I must have gotten lucky. I have never met anyone who thought (or at least said out loud) that dropping the hyphenate from "anything-American" was a good idea.
I have an analogy, of sorts.
I have a weird name IRL. A really weird name, even by the standards of my own birthplace. I know people who have changed their names as soon as they were able to fill out the paperwork, and who had names not half as odd as mine. I never once thought about doing that, because a) that name, good or bad, is as me as it gets, and b) one of the advantages of having a name like that is you find that people almost never forget you, not even after decades have gone by.
(Or maybe they just have better memories for names than I do.)
I think of myself as more American (U.S.-ian, maybe) than Turkish, but that's mostly because my folks came here, with me in tow, when I was but a wee lad of a few months. But I would be quite the fool to insist that the best way to be a nation is to dump all that silly "ethnic" baggage, because it isn't.
I'm not the best example of that -- I haven't exactly kept the closest ties with my roots -- but the name stays. The name stays.
(I did have more sense than to force my wife to accept it, though. She was more than happy with hers.)
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Date: 2010-06-30 04:32 am (UTC)I have an analogy, of sorts.
I have a weird name IRL. A really weird name, even by the standards of my own birthplace. I know people who have changed their names as soon as they were able to fill out the paperwork, and who had names not half as odd as mine. I never once thought about doing that, because a) that name, good or bad, is as me as it gets, and b) one of the advantages of having a name like that is you find that people almost never forget you, not even after decades have gone by.
(Or maybe they just have better memories for names than I do.)
I think of myself as more American (U.S.-ian, maybe) than Turkish, but that's mostly because my folks came here, with me in tow, when I was but a wee lad of a few months. But I would be quite the fool to insist that the best way to be a nation is to dump all that silly "ethnic" baggage, because it isn't.
I'm not the best example of that -- I haven't exactly kept the closest ties with my roots -- but the name stays. The name stays.
(I did have more sense than to force my wife to accept it, though. She was more than happy with hers.)