When I was seven, we became U.S. citizens, and a coworker of my dad’s bought me a subscription to American Girl magazine, whose arrival I awaited each month like a little junkie expecting her dealer. When it came, I tore into the features about typical girls in places like Boring, Oregon—not as boring as it sounds! I felt trapped by Midland, and I looked to the magazine to open my horizons, one Iowa corn parade at a time, or whatever.

One month, there was an article about the life of an Amish girl. The girl’s face was not photographed out of respect for her religion, so we readers had to settle for wisps of light-brown hair sticking out of the back of her bonnet. She described a life of reading by kerosene lamplight and obeying her parents no matter what. It was reality television for melodramatic second-grade girls: at last, someone whose life was incontrovertibly worse than mine.

After I gobbled up the Amish story, I raced over to a neighbor’s house. I had to let her know, without delay, that the Amish exist and that they don’t have Mario Kart. I didn’t know how to pronounce it—I had only ever seen it written—so I called it “Ame-ish,” like a religion made up of people named Amy.

“Maybe you’re Amish,” she said.

“Maybe you’re Amish,” I retorted.

We were both relieved that I was simply Russian, not Amish. After all, my parents forbade artificial food dyes, on account of a cancer article they heard about once, but they took no issue with Super Nintendo.

It was around then that the same coworker of my father’s asked me to write an essay about what being “an American” meant to me. I had never given it much thought, and I had no idea what to write. The Amish were Americans, but who the hell wanted to be like them?

I asked my dad what it meant to be American, and he said it meant I could vote. I was a kid, though. Of course I couldn’t vote. My dad occasionally expressed pride in being an American, but he usually meant it sarcastically, and usually only after he found he was obligated to spend money on some bureaucratic necessity. “Ohhhho!” he would bellow from the kitchen, having ripped open his car-registration renewal letter. “I’m proud to be an American! Register car! Bullshit!”

For my essay, I ended up spewing some patriotic hyperbole and calling it a day. It was good practice for my liberal arts degree, perhaps, but it didn’t get me any closer to the answer. What made an American girl? What did it mean to have an American life?