So a few days ago, I was talking on the phone with my mom about plans to go home for a month. (As of last September, I'm not legally able to go home for more than 3 months, and plane tickets are significantly more expensive if I stay for more than 1. Ah, immigration.) I can't wait to see my family, and I wish home wasn't so far away. My mom and I chatted, and as I hung up, I was thinking about family and cherry blossoms and golden week and Japanese food.
As I walked out the door, I stopped at the sound of the campus loudspeaker playing the national anthem. (Explanation: At the morning and evening flag ceremonies outside the BYU administration building, the national anthem is played over the campus loudspeaker and, according to tradition, everyone within earshot stands still and faces the flag. When the national anthem is over, everyone goes on with their lives.) So I stood there looking at the Eyring Science Center, which thoroughly blocked any view of the library, which in turn blocked my view of the flag. With my hand on my heart out of respect, I wondered what makes this or any other country my country. Why is America home?
I mean, it's easy to say what makes my family home. They are my legal and biological family, they will accept me no questions asked. They take care of me when I need help. And a bunch of my stuff is still at their house.
So what makes my country home? For a long time, I was an American citizen, but a Japanese resident. What, then, was legally home?
One can't really define a biological home, unless you define it as the place where most of your body originated. But that varies as cells are replenished. As of right now, I'm probably still part America and part Japan.
When I was a resident of Japan, both countries accepted me at the airports with the same questions: do you have any plants or animals in your luggage, do you have SARS, etc. Neither accepted me no questions asked, but neither was closer to that ideal than the other.
Japan gave me all-but-free health care whenever I needed it. Their school systems were open to our family. And my parents pay into a government pension plan that works like social security when they retire. Japan and its socialism are all about helping us when we need it. In America, I'm poorly insured, not a resident of anywhere that I would want to go to a public university, and in this special bracket that gets all my money taken away in self-employment tax but doesn't get any back because I'm too young for earned-income credit, etc. America doesn't want to help me when I'm down.And all my stuff is still spread between 2 countries.
Still, I'm American. I still hold my hand over my heart for "my country", and if I ever deny ownership (of it by me? of me by it?), people get angry. But what makes me Americ
an? What phenomenal cosmic power does citizenship hold? What does that purely legal construct even mean in terms of characterization of a human being?Such have been the questions of a decade. So holla, all you third-culture kids! Make me feel at home.
