Why i love america essay - Get started with term paper writing and craft the best college research paper ever select the service, and our professional scholars will fulfil your task supremely well witness the merits of professional custom writing assistance available here Jeff Popick and Alexis announce the winner of the "Why Do I Love America?" essay contest. Congratulations to 7th grader, Olive Kurlinski, who won the Gr Jul 04, · In honor of my great nation, here are 10 reasons I love America: Freedom – I have dear friends who fight to defend our freedom. This freedom gives me the right to do what I do without fear of government intervention
I Love America. That’s Why I Have to Tell the Truth About It - Viet Thanh Nguyen
Love it or leave it. Have you heard someone say this? Or have you said it? Anyone who has heard these five words knows what it means, because it almost always refers to America. Anyone who has heard this sentence knows it is a loaded gun, why i love america essay, pointed at them. As for those who say this sentence, do you mean it with gentleness, with empathy, with sarcasm, with satire, with any kind of humor that is not ill why i love america essay Or is the sentence always said with very clear menace?
I ask out of genuine curiosity, because I have never said this sentence myself, in reference to any country or place. The country in which I am writing these words is France, which is not my country but which colonized Vietnam, where I was born, for two-thirds of a century. French rule ended only 17 years before my birth, why i love america essay.
My parents and their parents never knew anything but French colonialism. Perhaps because of this history, part of me loves France, a love that is due, in some measure, to having been mentally colonized by France.
Aware of my colonization, I do not love France the way many Americans love France, the ones who dream of the Eiffel Tower, of sipping coffee at Les Deux Magots, of eating a fine meal in Provence. This is a romantic love, set to accordion music or Édith Piaf, which I feel only fleetingly.
Romanticizing their existence, oftentimes at the margins of French society, would be difficult, which is why Americans rarely talk about them as part of the fantasy of Paris. The fantasy is tempting, especially because of my Vietnamese history. Most of the French of Vietnamese origins I know are content, even if they are aware of their colonized history. I was made in America but born in Vietnam, and my origins are inseparable from three wars: the one the Vietnamese fought against the French; the one the Vietnamese fought against each other; and the one the U.
fought in Vietnam. Many Americans consider the war to be a noble, if possibly flawed, example of American good intentions. And while there is some truth to that, it was also simply a continuation of French colonization, a war that was racist and imperialist at why i love america essay roots and in its practices. Why i love america essay such, this war was just one manifestation of a centuries-long expansion of the American empire that began from its own colonial birth and ran through the frontier, the American West, Mexico, Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and now the Middle East.
One war might be a mistake, why i love america essay. A long series of wars is a pattern. Indians were the original terrorists in the American imagination. Many Americans do not like to hear why i love america essay things. An American veteran of the war, an enlisted man, wrote me in rage after reading an essay of mine on the scars that Vietnamese refugees carried.
Americans had sacrificed themselves for my country, my family, me, he said. I should be grateful. When I wrote him back and said he was the only one hurt by his rage, he wrote back with an even angrier letter. Another American veteran, a former officer, now a dentist and doctor, read my novel The Sympathizer and sent me a letter more measured in tone but with a message just as blunt. You seem to love the communists so much, he said.
And take your son with you. I was weary and did not write back to him. I should have. Perhaps he never made it to the middle of the novel, by which point I was also satirizing the failures of the government under which I was born, the Republic of Vietnam, the south. I made such criticisms not because I hated all the countries that I have known but because I love them.
My love for my countries is difficult because their histories, like those of all countries, are complicated. Every country believes in its own best self and from these visions has built beautiful cultures, France included.
And yet every country is also soiled in the blood of conquest and violence, Vietnam included. If we love our countries, we owe it to them not just to flatter them but to tell the truth about them in all their beauty and their brutality, America included.
If I had written that why i love america essay, I would have asked this dentist and doctor why he had to threaten my son, who was born in America. His citizenship is natural, which is as good as the citizenship of the dentist, the doctor and the veteran. And yet even my son is told to love it or leave it. Is such a telling American? And no. Unlike my son, I had to become naturalized. Did I love America at the time of my naturalization? But I still wanted to swear my oath of citizenship to America as an adolescent.
At the same time, I wanted to keep my Vietnamese name. I had tried various American names on for size. All felt unnatural.
By keeping my name, I could be made into an American but not forget that I was born in Vietnam. Paradoxically, I also believed that by keeping my name, I was making a commitment to America. Naming my own son was why i love america essay a challenge, why i love america essay. I wanted an American name for him that expressed the complexities of our America.
I chose Ellison, after the great writer Ralph Waldo Ellison, himself named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great philosopher.
This genealogy gestures at the greatness of America and the horror of it as well, the democracy as well as the slavery. Some Americans like to believe that the greatness has succeeded the horror, but to me, the greatness and the horror exist simultaneously, as they have from the very beginning why i love america essay our American history and perhaps to its end. A name like Ellison compresses the beauty and the brutality of America into seven letters, a summation of despair and hope.
My first name is that of the Vietnamese people, whose patriotic mythology says we have suffered for centuries to be independent and free. And yet today Vietnam, while being independent, is hardly free. I could never go back to Vietnam for good, because I could never be a writer there and say the things I say without being sent to prison. The current Administration is threatening even naturalized citizens with denaturalization and deportation.
Perhaps it is not so far-fetched to imagine that one day someone like me, born in Vietnam, might be sent back to Vietnam, despite having made more out of myself than many native-born Americans. If so, I would not take my son with me. Vietnam is not his country, why i love america essay. America is his country, and perhaps he will know for it a love that will be less complicated and more intuitive than mine.
That does not mean they did not love me. They loved me why i love america essay much that they worked themselves to exhaustion in their new America. I hardly ever got to see them, why i love america essay. When I did, they were too tired to be joyful. Still, no matter how weary they were, why i love america essay, they always made dinner, even if dinner was often just boiled organ meat.
I grew up on intestine, tongue, tripe, liver, why i love america essay, gizzard and heart. But I was never hungry. The memory of that visceral love, expressed in sacrifice, is in the marrow of my bones. A word or a tone can make me feel the why i love america essay of that love, as happened to me when I overheard a conversation one day in my neighborhood drugstore in Los Angeles.
The man next to me was Asian, not handsome, why i love america essay, plainly dressed. He spoke southern Vietnamese on his cell phone. Con an com chua? But when he spoke to his child in Vietnamese, his voice was very tender. What he said cannot be translated. It can only be felt. This is your father. Have you eaten rice yet? I grew up with these customs, these emotions, these intimacies, and when I heard this man say this to his child, I almost cried. This is how I know that I am still Vietnamese, because my history is in my blood and my culture is my umbilical cord.
Even if my Vietnamese is imperfect, which it is, I am still connected to Vietnam and to Vietnamese refugees worldwide. And yet, when I was growing up, some Vietnamese Americans would tell me I was not really Vietnamese because I did not speak perfect Vietnamese.
For me, as long as I feel Vietnamese, as long as Vietnamese things move me, I am still Vietnamese. That is how I feel the love of country for Vietnam, which is one of my countries, and that is how I feel my Vietnamese self.
So it is that every day I ask my son if he has eaten yet and every day I tell my son I love him. This is how love of country and love of family do not differ. Most Americans will not feel what I feel when they hear the Vietnamese language, but they feel the love of country in their own ways. Perhaps they feel that deep, emotional love when they see the flag or hear the national anthem. I admit that those symbols mean little to me, because they divide as much as unify.
Too many people, from the highest office in the land down, have used those symbols to essentially tell all Americans to love it or leave it. Being immune to the flag and the anthem does not make me less American than those who love those symbols. Is it not more important that I love the substance behind those symbols rather than the symbols themselves?
John Wayne ~ Why I Love America
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Nov 15, · If we love our countries, we owe it to them not just to flatter them but to tell the truth about them in all their beauty and their brutality, America included. If I had written that letter, I would have asked this dentist and doctor why he had to threaten my son, who was born in America Jeff Popick and Alexis announce the winner of the "Why Do I Love America?" essay contest. Congratulations to 7th grader, Olive Kurlinski, who won the Gr Why i love america (Click to select text) Through all of the racism, wars, and even crime, still love the country that we call the home of the free and the land of the brave
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