I have never really considered or called myself an American. One, I may have been born there but I never lived in the US until four years ago. Second, I never really felt like I belonged in a country where no matter how well I spoke the language or picked up the culture, some people still needed to asked me where I was from originally.
Take for example, a good American friend of mine from here (L: forgive me for sharing this even after you explained it to me, it's too good an example) looked at a group photo of mine from college, and said something along the lines of all my friends having been internationals. Nope. All the people in the photograph had been Americans except maybe one/two. Many were Americans I think who had never in their lives left America. Ethnically my friends from the photo (taken after a performance - bhangra/hiphop) had been South Asian, African-American, Hispanic, etc. otherwise all those considered minority population and hence the question about their nationality. But what a question, and surprisingly all the way out here, even in Bangladesh!
Therefore, whatever problems Bangladesh may have, and we have quite a few - one of the poorest, highest crime rate (eh...one of the top i suppose), apparently even a terrorism breeding ground- I still belong and always will to Bangladesh first. If nothing else, nobody questions my nationality or ethnicity when I go about in this country. Also, we may be small and we may be poor but we did fight and gain our independence and the right to speak our mother-tongue.
P.S. I guess it's unfair of me to not add this: the friend I wrote about earlier did tell me that she assumed I was international (because I did not grow up in the US and we clearly had different definitions of identity/nationality etc.) and also the fact that all students of color at her college had been international students, is what made her ask me whether all the people in my photo had been international students also.
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