On Being an American

Until I was five, I was a German citizen living with my mother's side of the family in Frankfurt, although I was born in the US and my father was an American, so I always had a legal claim to American citizenship.

Back in those days, I desperately wanted to live in America because the two things I wanted most to be was a cowboy or Superman, and that's what America meant to me: America was the old west movies my Oma would occasionally let me stay up past my bedtime to watch, and the Superman comic books that my grandmother from my father's side would send me every few months in care packages from the states.

Then when I was five, my Oma and I were in the states visiting the American side of my family when unexpectedly my father and grandparents staged a dramatic "rescue" at the airport, by simply dropping my Oma off at the airport and driving away with me still in the car. My mom was a heroin addict, and my grandparents had become convinced that my life in Germany was too unstable, and so they felt they were acting in my best interests. And by this time, though I was young and spoke very little English, I had also made my feelings on the matter plain: I wanted to stay in America where I could one day become a cowboy or Superman. As far as I knew, such things were really possible in a place like America, which by all accounts--as confirmed even in the gossip of the youngest children on the playground in Germany--was like no place else in the world, a place where anything was possible.

But when I started school in the states, I found the reality of America to be quite different than expected. Through the earliest parts of my school experience, I struggled with an English language-skill deficit and paid a heavy price for my disadvantage.

In Germany (where kindergarten started a year earlier than in the states and extended for two years), I'd been designated as gifted and called a "wunderkind" because of my advanced language skills, and other children my age considered my intelligence to be a positive trait and actively sought out my friendship because of it. In America, my poor English skills made me a playground pariah. My American classmates, most of whom scarcely seemed capable of conceiving of people who didn't naturally speak English as human, taunted me mercilessly, and assumed the guttural intonations of my native tongue were a sign of mental retardation. In Germany, I had been popular and accepted by my peers, and playground bullying had been the exception rather than the rule; in America I was bullied relentlessly and bullying was regarded as more or less a part of normal play.

By the end of first grade I'd established myself as the highest-level reader in my class, motivated largely by a spiteful desire to prove to all my cruel American classmates ("die Schweine," as I often called them under my breath) that I wasn't mentally deficient, but in fact, was just as capable--even more so--than they were.

With the language problems that playground bullies had used to justify their abuse behind me, I figured I would finally be granted some peace and social acceptance. But then word soon began to spread among my classmates that I was smart. And pretty soon, the bullying began all over again, this time because I was considered too intelligent.

After that, I pretty much gave up on making sense of American playground society and I just did whatever I could to blend in and gain the acceptance of my peers. Often this meant engaging in acts of petty delinquency. By middle school, I was a class clown and unrepentant delinquent who's claim to fame was skipping as many classes as I attended and being part of a crowd of other boys who once set a gym locker on fire.

On several occasions, I became a bully myself, letting myself be baited by playground antagonists into fight with weaker kids for the amusement of the crowd, even when in reality, there was no good reason to fight. I remember once, I gave this really harmless, nice kid a bloody nose because a crowd of kids had formed around us in the gym, fueled by rumors about some petty sleight, and one of the kids in the crowd shoved the kid into me, as several of the other kids goaded: "Oooh, you gonna let him hit you like that?"

I only had to punch the kid once and the fight was over. His nose just started gushing blood all over his shirt and he started crying. He didn't even bother to act tough or to act like he was going to fight back. And in spite of what I'd done to him, from the hurt and confused look on his face it was clear he still felt no ill-will toward me. I'll never forget how bad I felt when I realized that even though I had technically won the fight, in reality, he was the winner, because he was clearly the better person. He was just a good, sweet-hearted kid, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the crowd turned ugly. And I had for a short time been transformed into the disfigured and petty-hate-filled face of that crowd.

So this is what it means to me to be an American: Sometimes you're the bully, and sometimes you're the bullied. But either way, when the crowd gets restless and starts spoiling for a fight, you'd better believe they're not going to settle down again until they see some blood. So sometimes the best you can do is just to try to anticipate when and where the crowd is likely to start getting restless again, and then just quietly go the other way.

[This piece originally appeared in a comment I wrote for MetaFilter. It's reproduced here with minor revisions.]