A Question of Definition

In my household, to be an American was to be bloated and superficial. When my aunts and grandmother called me “American,” they meant I followed pop culture and didn’t know the capital of Indonesia, that I ate junk food and wore jeans and t-shirts and chewed bubblegum and was monolingual. America was an inflated military; decaying cities; sexual repression and the Bible Belt; fast-food restaurants and big gas-guzzling cars; bad slang; throngs of uneducated citizens who displayed an appalling ignorance of proper grammar (even in English! their mother tongue!); and a niece who didn’t forget to turn out the lights because she was forgetful but because she was American, and as we all know—solemn nods around the room, please—Americans are too shallow to care about the environment. Americans, in short, were lacking in nuance, juvenile, and as bombastic as they were inhibited.

— Laura Fokkena, “Sex in Translation” (Waking Up American: Coming of Age Biculturally edited by Angela Jane Fountas)

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How times have changed.