Wartime in the Beautiful Country

            My first memory of Meiguo, the Beautiful Country, was a carton of cold apple juice with a straw spiked through its side. A tall blonde stranger handed it to me with a rush of incomprehensible sounds; I don’t remember her face, only the impossible brightness of her hair, and the cool water beading onto my nervous fingers. I’m sure there were child-sized shelves in the room, full of alphabet blocks and friendly faded books, and a flag in the corner I’d learn to greet with high ritual. My father sounded out the familiar Mandarin words for me— pingguo zhi— and this shadowy teacher with the leonine mane, she supplied the English. “Apple juice.” Those were the first words I remember speaking in my new tongue, language of political protests and rock ‘n’ roll. I said them in the nervous squeal of a child émigré.

             My first memory of Meiguo, the Beautiful Country, was a carton of cold apple juice in a preschool classroom. But it should have been the patch of lights that was the Hartfield International Airport, on some cool forgotten night fifteen years ago. Those lights must have greeted me as I touched onto Georgia soil, with the five-starred seal of the People’s Republic on my passport and the hum of childish Mandarin in my mind. I saw the airport again five years after, in daylight, clear enough to make memory of this time. It was a sprawling field dressed in the gray-green colors of metropolitan commerce, hard modern sky-fiefdom full of indecipherable partitions. Later I learned that it started to swell during World War II, when it fed on patriotic fervor to become the busiest airbase in the nation.

            So it made a dream-logic sense to me, the arcane connections between those vast airfields and that distant war and my personal history fluid as myth, half forgotten and half constructed from poetic imagination. What did a star-spangled war effort have to do with me— Rosie the Riveter and “Remember Pearl Harbor” and the Normandy landing? My ancestors fought half a world away, on battlefields wet by the Yangtze and the Huang He. They remembered Manchuria, which the West forgets. They remembered the rape of Nanjing.

            When I studied World War II in many classrooms later on— always with the star-spangled banner in one corner, primed for the pledge— it was with a feeling of exclusion. This was the opposite of the apple juice through which I’d tasted my first mouthful of English. This was a conflict that began on December 7, 1941, “a day which will live in infamy.” It was guided through its course by a horde of fair-skinned heroes with eyes the color of the sky, while their while their flaxen-haired wives seeded victory gardens at home. As an Asian American, I felt that my community was barred from this glorious effort. As a Chinese American, I felt that I had no place in this story at all.

            It was only later, through my own haphazard researches, that I learned the truth about Chinese American involvement in the war effort. I remembered all the old cruel stories about exclusionary immigration laws, accidents on the Union-Pacific Railroad, “not a Chinamen’s chance.” The Beautiful Country was once a strange and terrible place for a Chinese immigrant. But with World War II, with its outpouring of fervor, this murderous status quo began to change.

            Like their compatriots of all races, Chinese Americans raised money for the Red Cross, poured into the burgeoning defense industry, became decorated soldiers, fought as heroes, whether for freedom or for family or for the star-spangled flag. Army Captain Francis B. Wai even won the Medal of Honor for leading an amphibious assault on Leyte. Like so many of his comrades, people of all backgrounds, he died in the line of duty.

            World War II was more than a WASPy pageant of picturesque heroism. It was a rallying point in American history, when formerly maligned groups like that Chinese-American community were embraced and enfolded into that single-minded pursuit of victory. It was the drawing together of all the segments of American society, to focus them on a common goal. To that end, it is as much my story as any of my fellow Americans’.

            After World War II came the slackening of restrictive immigration laws, the normalization of relations between the Chinese-American community and mainstream American society. This effort has continued in a cultural arena rather than a military one, with Amy Tan among the literary elite and Stephen Chu as President Obama’s Secretary of Energy. This is an ongoing process, as the children of that culture— my own generation— are encouraged not to assimilate wholly and lose themselves, but to bring to bear their unique talents and inimitable perspectives to the improvement of American society. This attitude is manifest in contemporary American culture, which has grown to emphasize the mosaic over the melting pot, diversity over homogeneity. We each have a distinctive voice. When we join them together, we produce not a deafening monotonous hum, but as chorus as rich and powerful as it is multifarious and subtle. I’m happy to be a part of that song.

            My memory as a child émigré is as delicate and subtle as old lace, full of fragile holes and embroidered pieces that may be half-fable. Sometimes it feels as if I remember joys and sorrows beyond the edges of my own life, as if I’ve tapped into some community consciousness and now share in the experiences of a long day that began before the construction of the Union-Pacific Railroad and stretches far into a hopeful future that I’m not yet able to see. In the middle of this day is World War II, a time of fear and terrible exhilaration, but above all things a time of change. What began for me with a carton of apple juice began for Chinese-Americans as a community then— the understanding of what it truly means to be an American.