Word: citizenships
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...moral imperative of gaining Yang’s liberty is self-evident. But as Fu’s remark subtly underscores, his case is larger than one brave man’s ordeal in a PRC dungeon. It involves the value of American citizenship and permanent residency—or, more precisely, the degree to which the State Department defends citizens and U.S. nationals from injustice, harassment and arbitrary detention abroad...
...Freedonian. Freedonia, as you may recall, is the fictional country Groucho Marx rules in Duck Soup; for a few weeks at the beginning of freshman year, I claimed it, with a straight face, as my homeland. Because Harvard first-years are loath to admit their ignorance, my declaration of citizenship went mostly unchallenged. Sometimes my fellow first-years, brows furrowed, would ask where Freedonia was, again, and—because these conversations generally took place over dinner in Annenberg—I’d sketch a map of the Balkans on a paper napkin...
Like so much else I did during my first year at Harvard, my declaration of Freedonian citizenship seemed like a good idea at the time, and now like mortifyingly pretentious posturing in retrospect. But unlike much of what I did during my freshman year, my declaration of Freedonian citizenship sprang from an insecurity that still haunts me: a lack of cultural identity...
...frustration with my lack of cultural identity springs, I think, from my inability to form this sort of connection. Though I’ve not stooped to reclaim my Freedonian citizenship, I have, at times, been sorely tempted. This weekend, after many telephone calls conducted at a high volume in what sounded to me like particularly vituperative Greek, my roommate departed for a Greek club in Boston with a swarm of people with whom she shares little more than a common heritage. And as I watched her go, part of me wished that I could have a posse of Freedonians...
...first half of the 20th century, the term passing had an almost tragic poignancy. It meant not only secretly renouncing one's race but becoming a "real" American--enjoying the privileges of equality and anonymity, back when one-tenth of all citizens were denied true citizenship. If America was a club that admitted whites only, why shouldn't those who looked as if they belonged in the club try to join it? As America took small steps toward racial maturity, passing should have passed away. It did not; Roth's book was triggered by the news that the late...