Hate in America

When I was a freshman in college, this is in Boston, and I was fresh off the boat (as my friends kept reminding me), I had to take a writing class meant to get everyone on the same page in terms of writing papers and essays. Here is an excerpt of the first piece I wrote for that class:

America thinks it’s so great but all it takes is one person and a couple of bombs in NY and Washington, DC. The war would be lost, but the point would be made. It would wake people up to the reality of anti-American sentiment.

I found this in an old box a few years ago and it creeped me out. I wrote in 1999 as a know-it-all teenager filled with a lot of angst and anger.
I still haven’t heard from the CIA, but it was a pretty shocking thing to find. I remember my writing class back then was a small group—five or six people. I read the story out loud and a girl from Venezuela really liked it. Later she told me that it was interesting to her because it embodied feelings that are so prevalent in her country. The other kids in my class enjoyed it too, although in a different way. They thought it novel that I would write something so negative about America. They didn’t harbor me any ill will, they were intrigued by what I was saying. At the time, it was something new to them.
Part of it may have been that, even at the age of 17, my writing was already incredible. But the reality was that they had never heard someone so much like them express these negative thoughts. Here was someone just like them, at an American university, apparently hating on America in perfect English in a very detached, casual way. Before 9/11. They had never heard this before.
It was and still is a matter-of-fact subject. This is the way the world has felt for a very long time and continues to feel today. It’s not important to debate whether the world is right or wrong to feel this way, it is what it is. It is real and it will not go away even if the world is wrong.
After class, the girl from Venezuela caught up to me and told me she liked my essay. She too felt moved by it, not so much because of the content—it was something that the both of us had grown up into. To her it was old news. The reason I was getting such positive feedback was because of who I was, what I looked like, and how these ideas sounded coming out of my mouth.

The whole experience left me feeling a certain sense of responsibility that I still have today. I’m in a position to rise above the noise of these ideas to come off as something more than a jaded foreigner on another anti-American rant. I don’t see myself that way. Then again, no one does.
I’m half American. I look and sound 100% American. I came to the states for college and still live here today. It’s the place I’ve chosen to live my life in.
But I grew up in a different country, where the prevalence of certain ideas, feelings, and historic events formed my opinions and philosophies on life.
All those thoughts and ideologies are a part of me that I can’t ignore. Through my writing, and this blog specifically, I hope more and more Americans can understand the complex emotions that, more often than not, come off as hate.
It isn’t hate, it’s the reality of the world we live in.