A Commentary on Patriotism
By Sareeta Bipin Amrute

Chinese food tastes different in different countries. Cooks have learned to adjust their Kung Paos and General Tsos to the particular palates of a place. In Singapore, add a little curry and coconut milk. In Atlanta, add sugar, in Lahore, add spice.

Could it be the same with ethnicity? Do we change our Indian-ness and Chinese-ness, our Filipino-ness and Thai-ness to match the places we live in too?

Sitting around a New York table heaped with steaming plates of Chinese food one Sunday afternoon with old family friends, the reining matriarch of our group turns to the rest of us with a question. She is sixty-eight years old, born and brought up in Bombay, and she is always provocative. “When something happens to India,” she pronounces with a flourish, “my blood boils.” She waits for us to follow where her conversation is leading, “But when I look at you kids, that doesn’t seem to be the case. When something happens to America, your blood doesn’t boil.” We ‘kids’, all of us well into early middle age by now, look at each other with a mixture of befuddlement and alarm. She was asking, after all, what kind of Americans did we think we were?

With 14.4 million persons of Asian descent living in the United States as of 2005, this was no idle question. Yet, over the last two decades, ideas about what it might mean to be a good American appear to be in transition. Due in equal parts to the increasing number of immigrants in the United States—according to the most recent census data, the foreign born make up 1/3 of the country’s population—the legacy of the civil rights and women’s movements of the 1960s, and the growing interconnections between the U.S. and the rest of the world, Americans have come to see culture as an integral part of a person. To many of us, to be American is, for example, to be an Asian-American woman, or a Chinese-American Californian. Ethnicity makes us who we are as much as who we vote for, what we buy, and how we earn our money. But, do these hyphenated ways of being make us any less patriotic? Why, in the words of the family matriarch, doesn’t every attack on America, verbal or otherwise, make our blood boil with fervent patriotism?

Amid the chopsticks and the noodles, we all gave our own answers to this question. For some of us, our blood does boil, but only when we are out of the country. “I found myself in London,” said Anand, “completely backing U.S. policy in Iraq although when I’m in New York I mainly speak out against it.” For others, it takes something really big, like 9/11 to get our blood heated up, and the fact is, not much else happens to the U.S.; in a way, we are pretty well insulated from the horrors of war and ill treatment that the rest of the world suffers. Most of us nodded in agreement; after all, that was what our parents wished for us when they moved themselves from India or China, Burma or Vietnam, Sri Lanka or Nepal to the United States, a life where we thankfully aren’t faced with the economic destitution, war, and violence that would make us react in ineffective anger were we still in our countries of origin.

So, what does it mean to be a good American, Asian or hyphenated individual? Perhaps like our tastes in Chinese food, our tastes in patriotism are changing. Gone are the days when our Kung Paos were homogenously sweet, fried, and gloppy, and perhaps the days are gone too when being a good American meant defending the country’s singularity of purpose, culture, and identity at all costs. Maybe, to be a good American today is to highlight different sides of our hyphenated identities when we deem them most necessary to illuminate an issue, now emphasizing our Asian-ness, now our American-ness; in order to create a dialogue among them, in order that our world be filled with the individual uniqueness and choice of each, and yet, both. To choose to now defend American policies, now criticize them is to respect the very differences implied in our Indian-American or Pakistani-American or Burmese-American or Chinese-Californian appellations. And it is true to what makes life for a bunch of first and second generation South Asians living in New York, eating Chinese food on any given Sunday, so rewarding.

About the Author
Sareeta Bipin Amrute is an anthropologist and writer living in New York. Her academic work focuses on immigrant experiences and urban spaces, she is currently completing her doctoral dissertation on Indian IT Workers in Berlin. Sareeta also loves to write fiction, to travel, and to eat all manner of cuisine.

Images courtesy The LOC & Corbis