Don’t Let the Door Hit Your Ass on the Way Out: An Essay by Dylan Lee

“Go back to your country”. Five words that I’d read in stories plenty of times, five words that I’d heard in stories being told on YouTube videos, five words that strangers memed about on internet forums – five words I’d never been told in person. At least not until my first trip to our country’s capital – my country’s capital.

If I’m being honest, I kind of deserved it.

In 2019, during our Thanksgiving break, a few college friends and I took a five-hour bus trip to our D.C. Of the four of us, I was the only American citizen – the rest were all international students. The Airbnb we checked into was exceedingly cozy – while there was only one mattress, the ground was perfectly fine for us. Over the course of the next three days, we hit the must-see sights around D.C. – the Washington Monument, the Lincoln

Memorial, the Library of Congress, the Supreme Court – the list went on. The milky marble that reflected sunlight so dazzlingly filled my heart with awe – and my eyes with temporary blindness. The sheer magnanimity of our capital wowed me to no end. People may have done an incredible number of injustices under the guise of advancing the American Dream, but in that moment, it was hard not to indulge in that American pride – even if for just a little bit. Of course, being a Texan, I found my state at the World War II memorial and took a picture there, in bowed respect for the lives lost – not just in that war, but so many countless others.

Then we hit the museums. I learned something completely new and mindboggling I have to take this quick minute to share it, and maybe I’m just incredibly slow, but did you know that the Smithsonian isn’t just one building? I thought the Smithsonian was like a single museum, and the other museums were just their own – it turns out, The Smithsonian, or the Smithsonian Institute, is actually a whole series of museums and research centers that are scattered around D.C., and include places like the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Air and Space Museum, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and numerous others. Anyways, we split up to visit whichever of these museums caught our eye, and read all too many placards – although after doing so many readings for Columbia, the carefully curated placards were a welcome respite from the dense readings of Dworkin and Hobbes. As a final hurrah, my friends and I met up in front of the Air and Space Museum to gawk over the incredible air and spacecraft hanging within the hangar like museum.

I guess plenty of other D.C. tourists had the same idea we had, as there was a line wrapped around the block to get in. We didn’t mind – we could catch up and throw random fast facts at one another that we had picked up, musing over the graffiti left by Civil War soldiers in the Washington Monument, and just friendly conversation in general. At some point (I’m not quite sure how we arrived at the topic), I began to talk about a YouTube video* I had chanced upon during some late-night procrastination session that I thought was mildly relevant to the topic at hand. It’s a brief 4-minute clip from a TV show back in 2012, The Newsroom, in which a panel of three speakers are answering questions from college students. The question is asked: “Can you say why America is the greatest country in the world?” The first response – “Diversity and opportunity.” The second – “Freedom, and freedom, so let’s keep it that way.” The third – “The New York Jets”, an answer that garners a few laughs. But the moderator is persistent and demands the third speaker give a real answer. The third speaker cuts him off: “It’s not the greatest country in the world professor, that’s my answer.” He then goes into a monologue, brazenly tearing apart his fellow panelists’ answers, then lists fact after fact proving that America is demonstrably not the greatest country in the world. Cue nostalgia music: “But it sure used to be,” at which point he continues his monologue, listing all the great things America used to stand for. Honestly, a beautiful video, and even though it’s scripted TV and probably isn’t completely factually correct, it makes some great points. But what does this video have to do with our visit to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum?

*Can You Say Why America is the Greatest Country in the World?

As I said, we were just shooting the crap and catching up on what we had done that day, when I brought up this video. I’m something of an idiot when it comes to speaking before thinking, and this was no exception. I started loudly quoting the video, saying lines like “American isn’t the greatest country in the world” and laughing with my friends about it. I say that one more time, when the man standing in front of me in the line turns around and says, “If America isn’t the greatest country in the world, then why are you here?” I immediately shut up, in complete and utter shock. He continued, “Go back to your country and don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out”. If I’m being honest, I was pretty impressed with that line, and my friends and I still jokingly use it with one another as we leave parties and whatnot. But in that moment I was in complete and utter shock – didn’t he notice that we were joking around? To be clear, I won’t state whether or not America is the greatest country in the world, just because that’s such a terrible question – by what metric are we evaluating greatness? He turned back around all of us just stood there in shock – at least until someone started laughing. I can’t quite remember who it was, but someone started laughing and we couldn’t help breaking down. We then overheard the man turn to the woman with him and smugly say “Those chinks think I can’t understand their chink language but they don’t know I fought in Vietnam.” Overhearing that sobered us all up. Let’s breakdown, point by point, everything that we found absolutely absurd with the situation.

1. He asked me why I was in the US if I didn’t think it was the greatest country in the world.

   1. What? The premises and presuppositions underlying this statement are utterly ridiculous. Are you telling me you only visit the greatest country in the world? And better yet, did you assume I wasn’t an American? A beautiful example of the perpetual foreigner. Or perhaps you recognized I was American, but thought people could just casually change citizenships to whichever country they perceived to be the greatest country in the world, because that’s such an incredibly easy thing to do.

2. “Go back to your country”

   1. Hilariously, of my four friends, I was the only American citizen – one was Singaporean, one was Indian, and one was South African. We all found this one rather amusing, but there definitely was a certain level of shock and confrontation with reality – even as an American, my physical appearance yet again demonstrated a prime example of the perpetual foreigner stereotype.

3. “Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out”

   1. I don’t actually have any commentary on this besides saying that it was so beautifully executed and honestly, I applaud the man for this one.

4. “Those chinks think I don’t understand their chink language..”

   1. First off, language mate. That’s really rather rude language, but I guess it spoke volumes on your ignorance, or at the very least, your intolerance. And secondly, what? What chink language? My Mandarin is so poor I once said “很盐" or “very salt”, instead of salty. To top it off, we didn’t even speak any other language besides English, so I’m not really sure what you heard, but it certainly wasn’t a “chink language”. My Singaporean friend still laughs at the idea that we would ever speak Mandarin given how bad we are at it.

5. “…but they don’t know I fought in Vietnam.”

   1. Oh boy. Like I mentioned – I’m American, arguably Chinese American (I say arguably because my mom is from Hong Kong and my dad is from Taiwan, basically the two revolutionary, anti-China countries out there), and my friends were from Singapore, India, and South Africa. Not one of us was Vietnamese. Also, if you somehow thought our laughter and English was Vietnamese, you really didn’t pick much up from Vietnam besides an overinflated ego and some light smatterings of PTSD, my friend.

All in all, he was an absolute mess. We managed to procure a great story from the experience, and still enjoyed our time in the Air and Space Museum. There were certainly some lessons to be taken away as well. Firstly, don’t be too loud in public spaces – respect the space of others. And if you must be, do wholesome things, not critiques of the American system without context. Secondly, my appearance as an Asian will mark me as the perpetual foreigner anywhere I go in the West. I will never be able to fully assimilate to the same extent as my White peers, no matter how well-spoken I am, no matter how Americanized I dress, no matter how much I try – it simply won’t be enough, short of some radical cosmetic surgery. Thirdly, America is certainly not the greatest country in the world, at least if you measure greatness through the metric of racial tolerance. And finally – don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out of my essay.