Who is an American?

By guest writer, Christina Kelso. Christina is my teammate who has been in China for 5 years. She teaches sophmore and junior students a class about Western history and culture. She also graduated from Asbury College. :)

Who is an American?
This is a question that my students and I tried to answer last week in class. As the students are sophomore and junior English majors, I felt they would have picked up some basics on how to tackle this question but the more I delved into it, the more I kept coming against a brick wall.

I started by asking my students to discuss a sub-question for a couple of minutes with a partner: How would you describe an American? (appearance, characteristics, values, beliefs) Now I realize that this is not an easy question to answer concretely or maybe even at all—and that was exactly my purpose in this exercise. When the time was up, I asked my students to tell me what they discussed. What about appearance? Most students replied that Americans had blonde hair and blue eyes. The ironic part is that they say this as they are looking at me with my dark brown hair and brown eyes. In their defense many of them do not consider me to be truly American because my mother is Chinese. Yet am I not still American? I mention this to them and they laugh, then correct themselves and say that Americans have all colors. Someone usually also points out that Americans are all tall. Again I ask them if I’m tall (I’m not quite 5’4”). They again laugh and correct the statement to say American boys are tall. I ask if Tom Cruise is American and if he is tall? Again, laughter.

I feel I’m making my point that you can’t pinpoint exactly what Americans look like, so we move on to the other categories. For characteristics and values, they seem to be a little closer in things that would describe many Americans—independent, active, open-minded, and valuing privacy, individualism, and money. In beliefs, they said most Americans are Christians. Which lead to a discussion between “believing in the existence of” and “believing in.”

These students have had at least 3 different American foreign teachers in the college experience. So after we have discussed how to answer the question and how hard it is to answer, I ask them if their 3 teachers were similar. Most of them say, “No, very different.” I remarked that to answer the question, “Who is an American?” is impossible because Americans have come from all over the world for many different reasons and have mixed together to form what is called the United States of America.

To end this section, I put up a PowerPoint slide with pictures of different Americans and tell the students there is one person pictured who is not American and ask them to choose who it is, keeping in mind all the things we had just talked about. Most of the students automatically pick out the Japanese-American man, the Chinese-American lady, the Mexican-American girl, the Eskimo woman, and the African-American boy. After again reminding them of what we talked about, I ask the students to choose their top 3 guesses—they usually chose the Japanese-American, the Chinese-American and the Mexican-American. I tell them that they were all wrong. These three all are American, in fact the Japanese man’s family have been in America longer than any of my family line—apart from some very, very, very distant relatives who fought in the Civil War. I point out the girl who is not American. She has blonde hair and blue eyes (she’s from Norway). All the students start exclaiming that it was impossible, it was a trick because there was no way they would know that.
I smiled and say, “Exactly.”