matter.
White
My last class of May, I draw the average Uzbek with my students. We agree he has dark hair, wears a chapan, has a dopa on his head, in his hand there is a spoon to eat his plov and a pot of green tea to wash everything down. He is most likely a taxi driver.
I then ask them to draw me the average American. What I learn is that the average American is white, he has curly blonde hair, wears a baseball cap and sunglasses, an oversized t-shirt, a gold chain, Nike socks and Air Jordans. He eats hot dogs and drinks coke. He is a rapper or a DJ. In the corner, my mom makes her own drawing, she draws a cowboy.
The takeaway? Our perception comes through the media we consume. My mother saw Westerns on T.V. - my students see TikTok influencers.
I then proceed to show my students a clip of Coming to America. A 1988 comedy about an African prince coming to New York to find love. Aside from the trashcan fire, the squalid living conditions, the crass language, there are only two white characters in the cast. They don’t understand that this is real too. That many people in the U.S. are not well off.
The issue? Perception is everything. Perception also doesn’t have to align with reality.
Pandora’s Box : The American Dream
I am the American Dream.
My parents left a society where they couldn’t find jobs, a country where they grew up with ration coupons, reeling from World War II, and came to a new land and started everything from scratch. They clawed their way to a home in the suburbs, worked long and late, and gave me and my brother a chance to be anything we wanted.
I am an American because I grew up as the child of immigrants. Not in spite of it.
I am thankful to be an American. I’m thankful for a passport that let me go so many places. I’m thankful for the school system that told me I could chase my dreams, for the public library that helped me learn English, for my Alma Matter that let me find the sport I loved, and for the Fulbright program for letting me chase my dreams.
But I am lucky.
But the American Dream doesn’t come true for everyone. Some people get chewed up and spit out. Sometimes, even if you work really hard, things go wrong. Pandora’s box was filled with scourges and disease, unhappiness and poverty, hope and wonder only slipped out just barely. We have the freedom to pursue happiness, but even then it isn’t a given.
Despite the rioting, the farcically childish spats over social media that have replaced diplomacy, the rampant gun violence, and the thing that Central Asia fears most - gays, trans, and furries - everyone I meet still dreams of America. Taxi drivers beg me to pack them into my suitcase. Store fronts, coffeeshops, everywhere you look, there are words in English. At times the wording is off, the signs look like terrible translations from Chinese, processed through ChatGPT. But the message is clear - they want to align themselves with the West. With America. Dreaming of freedom.
Lack of Perspective
What is the average immigrant coming to America for?
The real question is, what are they running from?
As Americans, we often lack perspective. People are running from things we couldn’t fathom. People disappear for joining rival political parties, for speaking about religion. In the older Soviet apartments, the water shuts off everyday at 9pm. The power goes out in the hospitals, I’ve heard of people being denied healthcare because they couldn’t pay a bribe, of tax collectors coming months in advance, of entire regions going dark and losing internet access. There are places where no matter how hard you work, you will never be able to achieve the life you want.
Even in America, many of us are not free. Not free to chose what happens with our bodies, our families, our jobs. But I have found America in my own dream. I still dream, along with all the others around the world dreaming of better lives, that one day we will truly be free.