It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  I believe in noble ideas, which differentiate humans from animals. Some governments of non-Western countries oppose universal values, and instead emphasize their countries’ peculiarities and differences. In essence, such an emphasis is their way of defending the power of the state and justifying their ideologies or dictatorships, which can never be measured against the standards of democracy and social justice. To me, it’s fundamental to hold on to some ideals so as to show the distance between sordid realities and the dream we might strive to realize. Without such a distance or room in our vision for improvement, we would be stranded in the quagmire of particulars and differences. In this sense, I admire American idealism and cherish the image of America as a shining city upon the hill.

  Because of my despondency about American pragmatism, I tended to stand aloof, observing life flowing by. Rarely would I get involved in politics. I even grew a little cynical about social activities, believing that everyone acted out of personal interests. During the last election when the final two candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, emerged to compete for the presidency, I would vote for neither. Clinton was an insider, a practical politician, whom I couldn’t trust, whereas Trump was too outrageous and bigoted in his views on many issues. I also knew that Trump’s family had business connections with China, so the Chinese government could find ways to influence him. I simply couldn’t vote for Trump. There was no viable third-party candidate for me to root for. I again stood aside and just observed, my despondency deepened by the political rhetoric and controversies I often encountered. I didn’t expect that Trump would win the election, and his success cast gloomy shadows on my mind about America and made me wonder if my adopted country had failed as a democracy.

  However, my attitude was utterly changed early this year when Judge James Robart blocked President Trump’s travel ban on citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from being implemented. Robart was only a district judge but could overturn the president’s order on the grounds that it did “not comport with our Constitution.”

  This public incident was very personal to me. It meant several things. Despite my despondency and cynicism, American society’s general acceptance of Robart’s ruling against Trump’s order showed that our democratic system was still sound and intact, and it was also a blow to those who were gloating over the US retreat from democracy. It demonstrated that this land was still ruled by law—no one, even the most powerful man on earth, is above law. No matter how great a political issue is, it must find a solution in the law, which everyone must serve and obey. Robart’s ruling struck a sharp contrast with the incident on July 9, 2015, when more than three hundred lawyers and legal workers in Chinese cities were detained and interrogated and imprisoned, and some simply disappeared, because they had been helping petitioners and common citizens defend their civil rights. Now I finally understand why at the naturalization ceremony we were asked to swear an oath of allegiance to the Constitution, not to a government or a country. The Constitution embodies the true America, a land based on ideas and principles. I was touched by Judge Robart’s ruling, which signifies to me that it’s still possible to live by ideas and ideals. If I have the law on my side, I can sue my country when it violates my rights guaranteed by the Constitution. As I recall the oath of allegiance that specifies “noncombatant service” in armed forces as a new citizen’s duty to defend the Constitution, I am more than ever willing to perform such a duty. If need be, I will be willing to do even “combatant service” for such a defense, because unlike China’s constitution that promises citizens so many rights without ever ensuring the implementation of them, the US Constitution has the supreme legal force and we can rely on it to exercise our civil rights.

  Finally, after living in America for thirty-two years, I feel at peace with my role as a US citizen and can accept myself as an American at heart. This conviction was possible only after I had witnessed the public acceptance of Judge James Robart’s ruling.

  HA JIN grew up in mainland China and came to the United States in 1985 to do graduate work at Brandeis University, from which he earned his PhD in 1993. In 1990 he began to write in English. To date, he has published three volumes of poetry—Between Silences, Facing Shadows, and Wreckage—and four books of short fiction: Ocean of Words, which received the PEN/Hemingway Award; Under the Red Flag, which received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, The Bridegroom; which received the Asian American Literary Award and the Townsend Prize for Fiction; and A Good Fall. He has also published eight novels: In the Pond; Waiting, which received the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Crazed; War Trash, which received the PEN/Faulkner Award; A Free Life; Nanjing Requiem; A Map of Betrayal; and The Boat Rocker. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He taught poetry writing at Emory University for eight years. Since 2002 he has been a professor of English and creative writing at Boston University and lives in the Boston area.

  LILY KING

  * * *

  Arlington Street

  It’s a long time ago now that Cilla Hall walked into the high school gym, heels ringing on the worn maple boards of the basketball court. I’m not sure we would have been more surprised if Joe McCarthy had come through the door. Only four of us had shown up to the meeting. It was an old Republican town. Just me, Ponti the hairdresser, Kosmos the dressmaker, and now Cilla Hall in her black capris and cashmere turtleneck. Kosmos made a fuss of getting her a chair from the stack against the wall. Imagine the fuss she must always have to put up with, I thought.

  I’d seen her around. She’d come to town earlier in the year with her bony husband and fierce-eyed toddler and a newborn that got wheeled around by the nanny. She came in a wave of young brides brought here by their Harvard grads who’d seemed to collectively decide that our harbor town was the next step after the Fly Club.

  I had that feeling of becoming less female because a beautiful woman has entered the room. People liked to say she looked like Grace Kelly but she was more willowy, with a Nefertiti neck, sharp cheekbones, and wide, wary eyes. She hooked her heels on the rung beneath her seat and pulled out a Flair pen and a notebook stained with coffee rings. Ponti and Kosmos were hopeless, and stumbled through their reports on the selectman meeting and the housing commission. Cilla took quick notes that filled up several pages while we griped about our town administrator and our state rep. When we had run out of complaints, Cilla took out a few newspaper clippings from the back of her notebook. The first was about something called the Boston Action Group that was organizing a boycott against Wonder Bread, she said, for its discriminatory hiring practices. She wanted to put up signs at the grocery store, reminding people. The second was about the Birmingham Sympathy Rally the next weekend in the Common that she thought we should go to. And the third was a short article about a congressional candidate we’d never heard of, who represented black families in housing cases, wanted to abolish capital punishment, and believed we should get out of Vietnam before we got into a proxy war with the Soviets and China.

  I want to host a fundraiser for him, she said.

  We tried to tell her that none of our candidates would ever win, that our district had voted Republican since 1875. But she just smiled, and wrote it down—1875—in her notebook, and underlined it twice.

  • • •

  As we suspected, the grocer wouldn’t let us put posters about the boycott anywhere near his store, so we lingered in the bread aisle, urging people away from the white bread made by white workers. The grocer called the cop, who was his brother, and he kept us at the station for the whole day, until our husbands got out of work and could sign for our release. You have to remember how it was then. We weren’t allowed to have a credit card or get our tubes tied without our husbands’ consent. The cop kept us in a hallway with a narrow little bench. He needed to go down the hallway to get anywhere and we
got into the habit of asking for something each time he came through. A deck of cards, a sheet of paper, a pencil. He refused us everything. But he came through so often and we got so hungry and punchy that soon we were asking him for a shoehorn or a bobby pin or—and this made us slide down from the bench onto the floor in senseless hysterics—a small piece of cheese.

  At the end of the day my husband came first and was mostly amused so I missed the arrival of hers, who was not.

  Undaunted, Cilla invited a cross section of ladies to her house for tea. The only thing we had in common was that we bought bread at the grocery store. I thought the plan was for Cilla and me to casually mention the boycott here and there to the other women, but once everyone was served their tea and sugar cookies Cilla tapped a spoon against her cup, silenced the room, and told them I would be saying a few words about Wonder Bread and the Continental Baking Company. I could not have been less prepared. But the words came. I said Jim Crow was right here, in our white town and in our white bread. Wonder Bread has been exposed this month, but these policies are in every part of our society, I said, from housing to schooling to the workplace, every aspect of black life was debilitated by our racism, our denial, our ignorance, and our silence. The ladies had not expected this. But Cilla had. She bent over her teacup with a satisfied little smile.

  • • •

  On the way to the Birmingham Sympathy Rally she told me about meeting her husband in the summer of ’59. She had her bare feet up on the dash, her hands laced around a thermos of coffee she’d brought from home. They were packed with rings, those hands, two or three on every finger, old-money rings.

  You know how when you try to break a branch you have to find the weak part? she said. That summer was her weak part. Her mother’s third marriage was falling apart and Cilla was losing her favorite stepfather and the house in Georgetown she loved. The three of them were in Northeast Harbor with friends for a week, putting on a good face, which seemed to be easier for her mother and stepfather than for her. Before a boat picnic she cried in an empty maid’s room on the third floor. Drew stepped out of a rowboat onto the dock, she said. He was the sailing instructor, all bones and knobs and a smile he couldn’t keep in when he saw Cilla coming down the ramp, steep at low tide. He asked her to come for a sail when she returned from her picnic. He asked her to a dance at the community hall that weekend. He asked her to marry him six months later, on Christmas Eve.

  When I said yes, she told me, I felt a sharp, unpleasant vibration, like the zap you get on your palm when you fail to put the car into the right gear, except it was all over my body, inside and out. It was the whole universe ruddering. I remember Cilla said that, ruddering, as if she needed to make up a word to explain the feeling.

  And then it stopped, she said, and Drew was grinning a wicked grin, and we both knew we could finally have sex.

  They planned the wedding for June, after she graduated from junior college, but in April she started getting headaches so bad her vision dimmed and her teeth felt like they were falling out. Her mother was in Palm Springs trying to attract a fourth husband before the money ran out, so Cilla went back to Northeast Harbor to stay with Drew’s mother, a widow with no daughters who put her in a suite of rooms that looked out at three small islands, one with a lighthouse at its tip. She told herself she would get better there, then break off the engagement. It wasn’t logical, she said, considering that the engagement was causing the headaches, but she didn’t figure that out until it was too late, until the flowers had arrived and Drew’s mother was doing up the front of her dress because she couldn’t see the buttonholes. Her own mother didn’t come. She couldn’t support the idea that her daughter would now have a husband and she would not.

  • • •

  She spoke about that time just before she married Drew often while we canvassed or drove to protests and rallies, while we set up and broke down events and benefits, but never about the years that had followed. If it was summer she’d invite me up to the house for a swim and I’d bring Markie, my littlest, and she’d pry her girl from the nanny and they’d float around the shallow end in orange life preservers. Drew’s station wagon might pull up or leave the driveway, but he never came over to our chairs by the pool and she never waved hello or goodbye. She hosted fundraisers, fancy affairs on the side patio out the French doors that overlooked the English garden. I got used to her asking me without warning to introduce the candidate, expound on the issues, shrink the problems of the day into a few digestible sentences for a cocktail crowd. Drew was never among them. When people asked, she said he was upstairs watching the Red Sox with their son, even if it was the dead of winter.

  • • •

  We worked tirelessly for many candidates who never won and a few who did, including her obscure congressional candidate who ended the eighty-year Republican lock on the seat. We marched with Reverend King from Roxbury to the Common. And three years later she came over to my house when we heard King was shot in Memphis. She drove over in her nightgown and we watched on the old black-and-white set in my bedroom—my husband had left by then, no longer amused by me and my politics—as Bobby Kennedy gave his speech in Indianapolis to a black audience, many of whom hadn’t heard the news. I can only say that I feel in my heart the same kind of feeling, Bobby said. I had a member of my family killed, he said. Cilla and I burst out crying. We wailed together like twin babies delivered into an unholy world.

  • • •

  Outside of politics we traveled in different circles that rarely overlapped. I had a cocktail party once, when my nephew Brad was in town, and Cilla and Drew came. Brad worked at the Service Board for Conscientious Objectors in Washington. Cilla had grown up in DC, or at least spent a few years there—the geography of her childhood was complex and involved at least six states in the US, Egypt, Mexico, and a West Indian island I’d never heard of—and they spent a while in the kitchen talking about Georgetown during the war. Drew glowered near the bar, and after less than ten minutes he got her coat and purse and went into the kitchen. He held the coat open for her and she slid her arms in.

  Don’t worry, little Commie, Drew said to Brad. You can’t afford her.

  • • •

  When my divorce was final I could no longer receive the host at mass. Cilla came with me every Sunday for six months and sat beside me so I wouldn’t be alone in the pew as all the other adults and children over seven rose and stood in line and let the priest drop the sacrament onto their tongues.

  • • •

  The day before Nixon’s second inauguration we decided to drive down and join the protest of the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam. We gathered at the Lincoln Memorial and the FBI took pictures of us all the way to the Washington Monument. The day after we got back she called me and told me to meet her outside on Walker Street across from the dry cleaner’s. She brought me up to a two-bedroom apartment.

  I’m leaving him, she told me in the galley kitchen. And I need a job.

  • • •

  Ponti had heard that the lieutenant governor’s cousin, who was in charge of fundraising, was looking for a new assistant. I drove her to the State House for her interview.

  I’ve never had an interview, she said. Never had a job. Her voice caught. She held a finger to each lower eyelid. I can’t cry, she said, laughing. I can’t afford to reapply my makeup. Drew’s lawyer was outgunning hers. He wrote her child support checks for half the amount they’d agreed on. You’re a Democrat, Drew had said to her. You love the poor.

  We went up the front steps of the State House. I pointed up to the corner office. We’d worked hard to help elect the governor. I took her up to the third floor, where the cousin was holding the interviews. I felt like I was leading in a skittish racehorse. We sat in the old leather seats of an outer waiting room. I don’t think she took a breath from the time we sat down to when he called her in.

  When it was over it was lunchtime and people were streaming out of the building and down the capito
l steps. The governor was ahead of us, on the other side of the stairs, ringed by a small cluster of men in suits and overcoats. Otherwise, all around us, were women, receptionists and secretaries and assistants and fundraisers—all the anonymous women it takes to prop up one male politician.

  We went to the deli a half block away on Park Street. We stood in line with the other women. The men were at nicer places, the Parker House or Locke-Ober. But Cilla was gleaming. She was gleeful. We ordered Reubens and extra pickles and she told me she had handed him her list of donors, a typed stack of pages of all the guests from her parties, names, addresses, and donation amounts. Big amounts. She must have had five thousand names, names you would have said were Republican names. He pored over it slowly. So—he looked up—do you want to get paid like this? He held his hand out flat above his desk. Or like this? He put his hand beneath the desk. She said she pretended not to understand the question. We shrieked with laughter in the corner of that deli.

  We crumpled up our napkins and tossed our plates. She said that we should now go pay a visit to Mr. Firestone.