When my grandfather died, in 2014, at ninety-six, my mother asked me if I wanted anything from the small, one-bedroom apartment that he and my grandmother, who had died a few years earlier, shared for nearly their entire American lives. Thinking about a tangible object that I could hold and cherish felt vaguely therapeutic, a way to displace more recent memories of a voice that had hoarsened and a proud handshake that had ceased to be viselike and painful. At some point, he had taken a ceramics class at the local community center. He had come home with a planter in the shape of an Uncle Sam hat. I loved its imperfections, its impractically large size, and all the dents and imprints that gave such a kitschy item a feeling of history. I liked imagining an entire class full of seniors all adding their own flourishes to a cornucopia of ceramic Uncle Sam hats. My grandfather’s featured a red bow painted along the base of the crown, an indented blue star in the front, and textured streaks along its thick brim. I’m sure this object held little meaning to him, and my grandparents never used it for plants. But I had always wanted it for myself, to replace their years of loose change with my own.

They had come to the United States from Taiwan in the nineteen-eighties, a decade after my parents. They returned to Taiwan just once, to visit their old neighborhood; they had found a comfortable place in the senior citizens’ community of Sunnyvale, California. They mastered the South Bay’s network of buses and libraries, figured out all the best places to eat. They watched the news in two different languages. Along one wall of their bedroom was a bookshelf lined with softcover diaries, filled with words I could not read. The only way I could distinguish them was by the homemade book jackets—some of them repurposed the local newspaper, others came from old wallpaper. My grandparents lived in a Chinese-speaking world, which is why it was strange when I went to lunch with them at the local senior center and realized that they had a more diverse array of friends than I did.

After my mom mailed me the planter, she told me that she had found all sorts of things we didn’t know existed. Apparently, my grandfather had taken a drawing class, too; there was a folder of pencil sketches depicting, among other things, a soda can, a canister of cheese puffs, Queen Elizabeth. And she found a few pages of notes that he had taken when he was studying for his citizenship exam, some twenty years ago. There was a diagram of where people sat in a courtroom, the path from district courts to the Supreme Court, a list of committee organizations within the major parties. One sheet of paper identified ten attributes of “Dictatorial Government.” Under the title “A Creed of Democracy,” there were a few pages of tenets: the “improvability of all men,” “a sense of belongingness,” a defense of the individual “against exploitation by special privilege or power.”

I didn’t recognize this document, just the spirit that animated it. Mostly, I was drawn to my grandfather’s beautiful penmanship, full of elegant, precise ovals—a hand accustomed to the tiny curvatures of Chinese characters luxuriating in cursive’s ostentatious loops and smeared dots. I recognized it from the red envelopes that my grandfather gave me every year for Chinese New Year, adorned with Abraham Lincoln quotes and other motivational homilies. Here it was as though his script were aspiring to match the words themselves: “We believe in and will endeavor to make a democracy which protects the weak and cares for the needy that they may maintain their self-respect.” A democracy that “holds that the fundamental civil liberties may not be impaired even by majorities.”

The author’s grandfather’s transcription of “The Creed of Democracy.” Photograph courtesy the author Photograph courtesy the author

Only recently did I bother to find out where these words had come from. “The Creed of Democracy” was written in 1940 by the faculty of the Teachers College at Columbia University. It was a moment when American entry into the Second World War seemed, to many, inevitable, and the language of patriotic duty, of an American way of life worth defending, was everywhere. In 1941, William Russell and Thomas Briggs, two members of the Teachers College faculty, published “Creed” as part of a book called “The Meaning of Democracy.” “Democracy with its concern for the welfare and happiness of all mankind, regardless of birth, inheritance, status, color, or creed, with its respect for human personality, and its faith in the wisdom of pooled judgments is not a natural way of life,” they wrote in the book’s introduction. “It is always in competition with the desire of the strong to dominate the weak and thus gain special privileges and superior advantages for themselves.” Democracy, they continued, could not be “imposed” or forced upon a people. It required a sense of purpose and faith that we acquire gradually, by studying history, renewing our commitments to one another, and, most importantly, simply living together.

Russell and Briggs acknowledged that the “Creed,” which consisted of sixty “items,” wasn’t exactly succinct. But each and every item struck them as essential to a thriving, constantly evolving democracy. My grandfather carefully transcribed “Creed,” probably to study it, point by point. Maybe the act of writing it out by hand had a kind of autodidactic effect, familiarizing him with a language he might soon claim as his own. I wondered whether he took these statements as rough guidelines or fixed rules—and whether he recognized that the immigrant’s only true faith is in rules, ones that can be memorized and mastered, providing a structure of relief or a path requiring circumvention. I wondered if he understood himself as part of that expansive pronoun “we.”

A couple of weeks ago, the Google Doodle—fast becoming one of our last shared national civics lessons—marked the birthday of the late civil-rights activist Fred Korematsu. Korematsu challenged the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066, which Franklin Roosevelt issued shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The order led to the internment of more than a hundred thousand people of Japanese ancestry—most of them American citizens—in “relocation” camps throughout the Western states. Some resisted the order or flouted a loyalty questionnaire given to detainees, ending up in prison. Others worked with the government, proclaiming this their patriotic duty as Americans; some even fought in segregated units within the American armed forces while their families were stuck in the camps.

Korematsu refused to report for relocation, hiding out in Oakland for a short while before being arrested. Though the A.C.L.U. had been internally split over the issue of internment, largely because of the organization’s close relationship to Roosevelt, it eventually offered to defend Korematsu. By 1944, his case had made it all the way to the Supreme Court. When you don’t grow up seeing too many faces that look like yours in history books or on television, you presume an imagined familiarity with those that do. When I first learned about Korematsu’s path, I looked at him with an affectionate scrutiny, projecting my own sense of the world into the deep past. I came to read a sense of placid kindness in his broad half-smile, a sense of humor in his peaked eyebrows.