It was a hot, dry afternoon in spring 2009. A young boy in an oversized T-shirt and shorts held up by wire sat beneath a tree across from a bamboo office, waiting for a white van. When the International Organization for Migration logo appeared, a crowd surged toward a man who pinned lists to the wall. Everyone searched for a nine-digit case number that would determine their future. The boy found his family's number, ran through the refugee camp in Nepal, and burst into his hut shouting, "Mama, we're going to Umerica." He couldn't pronounce "America," but he knew it meant possibility.

His mother, who had buried four children and lost everything in Bhutan's ethnic cleansing of over 100,000 ethnic Nepalis, heard something different. America meant leaving behind the last fragile threads of a past she still mourned. Two years later, after medical screenings and security interviews, the family boarded a plane not to Cleveland but to Twin Falls, Idaho - a town the boy couldn't find on a map.

Now a naturalized citizen and journalist, Lok Darjee has reported on a Rohingya refugee whose death after being abandoned by US border patrol was ruled a homicide, on mothers separated from their children, and on a refugee program that ground almost to a halt while making exceptions for white South Africans. He asks: How do you love a country whose government fails its ideals? How do you love neighbors who welcomed your family with kindness, then voted for policies that might have kept you out?

The answer, he writes, is in holding two truths together. Small-town Idaho taught him to drive, change a tire, and ask someone to prom - then many of those same people voted for Donald Trump. Democracy, he argues, asks us to practice both honesty and grace. America has always contained extraordinary compassion and profound contradiction, from slavery to exclusionary politics. Loving it doesn't require ignoring either; it requires holding them together.

He concludes: Somewhere, another child is waiting for a list on a bamboo wall. He hopes they still whisper "America" as a country where impossible beginnings become ordinary lives. That's the America the little boy shouting "Umerica" believed in. It's still the America he believes in.