> on not loving your country
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: quarantine week two, on not loving your country, and hope, anyway.
Hello friend,
There is no love lost between me and my country. Like many, I am an ungrateful child.
After the 2016 election, it was common to joke: let’s all move to Canada. I felt a similar relief upon going to Taiwan. It is an escape from the madhouse—away from the pandemic, the injustice, the terrifying comedy.
The events of this week remind me that there is no escape from my country. The people I love will forever be in that country and their well-being depends upon what happens there. In the fall, I will return to my country. I hope that my return, compared to my departure, will feel like waking up from a nightmare.
James Baldwin, on why he left the States:
When I left this country in 1948, I left this country for one reason only, one reason…I didn’t care where I went. I might’ve gone to Hong Kong, I might have gone to Timbuktu. I ended up in Paris, on the streets of Paris, with 40 dollars in my pocket and the theory that nothing worse could happen to me there than had already happened to me here.
How do I exist, here? I’m here on a grant funded by the government, the same government whose leader endorsed domestic terrorists this week. How is this possible? There must be two governments. Which is real?
The 2008 election happened when I was in fifth grade. Our teacher designed a project in which we would write a persuasive essay endorsing a presidential candidate. She assigned me to John McCain. How arbitrary it all felt then—what did I know of politics? I remember writing on the wall: “John McCain is a veteran and was a prisoner of war. He would make a good president because he loves his country.” For the sake of the project, I convinced myself that I felt safer with a White president because he was like all of the presidents before.
What does it mean to love your country? Certainly, the rioters who stormed the Capitol believe that they love their country, but they must love the other government, not the one that brought me here.
Or, the two governments are the same government. As much as I want to believe that teaching English in a foreign country brings a net good, that English is a useful skill, I have my doubts. There are, of course, diplomatic motives for a program like this. The president terminated the programs in China and Hong Kong just half a year ago, but kept the program in Taiwan.
I am the type to read too far into things, so please allow me this: the word “patriot” comes from Latin “pater,” meaning father, the same root as “patriarchy,” perhaps meaning that loving your country requires the paternalistic subjugation of another.
Last year, my father told me he had never doubted his move to the U.S. before, until now. He is not so sure, anymore, that the tyranny of the country he left is greater than the tyranny of the country he chose.
Sometimes I wonder who I would have been had my parents not immigrated to the United States. I look toward my cousins in China. I daydream about other English-speaking countries—England, New Zealand, Australia. Canada, again.
Alexander Chee does this too. In his essay, “On Becoming an American Writer,” he writes:
There’s another Alexander Chee in my mind, the one who I would be if I’d only had access to regular dental care throughout my career, down to the number of teeth in my mouth. I started inventing him on a visit to Canada in 2005 when I became unnerved by how healthy everyone looked there compared to the United States, and my sense of him grows every time I leave the country. I know I’ll have a shorter career for being American in this current age, and a shorter life also. And that is by my country’s design. It is the intention.
It’s hard to love a country that doesn’t seem to love you back. That’s why it’s so easy to think of the distance between here and Indiana as an escape. I can’t help but think of the opening line of Danez Smith’s poem, “dear white america”:
i’ve left Earth in search of darker planets, a solar system revolving too near a black hole.
At the same time, it’s not useful to see this time as an escape. It feels passive: “Let me run away from my problems.”
I’m in Taiwan for different reasons—to learn, to teach, to grow. I’m here as a small representative of the country I want to will into being.
Cheers,
Tiffany