Language Spoken, Not Heard

Because of comics’ multimodal nature, different elements often come into play in the process of meaning-making and storytelling. These elements include, but are not limited to, “the changing shape of word balloons, changes in fonts and type size, the use of line and white space, the plan of gutters and panels, changing perspectives, and the strategic use of close-up” (Whitlock and Poletti xi). Ha’s graphic memoir introduces the writer-artist’s strategic and deliberate choice of colors and lettering to distinguish and mix different languages in a footnote at the beginning of the book: words spoken in Korean are in blue ink and those spoken in English are in black (Ha 3). At the beginning of the narrative, the narrator Chuna is a fourteen-year-old girl living with her mother in Seoul, whose world is already multilingual and multicultural. As she tells the reader, she and her mother have been going on vacations outside the country every year, and “Mom listened to Good Morning English on the radio every morning” (3). Chuna has learned English for a year and a half in middle school, but the radio program is incomprehensible to her. As Figure 1 shows, these panels incorporate three different linguistic modes, differentiated by the use of color, lettering, and specific layout of the characters’ dialogue and voice-over narration. The book includes hand-drawn unintelligible scribbles in speech balloons to visualize English words that the narrator hears but cannot comprehend. The alternating colors and lettering occupying the same space situate the narrator’s coming of age within a multilingual context early in the book; they also visualize the fluidity of languages in her life and memory. These visual cues not only help contextualize the narrator’s childhood but also guide the reader through her multilingual and multicultural memoir, where language acquisition intersects with coming of age. In Ha’s panels and pages, the use of comics is effective for communicating complex experiences in cross-cultural encounters when the characters’ linguistic knowledge and skills are limited.

These panels include multiple linguistic modes and situate them in varied time, the latter a rather common occurrence in comics. “As a mediated form, comics map time as space and are frequently used to depict the interaction of the past with the present, and its persistent return, particularly in relation to pasts whose remembrance is inherently precluded from other forms of memorialization” (Nabizadeh “Visualizing Risk,” 543). Such a feature is prominent in graphic memoirs where different timelines often interrupt one another and where the narrating “I” and the narrated “I” coexist. As Hillary Chute has argued:

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Robin Ha, Almost American Girl, 4. Top panels

Citation: Journal of Literary Multilingualism 1, 2 (2023) ; 10.1163/2667324x-20230203

copyright © 2020 by robin ha

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This emphasis on the child affords a conspicuous, self-reflexive methodology of representation. It is a way to visually present a tension between the narrating ‘I’ who draws the stories and the ‘I’ who is the child subject of them. […] [T]he comics form not only presents a child protagonist and an adult narrator but also gives voice simultaneously to both perspectives, even within the space of a single panel, layering temporalities and narrative positions. In each of these works we are shown the process of an author interpreting her memory, her recollections, as a visual procedure. Through its hybrid and spatial form, comics lends itself to expressing stories, especially narratives of development, that present and underscore hybrid subjectivities.

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On this page, such “layering” of temporalities and narrative positions is conveyed through the writer-artist’s purposeful use of color, lettering, and panel layout. The everyday household items––coffee pot, dining table and chairs, stove, and refrigerator––situate the scene in a domestic, intimate space. They also suggest the conversation between Chuna and her mother, as visualized on this page, is part of their everyday life. Their dialogues are portrayed in two different colors, indicating two languages. The speech balloon with the phonetically spelled-out words in black ink––“Luk Dare Shi Goz Dat Gurl Izu Strangeee…”––indicates the mother following the radio program and practicing English (Ha 3). The words in blue ink show the daughter’s comment spoken in Korean at the time and rendered in English in retrospect in the book. The hand-drawn unintelligible scribbles with zigzag lines pointing to the radio visualize English as “gibberish.” The music notes that bookend the scribbles add sound effects to the panels, resembling what is typical for a radio broadcasting program. While the dialogues between the mother and daughter are framed in oval shaped speech balloons, the radio program speech balloons are rectangle shaped, setting them apart visually. Furthermore, their yellow background calls the reader’s attention to the nonsensical phrases, which the narrator did not understand at the time. All these elements help re-picture a conversation that occurred in the past when Chuna was a teenager living with her mother in South Korea, and a conversation that is reconstructed when she is an adult. The typeset narration in English included at the bottom of the panels indicates the narrator’s perspective looking back at a given moment from her childhood and functions both textually as part of the narrative and visually as part of the panel frames. In other words, her lived experience as a child (namely, the narrated “I”) and her recollection of that experience as an older self (i.e., the narrating “I”) exist simultaneously in the same panels, manifested in multiple languages and differing moments in time.

If the color distinction indicates Chuna’s phonetic understanding of English and separates different languages at the beginning of the book, the later narrative in Almost American Girl further unsettles linguistic and cultural boundaries and highlights the fluidity of languages. As Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven have reminded us, the language of comics is intricately layered and “comprises the verbal, the visual, and the way these two representational modes interact on a page”; its structure and grammar are “cross-discursive” where words and images “do not simply blend together, creating a unified whole, but rather remain distinct” (767–69). Such a cross-discursivity is useful in tracing Chuna’s process of language acquisition and her experience of a rather abrupt and unexpected journey relocating from Seoul to Alabama in the 1990s. As the narrator learns more English words and phrases, the book begins to include dialogue and thought balloons with mixed languages in different colors and lettering, signaling her gradual increase of fluency and comprehension in her second language as well as the fluidity and cross-discursivity of languages among bi- and multilingual speakers such as Chuna.

On pages 81–82, for example, Chuna struggles to find the correct English words for her journal entries and to decipher her English teacher Mrs. Hall’s responses. Writing these entries and reading Mrs. Hall’s responses give Chuna opportunities to practice English outside classes since her school in Alabama does not offer any English as a Second Language (esl) instruction. Chuna’s thought balloons feature some words in blue and others in black ink and sometimes mixes words spelled in English and Korean in one sentence or phrase, demonstrating a process of juggling and translating between two languages. As Whitlock has argued, “[t]he vocabulary of comics represents figures and objects across a wide iconic range from the abstraction of cartooning to realism; its grammar is based on panels, frames, and gutters that translate time and space onto the page in black and white; and balloons both enclose speech and convey the character of sound and emotion” (968). Besides the characters’ interactions and thoughts, these panels also reproduce pieces of her journal, fragments from a Korean-English dictionary, and Mrs. Hall’s handwriting in varied linguistic and stylistic modes. Sometimes Chuna is able to find the answer in the dictionary: “p…r…o…u…d… proud… There it is” (Ha 82). Sometimes she is puzzled, as the three sequential panels on page 81 indicate: “Hmm… how do Americans say 조정하다?” The next panel reproduces an excerpt from a Korean-English dictionary, which lists multiple possibilities to translate “조정하다” into English. Thus, Chuna wonders: “So many different ways to say the same thing. […] Which one of these is right?” “I guess I’ll go with the first one” (Ha 81). Other times a direct translation from the dictionary simply does not make sense: “How…was…your…day…so…far? So far? Like in the distance? Or like sofa, the couch” (Ha 82). She has to rely on the help of a native speaker to figure out the meaning of a word or a phrase contextually. Even with the help of a dictionary, she cannot comprehend the meaning of “so far” in this particular case. It is worth noting that the text in this thought balloon is part blue and part black, suggesting a mixing of Korean and English as the narrator processes both languages and tries to make sense of the phrase “so far.”

As American comics artist Will Eisner has pointed out, letters can function as images in comics, contributing not only to meaning-making but also to emotional interaction (8–10). The overlay of the thought balloons with reproduced pieces from the narrator’s dictionary and the handwritten lines and phrases from her journal entries use textual elements visually to reveal multiple linguistic modes at play and to foster emotional interaction between the character and the reader. Despite Chuna’s feeling that her English was not improving after the first month of attending school in Alabama, sequential visual and textual elements such as these, arranged in a panel-to-panel transition, actually indicate her progression in English-language acquisition: from a phonetic connection of homonyms (“so far” as “sofa”) to a dictionary definition (“so far” as “distance”), and eventually to a process of meaning-making (“so far” as “until now”). As these panels and pages suggest, for language learners like Chuna, navigating phonetics, literal meanings, and nuanced understanding is a daunting task.

A few pages later, Almost American Girl begins to use speech and thought balloons that mix typeset and correctly spelled English words with hand-drawn and incomprehensible scribbles in the same sentence, thereby suggesting Chuna’s continued struggle as well as the progress she has made in learning the English language. In other words, some of the scribbles have now become comprehensive and begun to make sense. She is able to piece together enough words and phrases to comprehend sentences. English spoken by others around her is, at least, partially heard and understood. As the school year continues, hand-drawn scribbles become fewer and fewer. Dialogue and thought balloons with English words in black and blue inks begin to fill the panels and pages seamlessly. By the time Chuna visits South Korea in 2002 when she was a sophomore in college in the book’s epilogue, evocatively titled “Motherland vs. Homeland” (Ha 218), the unintelligible scribbles have completely disappeared.

Real Fantasy, Fantastic Reality

Chuna and her mother moved to Alabama during summer before she started eighth grade. With the new school year fast approaching, uncertainty and angst aside, Chuna is excited about the possibility of choosing an American name. She is not a fan of her Korean name because she considers the name Chuna “unusually old-fashioned” and often being associated with “country bumpkin characters” in Korean comedy television shows (Ha 51). An avid reader of Japanese and Korean comics since the age of five, Chuna also loves to draw and create her own comic characters and stories. In this sense, it is not surprising that pictures become her “first fluent mode of communication and, later, of friendship” (Park n.p.). They also function as a coping mechanism for her to overcome the language barrier after immigrating to the United States. When recollecting her experience as a teenage immigrant, her graphic memoir blends “the recognizable everyday with the fantastical otherworldly” (Aldama 15), blurring the boundaries in storytelling. As she considers her choice of American names, Chuna shows, instead of tells, her excitement in a borderless panel featuring two versions of herself. The imagined superhero version occupies most of the space and takes an iconic superman pose, holding up one fist and flying against the background of clouds and a blue sky (Ha 52). Her windblown hair and flowing cape suggest movement and speed. Her crescent-shaped eyes behind the mask indicate smiling. The real-life version of the narrator is portrayed in an insert positioned at the upper left corner of the panel. Her daydreaming facial expression is set against a background with lights and stars, juxtaposing as well as mixing reality with fantasy.

In an interview, Ha highlights the important role comic books have played in her multilingual and multicultural coming of age, considering the medium “the umbilical cord that connected both worlds” (Powell n.p.) while her younger self navigates between Korean and English languages and cultures. The reader cannot help but notice the color coordination as well as the contrast between the narrator’s and the superhero’s outfits. While the superhero version dons a skirted bodysuit, boots, gloves, a cape, and a mask, the real-life teen wears a pixie hairstyle, glasses, and a T-shirt. On the one hand, Chuna imagines a complete and instant redo as the silver lining of her immigration to the United States: “This was my chance to start my life all over again with a new identity” (Ha 52). On the other hand, the big question mark on the chest of the hero’s bodysuit suggests the pending decision of choosing an American name and also foreshadows the narrator’s uncertain future. After all, choosing a new name might not be the magic key for her to create “a new identity” for herself or to help her navigate the complicated social and cultural landscape in middle school and in her American life in general.

A few pages later, Almost American Girl uses a frameless full-page panel with multiple inserts to show Chuna’s first day at school and the debut of her new name, Robin (59). Ironically, there is no equivalent of the “r” sound in Korean language. Even though Chuna practices her newly adopted name all night long, she cannot get the correct English pronunciation. The speech balloons on page 58 are filled with scribbles, mixed with a few English words that Chuna/Robin is able to understand at school. She introduces herself to her classmates, wrestling with English: “Hi, my name izu Lobin. Nisu to meetu yu” (58). Instead of verbal cues and narrations, the following page relies solely on visual and gestural language to convey the classroom atmosphere and the narrator’s emotion at the moment. As Marcus Weaver-Hightower states, comics offers a superior way of describing “inaccessible places and capture emotions and experiences,” compared to prose-only narratives (226).

As Figure 2 shows, the usage of various shades on this page presents a layered visual narrative of Chuna/Robin and her experience. Her full-body image with her back facing the reader and slightly leaning forward is positioned at the center of the page and is framed in a spotlight, highlighting her anxiety of being a new student. The insert featuring her face is pictured in the upper left corner, separating her from the other students whose close-up portraits in the foreground and collective image in the background further indicate the narrator’s otherness. Chuna/Robin’s body language in the insert, with her head down and shoulders forward, indicates her bowing to her class while introducing herself, a non-American gesture. The uneasiness, amplified by the wordless image, poses a sharp contrast to the light-hearted version of her imagining herself being reinvented as a superhero through the act of adopting an American name and her hope that she will be able to start her life “all over again with a new identity” (Ha 52). The earthly color hues on this page differ from the lighter and brighter tones of the superhero version a few pages earlier. Her difficulty in pronouncing her new name signals continued struggles that she faces, in terms of linguistic and cultural shifts. After all, she is not a superhero. She can neither soar to the sky nor fast-forward through the “profound cultural and geographic disorientation” (Park n.p.). Even though this page includes no text narrative, the visual and gestural language speaks volumes about the emotional intensity at that moment.

In his introduction to Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle (2010), Frederick Luis Aldama argues that comics’ ability to visualize the characters’ early experiences “inflected by race, culture, sexuality, class, and gender” while coming of age can make the types of racism, homophobia, sexism, and the like quite “raw and eye-opening” (8). In Almost American Girl, the narrator’s lack of language comprehension in her initial interactions with school peers highlights such rawness. When two schoolmates pull their eyes slanted and call her “Ching Chang Chong” (Ha 65) in the hallway on her first day, Chuna/Robin is puzzled. While such racist taunts and ridicule may have “no meaning” for the narrator at the time, they are “raw and eye-opening” to the reader. Looking back, the narrator considers her younger self’s lack of English-language skills “a blessing” (Ha 65). Even though Chuna/Robin could not completely register these early encounters with blatant racism in the moment, she can sense hostility and aggression toward her. After all, as a child born out of wedlock and raised by a single mother in a rather conservative social environment, she has known and experienced prejudice since an early age and before immigrating to the United States.

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Robin Ha, Almost American Girl, 59

Citation: Journal of Literary Multilingualism 1, 2 (2023) ; 10.1163/2667324x-20230203

copyright © 2020 by robin ha

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Bonny Peirce’s study on the connection between social identity and language learning highlights the “complex relationship between power, identity, and language learning” (17). In particular, Peirce foregrounds “the role of language as constitutive of and constituted by a language learner’s social identity” and argues that

[i]t is through language that a person negotiates a sense of self within and across different sites at different points in time, and it is through language that a person gains access to––or is denied access to––powerful social networks that give learners the opportunity to speak. […] Thus language is not conceived of as a neutral medium of communication but is understood with reference to its social meaning.

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Chua’s negotiation of “a sense of self” manifests in multiple languages: Korean, English, and visual. As a teenager at a new school in a different country, she has to figure out how to gain access to “powerful social networks,’’ where language is obviously not neutral. The nonsequential panels and pages in Ha’s book, sometimes transitioning without verbal cues, rely on comics’ formal properties to convey the narrator’s emotion at the time and her older self’s recollection and reflection when revisiting certain moments in her childhood. As Catherine Appleton has noted, “[t]he agency of the narrative becomes apparent as the subject moves through the action of the scenes, often in a highly fragmented progression. Thereby the narrative is contained within the paneled drama moving through moments of time, sometimes non-sequentially; emotion is shown or suggested and related aspects of the story are networked into webs of meaning” (538). Such an agency emerges in the memory of Chuna/Robin as well as that of her mother, fragmented, re-pictured, and sequenced in the graphic memoir. In between narratives of Chuna’s/Robin’s American life, Almost American Girl includes several episodes of the narrator’s childhood and her mother’s life in Seoul. Orphaned as a teenager, Chuna’s mother met Chuna’s biological father while in her twenties. They never got married and went their separate ways when Chuna was an infant.

Growing up with a single mother in Seoul in the 1980s and 1990s, Chuna is no stranger to discrimination at school and in society at large—so much so that being discreet about her family life becomes second nature (Ha 72). A child born out of wedlock and being raised without a father makes her an outcast, shunned and targeted by other children as well as school teachers, parents, and community members. Shortly after she started elementary school, Chuna learned that “people pick on others just for being different” and what she “thought was perfectly normal wasn’t normal at all” (70, 73). Inspired by her career-oriented and strong-willed mother, Chuna “tried to be extra good” and imagined herself as her mom’s “warrior apprentice” who follows her instructions: “Ignore them and study hard!” “You have the power to achieve anything you want! Draw! Study! Help others in need!” (75, 77). It is worth noting that Chuna relies on visual language as a form of communication long before her journey to the United States and learning esl. It is not surprising she would continue the multilingual approach while navigating language learning, the social landscape of school, and life at large in America.

While these early childhood memories are never lost, Chuna’s encounter with blatant racism at her new school in Alabama triggers connections to different kinds of prejudice and brings both to the forefront. In Seoul, she has to learn and adapt to the often unspoken social rules of gendered expectations and the heteronormative family structure; in the United States, she has to navigate through racist discrimination with limited knowledge of the English language. On the one hand, the narrator’s experience and her mother’s experience are filtered through a child’s perspective, making racism and sexism “raw and eye-opening” for readers. On the other hand, the book’s overall uplifting messages highlight the narrator’s ability to adapt and gesture toward hope as the story unfolds. Ultimately, sexist discrimination from adults and children in South Korea as well as racist behaviors of school peers and derogatory references stereotyping Asians in America, although exposed, remain unchallenged, therefore suggesting an acceptance of the status quo and a tolerance of discrimination.

Situating herself in an unfamiliar environment in the United States through multiple linguistic modes, the narrator has to piece together distant as well as immediate experiences and visualize them in deliberately sequenced panels and pages throughout Almost American Girl. Her passion for comics and visual language provides an effective means to convey what Appleton calls “fragmented progression” and meaning-making (583). In the midst of her struggle with the English language and racist mockery from peers at school, Chuna/Robin finds solace in the new issues of Queen’s Quest, fictional Korean comic books. Familiar languages such as Korean and visual vernacular not only bring her comfort but also offer alternative ways of expressing herself and making sense of her surroundings. As her thought balloon conveys, “it’s so great to be reading in Korean again!” (Ha 106). Resorting to visual language, Ha amplifies the narrator’s emotion in panels and pages that merge fantasy with reality. The two-page spread on 106–107, for example, uses comics’ formal properties to highlight the hybrid, fluid nature of visual and symbolic languages. These pages use the interruption and overlapping of space and characters to re-picture the narrator’s lived and imagined experience. The borderless scenes without temporal or spatial transition portray the narrator reuniting with Queen’s Quest. They are filled with dragons, unicorns, landscapes with water and towers, and characters dressed in armor, capes, and crowns. In this timeless mystic setting, she imagines herself being crowned and joining the ranks of Princess Eshika’s people. In contrast, the small inserts frame Chuna/Robin and her American life within well-defined, rectangular borders. She huddles in a corner of her room or sits in bed, holding copies of Queen’s Quest, occupying a small, confined physical space, and being alone and away from others. The lack of gutter space on this two-page spread merges several scenes with both fictional and nonfictional characters and stories, leaving the reading sequence largely for the reader to determine. Here, the writer-artist uses comics’ “collection of codes” (Groensteen 6) to highlight the fluid nature of life, imagination, and memory, where different linguistic modes coexist. Taking advantage of comics’ unique features to unfold the story, Almost American Girl blurs the line between reality and fantasy through page layout and spatial arrangement.

Cultural and Linguistic Hybridization

Applying Peirce’s theoretical framework in their empirical study on adolescent immigrant students’ language acquisition, Sandra McKay and Sau-Ling Wong find that second-language learners “exist in extremely complex social environments that consist of overwhelmingly asymmetrical power relations and subject the learners to multiple discourses,” which requires them to negotiate and reconstruct their identities (603). Such an intersection between language acquisition, cross-cultural encounters, and identity formation plays a significant role among teenage immigrants like Chuna. In the graphic memoir, the narrator gravitates toward comics, a familiar and therefore comforting medium, while navigating “multiple discourses.” In her new American life, English is mostly incomprehensible scribbles; racial discrimination and ridicule remain unchallenged; school equals confusion and isolation; home means distance and alienation from stepfamily members. In the imaginary world, Chuna/Robin is able to reunite with her favorite character Princess Eshika and her entourage from Queen’s Quest; all dialogue bubbles are filled with words in blue ink, namely spoken in Korean. Paired with the visual language of comics, another narrative medium familiar to Chuna/Robin, the fantasy world makes sense. As such, Ha’s graphic memoir anchors a narrative of childhood and memory through comic books: the reading, creating, and reimagining of them.

In her study on autobiographical comics, Elisabeth El Refaie uses the term “pictorial embodiment” to highlight how the perception of the self is “constantly changing and inconsistent over time” (50–51). In Almost American Girl, Chuna/Robin’s “physical identities” reflect such a “process of engaging with one’s own identity through multiple self-portraits” (El Refaie 51). These self-portraits show Chuna/Robin as a narrator and author, and also as some of the characters she imagines and visualizes in comics. Convention-breaking “paratextual markers” (Postema xvii)—such as the unidentified fictional characters from Queen’s Quest, the lack of temporal and spatial indicator of the events, and the absence of gutter space marking the sequence and transition—help reveal emotion and unfold the narrative. Ha’s rendition provides a coping mechanism for the teenage narrator to convey her feeling of loss, isolation, and confusion in a familiar language as well as a way for her older self to see and remember the past. It also offers a means for the reader to witness the linguistic and cultural challenges that Chuna/Robin grapples with and eventually overcomes.

In addition to visually juxtaposing and mixing comic sketches and characters with the narrator’s childhood, Ha’s graphic memoir incorporates a variety of elements—including envelopes, photographs, drawings, journals, dictionary pages, excerpts from yearbook pages, and images of memorabilia—to tell a nuanced story across linguistic and cultural boundaries. This kind of “archival documentation” (Cvetkovich 114) is of visual and narrative significance in graphic memoirs, as books such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986) and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) have demonstrated. It helps situate the narrator of Almost American Girl in “particular times, spaces, and histories” (Chute 2) and frame her lived experience and reflection; she revisits her past, retraces events, and reimagines and rearranges them. These intentional collages mix languages, narrative voices, time periods, and geographical locations, while documenting the narrator’s coming of age and coming to terms with her bilingual and bicultural heritage.

In a splash page, Ha reproduces snapshots of letters, documents, and sketches, reflecting on her childhood in Korea and America and the connection between two homelands, particularly manifested in excerpts and trinkets from her Korean friends. As Figure 3 indicates, the visual elements––“its style, composition, layout, and sequencing” (Cvetkovich 115)––capture the narrator’s emotion at the time as well as when she recollects and reflects on it retrospectively from adulthood. In this sense, “graphic memoir allows for the visual elements of illusion to coincide with the production of memory across times and places, demonstrating such as aesthetics and characterizing their artificers” (Stamant 4). The borderless and frameless image on this page overlays fragmented letters written in Korean, envelopes with addresses in Korean and English languages, reproduced photographs of varied sizes, sketches of comic characters, a cassette tape, and excerpts of letters in quotation marks as if someone were narrating them. The excerpts are framed in dialogue bubbles and colored blue, indicating words written or spoken in Korean at the time and rendered in English as the narrator’s older self revisits and re-imagines her past. These overlapping details serve as a touchstone of historical and cultural references from the 1990s as well as a metaphor for the narrator’s memory, which is not always sequential or linear. Instead, it is often fragmented, layered, and selective, not dissimilar to a scrapbook or a collaged page featured in the book. It is through re-sorting and re-picturing pieces from her childhood that the writer-artist is able to explore “the possibility of self-expression and self-determination” (Ayaka and Hague 5) and to make sense of her experience within a multilingual and multicultural context. In this sense, Ha’s graphic memoir portrays a nuanced childhood through “archival documentation.”

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Robin Ha, Almost American Girl, 113

Citation: Journal of Literary Multilingualism 1, 2 (2023) ; 10.1163/2667324x-20230203

copyright © 2020 by robin ha

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Through the processes of intentional “inclusion and exclusion” (Nabizadeh Representation and Memory, 4), Almost American Girl is able to explore and confront the limitations of memory and in the process highlights the important roles that languages and language acquisition play in the narrator’s childhood and young adulthood. By offering “fragments of an imagined world,” Chuna/Robin’s narrative enacts “the relationship between storytelling and time so that the present speaks back to and carries traces of the past in the words and images” (Nabizadeh Representation and Memory, 4). Drawing and narrating the narrator’s coming of age through a multilingual and multicultural lens, Ha’s graphic memoir provides a nuanced form of remembrance and guides the reader through the complex landscape of language learning, visual expression, immigration, and becoming “almost American.”