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Do I Consider Myself an American?
I’m not sure.
Growing up my East African parents told me so many times,
“you are not American . . . we are not American”
I had that drilled into my head as early on as I can remember. Judging from my surroundings, it was easy to believe. We clearly weren’t like the other kids at school.
Most were Black or White and their parents and grandparents spoke perfect English. They ate American food at home; macaroni and cheese, casserole, mashed potatoes, and gravy. The white kids had a family cabin where they spent their summers up north. They knew their grandparents and they talked about them coming over to their house, or them going there.
The only kids like me at school were the Asian kids. They spoke broken English and some of them weren’t born here.
I always knew I was different because people always asked me where I was from. Most of the time when I would tell them, they would say — they had never heard of it. I was the first person they met from my country.
“Eriitreeeaa?”
I’ve even got such wild responses as,
“wow, you speak really good english!”
Maybe that one was my fault. When people asked me where I was from, which was pretty frequent because I…
