Saying Goodbye to America

Saying Goodbye to America
By Jonathan Chan

The U. S. Embassy in Singapore is an imposing structure, a Brutalist presence swathed in concrete. It stands between the British Council and the Australian High Commission, undulating pillars flanking a larger complex with equidistant rectangular windows. At first glance, it looks like a correctional facility, not unlike the many prisons endemic to the U. S. itself. There is little of the building to suggest the warm, rosy face that the country presents to the Singaporean populace at large, a benevolent source of education, pop culture, and investments. The hard militarism of the American presence in Northeast and Southeast Asia is often conveniently cloaked, save for this conspicuous grey behemoth at Napier Road.   

…

I was born in Manhattan, New York, in July 1996.

My Malaysian father was educated in London, started work in Singapore, and was rotated to his multinational stockbroking firm’s New York branch. Like a watchman, he would stay up till dawn monitoring Asia’s markets. He travelled across the country convincing investors to dabble in Asian stocks and equities. Operating in the ‘80s and ‘90s, my dad worked at the zenith of neoliberal deregulation, buttressed by a national groundswell of economic optimism. What Reagan had loosened, Clinton had retained. My dad never fell to the worst excesses of Wall Street, but sustained his work on its sidelines, building a steady portfolio of commodities and services through dinners with clients of various stripes. Both my brothers’ white godfathers live in Boston.

My South Korean mother grew up in Hong Kong, studied at a university in Seoul, and enrolled at a fashion school in New York. An urbanite, she loved the sheer energy of the city: the gust of wind from the subway that made her coat flutter, the parties that energized the city’s nightlife, the trips to the theatre to see the same musicals again and again, the delight in encountering a new gallery in SoHo, the afternoon walks to Chinatown for char siew fan. She worked in fashion, developing a long-standing affinity for the design giants of Seventh Avenue. At the time, East Asia was attaining a prominence unprecedented in the 20th century: South Korea reintroducing itself to the world at the ‘88 Olympics in Seoul, Hong Kong featured as the futuristic cyberpunk backdrop of many an ‘80s sci-fi film. Things were good when mutual friends brought my parents together. They lived within a few blocks of each other and would often share a cab home.

In October 1993, they married at St. Bartholomew’s Church, a glamourous affair that united family and friends from Houston, Malaysia, South Korea, Hong Kong, Britain, and a panoply of other places. Pictures of that day populated my imagination, placed carefully in frames around the house. Dad in his tuxedo and Mom in her dress, Mah Mah and Yeh Yeh, Halmoni and my aunts. There was something of that ceremonial synthesis, the harmonizing of intercultural difference, that brought to mind all that America could and would represent.

*** 

I got out of the car with a dossier of documents, keeping my appointment to confirm the renunciation of my U. S. citizenship. I had completed my military service a few months prior and had come to the decision to keep my Singaporean passport. The U. S. Embassy’s layers of security are staggered: the guards at its entrance, before a labyrinthine set of metal detectors and bag checks. Phones were not permitted inside and as I made my way in, the hard concrete edges of the building gave way to maroon carpets and embossed wooden ornaments. I sat in a waiting room for consular services and read the magazines available at the side. Its layout, washed in fluorescent white, did not seem too far from that of a DMV. My number was called, and I found myself speaking to a white consular officer, our faces separated by a panel of glass.

*** 

The longest period I spent in the U. S. was my one year in New York from 2000 to 2001. It came in the middle of my upbringing in Singapore and formed the edifice of my memories of American childhood. I watched Little Bill and Blue’s Clues on Nick Jr. at breakfast, attended an international school with the children of diplomats, and made snowmen when winter arrived. My brother was born in New York in 2001; I suspect my parents still believed in the merits of American citizenship. We left before the events of September 11, settled back in Singapore by the time al-Qaeda flew those planes into the World Trade Center and permanently punctured the myth of American impregnability. My dad received panicked calls from family and assured them that he was safe.

After the move back to Singapore, every trip to America became a bevy of frustrations. My paternal grandparents had migrated to Houston, Texas, from Kuala Lumpur in the ‘80s, and it became standard practice to stay with them once or twice a year. The stresses of passing through post-9/11 airport security were characteristic of every trip, and inevitably led to a souring of Dad’s mood as he emptied his pockets of all traces of metal. Several times he was taken in for questioning on account of his Malaysian passport; being Malaysian represented an affiliation with Islamic extremism, even though that was largely untrue of the country and of him, as he was not a Muslim.

The Houston of my childhood was hot, flat, and sprawling. My Chinese Malaysian grandparents settled happily in a suburban cul-de-sac and took quickly to regular churchgoing, Christmas ornaments on their front lawn, and the promises of American conservatism. Bitter memories of racial inequality and political corruption in Malaysia slowly began to recede. Over many trips to Houston during school holidays, we delighted in the winding highways and maze-like malls, generous platters of fajitas, and formidable steaks. In turn, I saw the marks of new kinds of hybridity: an angklung beside Yeh Yeh’s piano, Mah Mah’s wushu swords perched above their fireplace, the bowls of jook Mah Mah would make from the bones of her turkey carcass the day after Thanksgiving. The flitting between Houston and Singapore never felt definitive, but it was the most secure link we maintained with the United States.

The America I remember is airbrushed with the naivety of early childhood. The sentiment is not shared by my two brothers, the youngest of whom was born in Singapore. They remember little of our home in Mid-Town but reveled in the mundanity of our Houston trips. I only ever knew an ascendant, wealthy America, one whose place in the world was immovable, sealed by the promise of relentless reinvention and remaking, available to all those who wanted to work toward it.

***

The consular officer pored over my documents to make sure the administrative work was all in place. My first visit had been to announce my intent to renounce my citizenship, the second to return my completed papers. I had rehearsed the reasons for wanting to do so in my head: the tangibility of a future in Asia, the rootedness of my family in Singapore, the faux sense of patriotic sentimentality I attributed to my upbringing here. There was a careful elision of the reality of unwanted taxation, an issue I had paid attention to ever since Eduardo Saverin relinquished his U. S. passport. It resulted in a federal law being drafted to raise taxes and impose entry bans on certain former citizens and departing permanent residents. As is often germane to a certain strain of petty parochialism, the legislation was named the ‘Ex-PATRIOT Act’.

The consular officer, satisfied with my responses, looked at me through the glass and asked, “You do know that it will be almost impossible for you to reclaim your U. S. citizenship once you’ve given it up. Are you ready to proceed with this?”

***

The first time I realized that I was an American was in primary school. The conspicuous distinctiveness of my accent, American in its contours but Singaporean in its essence, invariably invited looks. I felt as if by the sheer virtue of being American that I was given a secret access to a set of beliefs to hold to, one that would forcibly set me apart from my friends in school. There were vague notions of freedom and democracy that floated at the back of my mind, bolstered by an anxious need to impress upon my schoolmates a sense of my intimacy with the cities of my childhood—Houston and New York.

This claim to intimacy with America slowly shaped the bend of my interests, a conviction that I needed to assert what I felt to be essential to my citizenship. At the golden age of Asian American YouTube in the late 2000s, I found myself drawn to Nigahiga, Wong Fu Productions, and KevJumba. Passing as a member of Singapore’s Chinese majority, I should have counted it curious that I would be drawn to the marginality of the East Asian diaspora, whether they were of Chinese, Japanese, or Vietnamese descent. I was sixteen when I wanted to dwell in this prism of constructed affinity, an imaginary built by a saturation in their videos, one that remained perhaps willfully separate from the normative Chinese masculinity of the country I lived in.

The apotheosis of my engagement with the question of American-ness came with an essay I wrote when I was eighteen—a four-thousand word analysis of the influence of Langston Hughes’ poetry on Jack Kerouac. On the day set aside for us to do research for our essays, I read through a purple volume of Hughes’ poetry in the swelter of afternoon heat, seated on a bench by our school’s koi pond. I savored the tenderness and rhythm of his poems, one at a time, under the orange glaze of midday: ‘Mother to Son’, ‘The Weary Blues’, ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’. In my mind, I fashioned Hughes as the elder statesman of New York’s literary scene, a reversal of what I had assumed to be a prevalent Black cultural servility.

Later on, I learned of Kerouac’s affinity for Black writing, built upon an estrangement from Anglo-American society because of Kerouac’s Québécois Catholic heritage. The Beats wanted to rouse a deadened, post-war America from its moribundity and found, in the promise of Blackness, a lexicon to unsettle white America’s foundations. Part of me wanted to map the revolt onto my own experience as the only Asian American in a class of Chinese Singaporeans. Part of me wanted my classmates’ validation of my ability to articulate an alienation against America. I had only begun to scrape the surface of my birth nation’s endemic history of racism, imperialism, and violence. And yet I clung to my being American because part of me wanted to believe in the exceptionalism of difference, that the crisscrossing threads of my life would tie up in a hybridity I could not find in Singapore.

I chased after an ease of self but could not find it in the promises of citizenship, nor in the vacuous cultural intimacy I constructed for myself. There was no authenticity in claiming knowledge of the Star-Spangled Banner, the Founding Fathers, or New York City. There was no authenticity in insisting on a kind of national or spiritual inheritance from America—the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There was only the vantage point of a teenage outsider trying desperately to peer in. By the end of 2014, I felt doubly torn—I had become a dual citizen of Singapore and the U. S.

***

The officer glanced at me across the glass. Intuitively, images of immigrants from Latin America, South and East Asia, and Africa at citizenship ceremonies flooded my mind. I thought of the onerousness of citizenship tests, the relentless striving of immigrants, the desperation fueling the desire for a mythicized American dream. 

*** 

It would be fatuous to claim that I have said goodbye to America in its entirety. My extended family resides across the United States, as do many cherished friends. Rather, what I have bidden farewell to is a desire to be American, to feel American, to be affirmed as an American. I once found that every trip back to America was bound up in an eagerness to pass as American whenever I could—walking around shopping malls in Houston, seeing the streets in New York, joining college tours across the East Coast. The inanity of a claim to belonging was slowly chipped away as time went on, as the alternative lives I’d envisioned grew more and more distant.

If I had been able to stymy the growth of a sense of Singaporean-ness when I was in school, National Service shattered my unspoken pretensions regarding the cultural superiority of American-ness. One of my troopers was half Chinese Singaporean, half white American, and grew up in Hawaii. In him, I saw a refraction of my own affectations of Americanness, one in which to be American no longer held any wisp of mystique but was flattened into submission by the immediacy of our military training. It was just one of the many nationalities that composed our platoon: Singaporean, Burmese, Indonesian, Malaysian, Chinese, Indian, American. I sometimes think of the postcolonial elitism that accompanies a desire for proximity to the Anglophone West, and the steady puncturing of that status as I learned how to lead my soldiers across ethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic difference. (My accent invited confusion about my predilection for ‘slang’.) I learned to lay aside that insistence on difference to focus on what came before us each day in camp.

What happened to my American sentiment was more a recession than anything else. I learned to be comfortable with my particular iteration of in-betweenness, the fruits of globalization and the mobility of high-income labor markets. Perhaps I had just learned to cede less of my emotional and intellectual energies to the American question itself, not least when my optimism was shattered by the election of Donald Trump in 2016, a sound rejection of all that I had believed to be the global ethos of the American Dream.

***

And so it was that in that neon-bathed office at the U. S. Embassy on Napier Road, that imposing, concrete behemoth, where I made my decision. I weighed the enormity of the privilege of giving up my American passport. And yet I felt at peace. I nodded my head and promised the consular officer that my renunciation was not a decision made under coercion or duress.

For the sum of my efforts, I was charged several thousand dollars in processing fees and waited for weeks before my papers came back. The envelope opened, my certificate of renunciation slid out. As of August 2017, I was no longer an American.  

***

James Baldwin once wrote that ‘American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.’ I took a class on American Literature in my final year of university. I wrote long, sweeping essays about Herman Melville’s adversarial critiques of capitalism, the excoriation of white America by Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, and how Theresa Cha and Ocean Vuong pursued an emotive unravelling of the American Empire. I thought back to high-school essays critiquing the U. S. invasion of Grenada in 1983 or analyzing Kerouac’s debt to the Harlem poets. It struck me that I had taken the class to pick America apart, to pull at the seams of American identity and gaze upon it in all its grotesqueness.

In seminars, we traded insights and perspectives under the guidance of a professor from Brooklyn, with most of my counterparts being white and British. We were thrust into the late 19th-century and tasked with reading the Transcendentalists, the abolitionists, slave narratives, First Nations folktales, and the letters and poems of the Civil War. The unfolding horror of realizing the violent imperatives of America’s manifest destiny, the distortions of its Puritan inheritance, the frontier legends born of indigenous erasure, and the reality of slavery instigating its worst domestic conflict punctured any myth of American rectitude. Their convenient elision by politicians at the zenith of America’s role in the 20th century began to feel increasingly malignant. Perhaps the cynicism shared by Obama and Trump toward any presumptions of America’s global moral leadership had broken through.

The renunciation of my citizenship felt less and less fraught as I dwelled on the worst elements of America, bolstered by images of knees on Black men’s necks, Asian Americans being harassed and assaulted, and anti-maskers holding rallies in the middle of a global pandemic. And yet this process has also meant letting go of the best of America—its commitment to democratic freedoms and liberty, self-determination, and compassionate governance, as well as a social compact based on trust and mutual regard. Myopia comes from ignoring the American friends and family I have known and loved, and who have similarly known and loved me into being. It comes from seeing the abandonment of my American citizenship as a mere matter of flexibility and pragmatism, and not of the ideals and aspirations it once represented to me as I was growing up.

And so, here I am, watching from afar, turning my birthplace over and over in my head, abiding in that slow bend: the stripping away of the cultural authority America once held over my life.

I remember how it once felt beautiful to me.


Acknowledgments

This piece was inspired by Akala’s Natives: Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire (2018), Kion You’s ‘Double Displacements: Asian American Narratives Outside of the Ancestral and Adopted Homeland’ (2020) for Brown University, and Tom McTague’s ‘The Decline of the American World’ (2020) for The Atlantic.


Jonathan Chan recently graduated from Cambridge University with an English degree. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore, where he is presently based. He is a naturalized Singaporean citizen. He is interested in questions of faith, identity, and human expression.