Happy Fourth of July from Shanghai!

This is my first 4th of July outside of the United States. Well, really I have also had my first July 3rd, July 2nd, etc. outside of the country too... but this day seems a little more significant.

Growing up, the we always celebrated the Fourth of July, but it never really struck me as a significant holiday. We never hosted large parties with the neighborhood, we never set off thousands of dollars of fireworks, we never went camping, and we never bought plates, napkins, and a million other things all emblazoned with the flag for that day. If we were at home, Mom would hang our flag on the front porch, and that would be the end of our decorating. Our only significant holiday traditions were exhaustion from being kept up all night by neighbors who set off fireworks all night the entire week before the holiday, grumblings from Mom about how people disrespect the flag, eating a huge watermelon, and going to see the town's firework display. I liked the Fourth well enough, but it wasn't especially dear to my heart.

This year, though, there are no fireworks, I won't be eating a watermelon, and I haven't seen a single US flag. For the first time, I am forced to consider what the Fourth actually means, and what being a US citizen means to me.

Everywhere I go, I am immediately branded as American, because I am obviously not Chinese and I don't act like a European. This initially was terrible surprising to me. I never really considered myself as a representative of the entire United States. Growing up, everyone always talked about the divisions and differences within our country. I can hardly think about the United States without immediately chopping it into separate pieces; citizens, immigrants, illegal immigrants, democrats, republicans, northern, southern, rural, urban, inner-city, suburban, white collar, blue collar, homeless, unemployed, the list goes on and on.

But maybe, in part, some of our division shows the strength of our nation. Throughout Chinese history, minority groups and anyone determined to be different than the Han Chinese majority were systematically removed to the fringes of society or exterminated. China had one absolute ruling family, and their word was followed without question. However, invariably this system lead to greed, corruption, and suffering for huge numbers of people. Then China would fracture into many different warring groups, scrambling and fighting for complete control. After years of horrible violence, a new ruling family was established, and the cycle restarted. The state was inflexible, it grew complacent because there was no competition, and Chinese people suffered horribly for it.

We are a nation of dissenters. Our history begins with a small group of religious outcasts from England landing on the East Coast and setting up their own towns. Different groups of Protestants arrived from England by the boat full, settling along different points on the coast, and happily preaching and practicing their own distinct forms of Christianity. It was only when the British government began instating unbearable taxes and limiting the freedom of the colonists that they began to develop an unified identity.

On July Fourth, 1776 a group of leaders from the separate regions of the colony signed the Declaration of Independence,  and so, a rag-tag band of half trained farmers and laborers took on one of the world's most powerful military forces and won.

However, moments of true unification are rare in US history. Countless political battles, protests, threats, and wars have risen over the past two hundred years, but we have always remained united as one nation. As a nation, we have made a choice to place value on our diversity. We as a nation want to protect our different cultural heritages, religious ideas, educational goals, and political views.

And yet, at times we feel overwhelmed by the diversity. When our government seems to have ground to a halt because two political parties cannot agree even on the smallest of issues; when a community is suddenly inundated with immigrants and minorities who's culture seems worlds away from the way they have been living; when each day we hear people arguing back and forth about every possible issue, and it seems like none of our problems will ever get solved unless everyone could just sit down and agree.

But there too is a danger in that. By discussing our differences, by challenging each others' ideas, and by forming our own opinions we can gain a better understanding of who we are, what we want, and where we are going. Debate is not intended to inspire anger and distrust; it is a tool to make us more carefully consider our own thoughts and ideas in relationship to other world views around us. The United States can never move forward if we cannot move beyond pointless squabbling and finger-pointing. There is no thoughtfulness in this, and we cannot grow from this perspective. But neither can we afford to stagnate, to all mindlessly agree to one path or another.

Diversity and dissent are tools that we can use to develop our nation, and indeed have often been the only way that people have moved forward. As an American, I have the unique ability to dissent from whatever I want. Throughout history, very few people have been granted this ability. Dissent is a powerful tool, because it implies that you have imagined a better reality. Dissent is a hope for change, a hope for a better future, a dream vocalized. I identify myself as an American not because I believe that the United States is the perfect nation, but because this is a nation which gives room for its people to dream of a better nation.