Graphic by Mariko Kuroda/The Gazelle

About two years ago, shortly after the end of my summer internship with the US Department of Defense, I was interviewed by The Gazelle in a piece about students considering military careers. I had this possibility in mind from the moment I applied to NYU Abu Dhabi and put down Civil Engineering as my intended major, and I knew that the US military needs more professional engineers. Now, I’m graduating with a skill set that the US military has deemed of critical need, one that it employs extensively in its humanitarian activities overseas. Supporting the largest disaster-relief organization in existence seems like a perfect fit for me, given that I chose my major for humanitarian reasons.

There’s just one thing missing: I am not a patriot.

I am an American born to immigrant parents, and I grew up in an area of the United States where families like mine dominated the population. White children were the minority in schools, while Asians made up 50 to 70 percent of the student body. In high school, the term pop culture was universally understood to mean Korean pop culture, and among dance styles the major rivalry was between K-Pop choreography and Bhangra. We put kimchi in our burritos at lunchtime and read manga instead of comics. We had no football team, no baseball team, no cheerleaders and no jocks. Interracial couples were the norm and not the exception.

I had assumed that my world was representative of the rest of the United States — it wasn’t until I ventured beyond the Californian coast that I realized how wrong I was. By the time I was 13, those lands became associated with an inexplicable obsession with guns, Thanksgiving turkey and football. 

It seemed that the people living there had absolutely nothing in common with us. Many didn’t consider us to be fellow Americans because we were racial minorities; some went so far as to say this to our faces in public. After a while I started to believe them and constructed a shield of indifference and guarded suspicion to carry with me whenever I traveled east. That shield is still intact today.

This, then, is the fundamental crisis: how can I possibly feel any attachment to a nation whose people are so culturally factionalized that the term American is utterly meaningless as a distinction? Why should I care more about a citizen of the United States than a citizen of any other nation when they’re just as foreign to me?

But over the course of my years at NYUAD, where I have had the great fortune of surrounding myself with friends from every corner of the globe, my apathetic brand of cosmopolitanism gradually grew more compassionate. Every natural disaster and terrorist attack on the airwaves becomes a personal tragedy, regardless of the location. No act of injustice or suffering, anywhere, registers in my consciousness as a problem for someone else to deal with. I have felt free to go about my daily life without needing to represent my home country, and divisions along national or ethnic lines have faded in value. I have come to understand my professional career as one of global service: I am to employ my knowledge and abilities to support the world’s infrastructure, and I am to go wherever I am needed most.

And so out go the cover letters, the job applications, the emails to recruiters. I took home those promotional packets from career fairs, emblazoned with dazzling examples of world-class engineering projects: “Do you want to work on assignments like these & support development around the world?  Join our company!” And then I sat through recruitment videos on the Navy’s Civil Engineering Corps Facebook page: “Do you want to serve your country & strengthen US presence abroad? Join the Corps!”

Their respective marketing strategies betray their priorities. One serves global communities, the other serves a single nation’s reputation. One seeks talent, the other seeks patriotic sentiment — and my global education at NYUAD has eroded any remnant of patriotism I had left.