The Foreign Service Journal, September 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2020 41 my dad had climbed the ranks to become the CEO and president of that company, designing a heating system to prevent O-rings from freezing on space shuttles, which had been the cause of the Challenger tragedy. His invention allowed NASA to restart manned space missions, and he went on to develop the nerve system for the robotic arm of the Mars Rover. My mom became a senior librarian, community volunteer and active church dea- con. Does this make us real Americans? For our first Thanksgiving in America, my mom had done her research and cooked a beautiful turkey. The photo of us at the table prominently features the turkey alongside a plate of unpeeled oranges and broccoli, as we had not yet learned about all the other traditional holiday accoutrements that went with the feast. But by God, that was a beautiful turkey and my mom was so proud. We thought we could be real Americans, and this was the American dream. School presented a different story. As a young kid trying to learn English, I remember taking a public bus to school where I was bullied and tripped on the playground. My first-grade teacher lent me extra books from the library to quickly expand my vocabulary. Classmates would taunt me by stretching the ends of their eyes into slits and yelling, “Chun King Chicken! Chun King Chicken! Kung fu chicken!” Chun King Chicken was a popular Chinese canned food at the time. Boy I hated that brand, and hoped never to eat that horrendous food from a can. And I never felt more un-American than the times when someone yelled, “Go back to China!” Sometimes it came from an angry kid, other times an adult speeding by our car flipping the bird because we were driving too slowly. I would slouch down in my seat and think, But we’re not from China! I’ve continued to hear that taunt well through my adulthood. In sixth grade, I thought the best way to be American was to run for student council president on an earnest campaign to bring fairness in the grading system and more after-school activities. My opponent promised chocolate milk in all the water fountains and won by a landslide, although he never did deliver on that promise. I gave the commencement speech at my middle school graduation, speaking of the American dream and convey- ing my parents’ endless optimism in the opportunities that the United States could give us. v When I joined the Foreign Service with the very first cohort of the Pickering Fellowship (originally called the Woodrow Wilson Foreign Affairs Fellowship), my parents were immensely proud. During my internship abroad at the U.S. embassy in Bonn, I had a kind supervisor who was the economic counselor, but I never once met the ambassador (Richard Holbrooke) or deputy chief of mission (no idea who that was) all summer. One day I had forgotten my badge. Trying to enter the hous- ing compound, I was told that Filipino maids went around the back. And in one encounter that particularly shook me, a white male officer told me: “It’s because of people like you that I can’t get promoted.” He dressed up as Uncle Sam during the embas- sy’s Fourth of July picnic, so I felt that, essentially, Uncle Sam had just told me I did not belong, and I wondered if what he said were true. I did not want to rock the boat, and I certainly wanted to be a “real American.” So I decided I needed to work twice as hard as others to prove myself. During my work on the Korea Desk, I took several trips to the DPRK where North Korean officials eyed me from across the table and asked me, in Korean, if I were really an American. I wondered if they knew that my grandfather was separated from his wife and three children during the mayhem of the Korean War and was never to be seen again after the DMZ border ALEXANDRABOWMAN