"You're not Japanese-American," she say. "You're American." And to this day, I'll think of myself as American more than I do Japanese-American. This kind of identity construction is what I subscribed to when I was a kid, and I didn't know that it wasn't universal, so that is where I clashed a lot with my parents. For all the racism debates active around the USA right now, they are only indicative of what a pluralistic country the US is. There is no one way to be American, and being American doesn't seem to hinge on how you should act or what you should say or what you should believe. Granted, most of what I know of Indonesians, I get from my family, so it's not a very diverse sample of people and their beliefs, but I've always gotten the impression that it seems like there is only one way to be Indonesian, and I've been fighting against this definition for years.
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This kind of identity construction is what I subscribed to when I was a kid, and I didn't know that it wasn't universal, so that is where I clashed a lot with my parents. For all the racism debates active around the USA right now, they are only indicative of what a pluralistic country the US is. There is no one way to be American, and being American doesn't seem to hinge on how you should act or what you should say or what you should believe. Granted, most of what I know of Indonesians, I get from my family, so it's not a very diverse sample of people and their beliefs, but I've always gotten the impression that it seems like there is only one way to be Indonesian, and I've been fighting against this definition for years.
Snippet to be written in another comment!