Discussing the recent tragedy in Virginia with some of my relatives (who happen to be from Virginia), a few of their comments brought up, IMHO, an interesting question:
How many generations does it take before one’s considered American?
Let me explain that query a bit. These relatives view any Chinese-American as Chinese, any Japanese-American as Japanese, any Vietnamese-American as Vietnamese. Yet, they view themselves and other Scottish-Americans as American. The puzzling thing about that is, in many cases, the Asian-American family has been in the US many generations longer than my family has. They extend this puzzling view to any European immigrant family. Also puzzling is that they don’t consider Black American families to be other than American.
I think it’s less about the number of generations and more about culture and the relative size of the groups.
I’m willing to bet the number of Asians in the US is substantially smaller than the number of Whites, Hispanics or Blacks. Further, they tend to be more close-knit than other groups. Small population + close-knit = foreigner. IME, YMMV, etc.
I asked them. They were shocked by the question. From my experience, though, they’re fairly representative of where they grew up and where they now live, so I figured it could make for a good debate question.
I’m told my father was beat up for being Irish. He was born here, but his parents came from East Galway. However, I never heard the story from him, since I was 4 when he died–in the crash of a USAF plane. I do have the flag he wore to his wake. It’s Red, White & Blue.
You’re an American if you’re born here. Or if you’ve been naturalized.
Many people have some pride in their roots. But those outsiders who don’t consider them American enough are just showing their racism and/or xenophobia.
I’m not sure, technically they are American citizens, but have a mixed relationship with America at large. They aren’t part of the Social Security network, they do use modern medical services (and pay in cash, from what I understand) when it is needed. But they prefer to live their own lifestyle away from mainstream American life. FWIW they refer to non-Amish as ‘English.’
I have a co-worker who was born in Vietnam and came here by way of a refugee camp when she was 10. She has lived here for 30 years and she is as American as you get in voice, attitudes, norms, etc… She’s still bilingual (more than actually- English, Vietnamese, some Thai and some French) and her parents still speak Vietnamese in the home, but she speaks English perfectly and with little accent, is married to a native Alabamian, her children have western names (they’re not Vera, Chuck, and Dave but they’re as “American” as that) and she speaks Vietnamese only to her older relatives.
I had a co-worker, “George”, in Georgia who is my age (40ish) and whose grandmother is still alive and lives in Chinatown in San Francisco. His great-great grandfather came here from China in the late 19th century. While George has a Chinese name (“Chao Lin Chi”) he uses George for the benefit of students. His 80-something grandmother speaks only passable English and prefers not to speak that- her first language is Chinese even though she and her parents were born and raised and married and had kids and grew old in San Francisco.
So it’s pretty much an individual case-by-case basis. My aunt was engaged to a man from NYC during WW2 who spoke English, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German and some Romanian because he grew up in a NYC neighborhood peopled by Jewish immigrants from those cultures and knew many, including his own parents, who had never learned English in spite of having come here as kids, while his own dream was to be a baseball player. (He became a realtor in Atlanta instead and made millions.) Most of his family never left their NYC neighborhood even after he made it big down south because of the language barrier. (He and my aunt remained friends for 60 years until his death and I met him a few times; I found it fascinating that less than an hour away from downtown Manhattan there were neighborhoods with Yiddish language newspapers and theaters (and Italian and others). Of course now there are thousands of Montgomerians who speak Spanish and Asian languages only.
When they got over the shock, what was their response? Did they not believe your observations? Did they come up with either a rationale or a rationalization?
Your question also has two different answers depending on the perspective taken.
From the perspective of the immigrants and their descendants, they are American as soon as they feel they are, which could be the immigrants, themselves, or their children or some later generation. (My family has handed down the tale of the maternal ancestor who declared, some forty or more years after the first generation debarked at Biloxi, “We are Americans. We will speak English.” putting an end to forty plus years of in-the-home German. I have no idea how the people in those forty years viewed themselves.)
From the perspective of the great hordes of other Americans, it probably occurs when they are not immediately identifiable as “other”–and that will vary from observer to observer. I grew up identifying people who spoke with extremely thick Italian or Polish accents as American because they were sufficiently numerous and were the parents of enough of my classmates that it would not have occurred to me that they were not American. Had I encountered a Mexican or Japanese immigrant in my youth, I might have seen them as “immigrants” simply because I did not know any. As the Southeast Michigan Hispanic population exploded, I lost that view of Mexican immigrants and in my dotage I probably do not see Japanese that way, either, as long as they appear to identify themselves as American.
I agree with those who say that if you live in the US now on a permanent, legal basis, you are an American, no matter where you were born, or your accent or ethnicity, or whatever. But that’s not the question. The questions is how long you have to be here before you’re considered an American, presumably by the average “man on the street.” The answer to that is a little different. In that case, I’d say the number one marker is your accent – if you have a foreign accent, no matter how long you’ve been here a significant number of people will never think of you as a “real” American.
A secondary marker is, unfortunately, your ethnicity. Asians are going to be thought of as a bit “foreign” for some time yet, I think, no matter how assimilated they are, or how many generations their families have been here. I don’t think there’s much malicious intent in that feeling; it’s just that a) there are very few Asian-Americans, compared to other ethnic groups, and b) a large number of them are either first or second generation immigrants. Virtually every Asian-American I have ever known falls into one of those categories. Off the top of my head, I can think of only one Asian-American friend whose family has been here for more than two generations (unless you count Asian-Americans who were adopted as babies). Also, her family was from California – I’m sure there are more such families out west than here in the east; maybe Asian-Americans get the dreaded “No, where are you really from?” question less often out there.
I suspect Hispanics might face a similar problem, given the huge influx of Latino immigrants. But I think they probably get it less often than Asians, because there are so many more Hispanics, and have been for longer.
Your OP contains the answer I was going to give… my 7th-generation Chinese-American friend runs occasionally into people who tell him to get back on the boat. “For them, anybody who isn’t white is never going to be ‘American.’ I don’t even speak Chinese!”
I don’t think they’re over the shock yet. Mostly, it was shock that I even questioned their voiced perception of Asian-Americans as foreigners. Neither side of my family has been in the US for seven generations*. But they did come up with a rationalization: “Those people just don’t come from our culture.” Silly of me, I guess, for not thinking that Scottish and German cultures were so all-American.
To say the US “has a history of discriminating against Asians” would be putting it a bit mildly. After World War II was over, the United States government enacted legislation to make it impossible for Japanese wives of US servicemembers to come to the US. At the same time, it also enacted legislation to make it easier for European wives of US servicemembers to come to the US. Additionally, the US government’s representatives in Europe–and especially in the UK–welcomed and congratulated those foreigners. Those White foreigners.
By the way, those bigoted, intrusive, and ridiculous regulations are currently in effect and still applied to prospective wives of US servicemembers. For one class in university (2003 or 2004, I don’t recall which quarter it was), I did a research paper on those regulations. I was appalled by the responses to the survey question, “Why do you support such regulations?” The population surveyed were my fellow university students in California.
So long as you don’t look White or Black, apparently, there’s a fair number of people who will never treat you as a “real American” no matter how much longer than their family yours has been in the US.
*When my grandniece or grandnephew has children, that’ll make it seven generations. The grandniece is just 2 years old and her little brother is 4 months old now, so it’ll be a few years.
In my experience, Just about any furiner that went to high school in the US came out the other side American in speech, language, diction, pop culture, mannerisms, humor, etc.
Sure, in my book, a US citizen is a US citizen. But if you want someone to “act, look and sound like an American”, whatever that may mean, going to high school in the US pretty much guarantees it.
Some people still equate being an american with being white. I get this with my kids sometimes.
Heh, I’m Asian myself and I once got into a bar argument with another Asian over this very topic. She’s a native Californian who’s been here for 30 years; I was born in Taiwan and I moved here just 5 years ago. She considers herself Chinese and I consider myself American.
Know what that really makes us?
Very confused
Hell, the term “American” can mean so many different things depending on context and who you’re talking to. It could refer to your nationality, your skin color, your birthplace, your culture, etc. To be fair, any multi-cultural country would have to ask the same question. Is a black Englishman English or a Vietnamese Frenchman French?
On the other hand, the actual Asian countries almost never have to deal with that issue. Long traditions and isolationist cultures have kept them pretty racially pure, it seems… when was the last time you saw a white Chinaman or a black Japanese guy?
