假装是同一民族

Pretending to Be One Nation (《假装是同一民族》) is a Chinese-language nonfiction book by Gong Chien, a New York-based Chinese writer who spent 26 days traveling across 37 American states aboard 11 Amtrak trains in the summer of 2023.

This is not a travel book. It is a record of looking - at the people who never make the news, the histories buried beneath place names, and the fault lines that run through a nation that has always pretended to be one.

On the trains, the author encountered a drug addict removed by police at midnight, a young conservative hippie who rejects the internet, a first-generation Vietnamese American trapped in a patriarchal family, a formerly incarcerated white man rebuilding his life, and Amish families traveling together. She also traces the histories of those no longer present: the Indigenous peoples dispossessed by the Homestead Act, the Chinese laborers who built the railroads and were then expelled, the communities that never appeared in Tocqueville's portrait of America.

Eighteen months later, the author was assaulted by a random white woman near Bryant Park - one of Manhattan's most crowded tourist destinations, surrounded by passersby, during evening rush hour. That punch forced a reckoning: the question she had been observing from the outside had always been about her too.

Written entirely by hand - no AI - and illustrated with 600+ original photographs, this A4-format full-color hardcover sits at the intersection of literary nonfiction, social observation, and personal memoir. It asks who counts as "the people" in a nation that declared all men equal 250 years ago, and arrives at an answer that is clear-eyed and, ultimately, unsentimental.

The author donates $5 from every sale to 1Thing.org, a New Jersey-based nonprofit dedicated to combating anti-Asian hate crimes.