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• Line		In kindergarten, I learned the Pledge of Allegiance. Or rather, I learned to imitate it. The words spilled out of my mouth in one long jumble, all slurred and sloppy. I'd stand tall and put my right hand over my
  5		heart, mumbling proudly. Even then, I understood that "'Merica" was my home-and that I was an American. Still, a flicker of doubt was ever present. If
  10		I were truly American, why did the other American people around me seem so sure I was foreign? By the time I was a teenager, I imagined that I was a "dual citizen" of both the United States and China.
  15		I had no idea what dual citizenship involved, or if it was even possible. No matter, I would be a citizen of the world. This was my fantasy. When I got to college, I decided to learn more about
  20		"where I came from" by taking classes in Asian history. I even studied Mandarin Chinese. This had the paradoxical effect of making me question my Chinese-ness. Other students, and even the teachers, expected me to spout perfectly
  25		accented Chinese. Instead I stumbled along as badly as the other American students next to me. Still my fantasy persisted; I thought I might "go back" to China, a place I had never been.
  30		President Richard Nixon's historic trip to China in February 1972 made a visit seem possible for me. That summer, China cracked open the "bamboo curtain" that separated it from the
  35		West, allowing a small group of Chinese American students to visit the country as a goodwill gesture to the United States. I desperately wanted to be one of them, and I put together a research proposal that got
  40		the support of my professors. With a special fellowship, I joined the group and became one of the first Americans, after Nixon, to enter "Red" China.
  45		In China I fit right in with the multitude. In the cities of Shanghai and Suzhou, where my parents were from, I saw my features everywhere. After years of not looking "American" to the "Americans" and not
  50		looking Chinese enough for the Cantonese who made up the majority of Chinese Americans, I suddenly found my face on every passerby. It was a revelation of sameness that I had never experienced at
  55		home. The feelings didn't last long. While in China, I visited my mother's eldest sister; they hadn't seen each other since 1949, the year of the
  60		Communist revolution in China, when my mother left with their middle sister on the last boat out of Shanghai. Using my elementary Chinese, I struggled to communicate with Auntie Li. My vocabulary
  65		was too limited and my idealism too thick to comprehend my family's suffering from the Cultural Revolution,* still very much in progress. But girlish fun transcended language as my older cousins took me by
  70		the hand and dressed me in a khaki Mao suit, braiding my long hair in pigtails, just like the other young, unmarried Chinese women.
  75		All decked out like a freshly minted Red Guard in my new do, I passed for a local. Real Chinese stopped me on the street, to ask for directions, to ask where I got my tennis shoes, to complain about the long
  80		bus queues, to say any number of things to me. As soon as I opened my mouth to reply, my clumsy American accent infected the little Chinese I knew. My questioners knew immediately that I was a foreigner,
  85		a Westerner, an American, maybe even a spy-and they ran from me as fast as they could. I had an epiphany common to Asian Americans who visit their ancestral homelands. I realized that I didn't fit
  90		into Chinese society, that I could never be accepted there. If I didn't know it, the Chinese did: I belonged in America, not China.

*During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese leaders used the Red Guard-young soldiers-to impose desired behaviors on members of Chinese society.

The passage as a whole suggests that becoming a "citizen of the world" (line 17) might best be characterized as

• (A)   a worthwhile endeavor
• (B)   a painful reality
• (C)    a modest achievement
• (D)   an unrealistic goal   CORRECT ANSWER
• (E)   an uncommon ambition

Explanation:

Early in the passage, the author tells us that as a child, her "fantasy" was to be a "citizen of the world." But later, after she traveled to China and tried to pass for a "local," she learned that this was not an easy thing to do. "Real Chinese," upon talking to her, immediately realized that she was a "foreigner" and avoided her. This led the author to her "epiphany": she didn't "fit into Chinese society" and "could never be accepted there." So the passage as a whole suggests that becoming a "citizen of the world" is an "unrealistic goal."