I am a half-Japanese half-American individual, and it was only mere decades ago that the two halves of my heritage were embroiled in war. Consequently, the impressions of World War II that I received from my relatives differed greatly depending which parent’s side of the family with which I spoke. Take, for example, Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States of America who led the U.S. in ending World War II and pushed for peace through the founding of the United Nations, according to his Wikipedia article. My grandmother dined with Truman once, and my father, born and raised in Pennsylvania, was fond of recounting that one story to me. The story was barely more than a single sentence–“My mother once dined with Truman,” or some variation thereof–but I understood that he was very proud of the fact that my grandmother had interacted with an individual who would play a large part in shaping world history. One day, I was in an elevator with my grandmother on my Japanese mother’s side, and I recounted my father’s story to her. I remember clearly how her smile ebbed slightly, showing no sign of my father’s enthusiasm. She had only been a baby, but she had experienced the terrors of war first-hand, fleeing her home in her mother’s arms as Allied troops fire-bombed civilian cities in Japan (http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/02/15/commentary/tokyo-firebombing-and-unfinished-u-s-business/). Then came the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and as if that weren’t enough, Nagasaki was targeted, establishing Truman as a war criminal (http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/31/us/hiroshima-a-controversy-that-refuses-to-die.html, “http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/after-hiroshima-truman-fa_b_3727286.html). I couldn’t deny my grandmother’s experience and the experiences of countless other Japanese people in WWII, but I also couldn’t ignore the effects of Truman’s actions in ending the war. Which side of the story would I align myself with? Which side of my family would I align myself with?
In her essay “The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning”, Farhat Shahzad addresses the impact of family as an interpretative community in influencing an individual’s memory. Throughout my predominantly American education, the information provided by school textbooks about WWII was secondary in comparison to the impressions from my family. “Human beings do not consume knowledge linearly from different technologies of memories such as textbooks and museums,” she asserts, with family being “the strongest, most cohesive, and most viable social group…on the processes of remembering and learning.” Whereas I barely remember the textbook information beyond vague dates and facts, the biased knowledge about WWII imparted to me by my family has remained years later.
The way that my personal narrative fit into Shahzad’s focus led me back to the question of “What is a global citizen?” At the beginning of this term, I considered a global citizen to be an individual who embraced the diversity that exists in the world, but now I believe the definition of “global citizen” must also include an awareness and acceptance of the conflict, be it internal or external, that can be brought about by different viewpoints.