What Does It Mean to Be Uzbek American?

I don’t intend this to be another coming-of-age woe, not “woe is me,” but it is another coming of age. No one looked like me growing up, or very few people did, but I don’t really know what I’m supposed to make of that. I am who I am. There is a genuine feeling of separation there, though, and I don’t think pretending there isn’t one makes any more sense than making the whole story about it.

I grew up being, of course, visibly different, and audibly different as soon as somebody heard my name. Occasionally I would blend in with the Asian children, and other times I would blend in with the Latino children, but I was neither. It wasn’t necessarily something I thought about all the time. You are a child. You go to school. These are just the people around you.

The language I grew up with, the language I know, was only something I spoke at home. I never spoke to other people in it. There wasn’t anybody else to speak Uzbek with. It was just my special language that I spoke at home. It wasn’t anything more. Obviously, I knew there was a place called Uzbekistan and that we came from there, but Uzbekistan and being Uzbek weren’t things I needed to explain to myself.

There are things I remember from the home where I was born. Then there are pictures of me doing things there that I don’t remember at all. I can look at a picture and know that it is me, that I was there, while having absolutely no memory of the thing happening. Is that me? Obviously it is. But what exactly is the continuity there?

I moved to the U.S. shortly after 9/11. My name is Akbar Sherzod Khamidov. Before I knew what being Muslim meant, I knew that people reacted to it. They had questions. They wanted to change me. They told me about Jesus and Christianity, but all I knew was that being Muslim was something my parents said I was, and something other people said I was too. I got older, and I realized the world had its own ideas about what that word meant, and some of those ideas were very bad.

At first, you don’t really think you can do anything about it. This is who you are. Eventually, you realize that actually you can push parts of an identity away. You can say, no, I’m not. This isn’t me. And there you go. You have let go of some part of yourself, although at the time you probably don’t think about it in those terms.

The odd part about being Uzbek in America is that I have spent almost my whole life here, and I still have to explain what I am every day.

I get asked where I’m from every day. Sometimes I say Nashville. Sometimes I say I was born in Uzbekistan, and I always have to try to deduce what they’re actually asking. If I say Nashville, there’s another question: “No, where are you really from?” If I say Uzbekistan, there are usually more questions after that. But I’m not upset about this. It’s just an observation, because I actually like those questions.

I love talking about the land where my family comes from. I like telling people where it is, what the language is like, what the people are like, what my culture means. I don’t find the conversation offensive at all. I bring this up because I’ve had this conversation so many times that I know that after I’ve explained it, the other person still doesn’t understand it the way they understand identities that already exist.

If you say you’re from Canada or you’re from Mexico, an American knows what that means. I’m American. I know what that means. Maybe what we know is completely wrong. Maybe it’s all based on stereotypes, food, media, people we’ve interacted with in school, politics, whatever, but there is some idea there. It’s a category that exists. Chinese, Indian, Russian. These are things that already mean something before the person standing in front of you has to explain them.

Uzbek typically doesn’t, so I explain. Yes, I’m Central Asian. Where is that? It’s south of Kazakhstan. No, we’re not Russian, although yes, my parents speak Russian, and I speak a little bit, and I have Russian friends, but we speak a Turkic language. No, we’re not from Turkey. Yes, we’re Muslim-majority. We were part of the Soviet Union. No, we don’t speak Arabic, and we’re not Middle Eastern either.

Despite what people may assume, these explanations aren’t necessarily wrong. But after enough of them, you realize that you have to explain yourself through things the other person already understands.

The first time I was ever in a room full of people who looked like me, acted like me, and in some ways grew up like me, they weren’t even Uzbek. They were Uyghurs in Washington, D.C.

This is not about them, though. They have their own issues, their own history, and their own problems. They’re different, but also very much alike. What I mean to say is that there’s something very odd about spending my entire life in America and then recognizing familiarity among people my age in a group of people who aren’t actually my people.

And it happens in reverse. The more time you spend around Russians or people from the former Soviet Union, the more likely someone will eventually assume you’re Russian. I’ve been called Russian plenty of times. I know why. There are things in the way our parents grew up, the way we grew up, pagadi, things that we eat, things we say, institutions, and habits. They are all leftovers from a great power that no longer exists. But I’m not Russian. So even then, when somebody recognizes an aspect of you that is definitely real, you’re being recognized through someone else’s category.

I don’t know that any of this explains why I am the way I am. I don’t particularly want it to. I am suspicious of telling a story about my childhood and then giving every part of myself an origin, as if being Uzbek American is the answer to why I think the way I think, what I’m capable of, what I’ve done, or what I will do.

And because it is something most Americans don’t already understand, I have had to explain it over and over again. I have gotten very good at explaining what an Uzbek is. I’m less sure that explaining it is the same thing as being understood.