on being chinese in an american culture, being american in a chinese body

I was watching this documentary produced in part by 88 rising and felt drawn to tears. It goes through the stories of many kinds of Chinese heritage - ABC, Singaporean, immigrant, overseas student, etc. - and questions them about their identity and their relationship to home. I was a little struck by how much I related to so many accounts: the Formula One racers who found community in each other, the teenager who finds her differences in her art production, the students who think about where home is when Chinese New Year rolls around.

This year for Chinese New Year was the first time I’d celebrated the festival without family with me. When my sister and I moved to New York, we started hosting it together, bringing a bunch of friends from work or school (COVID-safe). We usually brought other Chinese children of immigrants who hadn’t returned home, and made dumplings together. This year I continued the tradition but without my sister, who was traveling at the time. This year also marked my first Chinese New Year without my mom, who by so many accounts, gives you the feeling of home.

It is weird to be in a place without home. I love my apartment in so many ways but it is not home. Even home is not home anymore - we’ve moved out of the house that I grew up in. Most of my friends have left the town I grew up in, with little indication that they’d move back. After all, that’s what we bonded so closely over: leaving and finding our own place in the world.

But in terms of the Chinese American experience, I find that question so pervasive. There are too many instances where I wonder what I consider home or my country, and what others expect to hear when I say that.

For instance:

I was hit on recently while walking the streets of New York. He commented that I’m beautiful, and then asked where I’m from. The answer is, from Georgia, but what he wanted was, from China.

When I’m at school, where many students travel from out of state to live in New York, I often introduce myself as being from Georgia, and people say they didn’t expect that. They thought I was from New York, or Boston, or the Bay Area, or some other place that Chinese Americans have roots in.

I was meeting a new mentee for a club program. When I asked why they wanted to speak with me, they mentioned that they saw my last name and thought, there’s a Chinese girl I can speak to. We spoke for an hour in Chinglish.

I recently traveled to Europe and was often greeted in Chinese or plainly asked what language I preferred. I noticed there were a lot of Chinese translation options available. It was nice to be asked, but it goes back to the question: where do you expect I’m from?

When Chinese people ask me in Chinese where I’m from, my answer is Shanxi or Hebei or Beijing - my parents were born and raised in Beijing, but their ancestral roots are tied to those two provinces. What is my ancestry then? Am I a Beijing-er by accent or by accident? Can I say that I’m from Shanxi, my “老家” too?

When Chinese people ask me in English where I’m from, my answer is the metro Atlanta area. When American people ask me in English where I’m from, my answer is the metro Atlanta area - but I know they’re expecting me to say China (or Korea, because of where I grew up).

The list goes on in many other situations. What do I answer? What do I think is best?

I was raised to be multicultural in that way. In many facets of life, my parents adopted a Chinese mindset to my upbringing: there’s a sense of what is 懂事 and what is not. There’s a sense of 尊重 that doesn’t translate over entirely. There’s the more commonly known 面子 concept. And I grew up going to Chinese school and learning about all those things in these (Chinese) government-sponsored workbooks about Confucianism and idioms about 曹操 that only a childhood in those workbooks can relay.

When I took a class at NYU as part of my required coursework, I chose “Chinese and Japanese Traditions” thinking it’d be relatively easy to understand. And it was - but it also demonstrated how strange those notions were to an American or more largely Western understanding. As close as we are in an increasingly globalized world, those underlying notions continue to be strangers. I struggle to verbalize the ways I feel different and the reasons why, other than that they were the way I was raised.

But when I go back to China, as I used to quite often, I feel other in different ways too. I thought it was quite funny once when a cousin commented that my English was so good - despite being born, raised, and educated in America. Or when I’m told that I appear American because I make too much eye contact - despite being full blooded Chinese.

And these frustrations pour over in America too. I had a half-Chinese friend at one point who I realized I held to a different standard because the half of her that was Chinese. I could speak perfect Mandarin with her mother, but when I thought in some ways that she had appropriated her heritage (because of her limited understanding of Chinese or Chinese customs in the first place), I had to bring myself back. Why did I have the right to judge that? Does my half-more Chinese-ness make me qualified, when we’re both born in the USA?

And if you ask my dad, he’d say that I’m Chinese. But I would argue, there are so many ways that I’m not Chinese. And regardless of how much I like to think that I can be both Chinese and American, it is the limit of my appearance and my customs. It can’t be helped when I travel the world. It can’t be helped when I meet new people.

Maybe there is no home and there is comfort in that. Or maybe I just have to pick one and stick to it - while feeling a sense of falsehood anyways. I think there is comfort in not knowing and not having to choose, but it feels increasingly like we are made to choose. As much as immigration and diversity is important to our society, where does being in the middle stand?

In some ways I am also scared of accessing the Chinese-American identity that way. Whenever I talk about it I cry. It is so close to home and so scary to come to terms with, because it means reconciling what the United States has historically done to us and thought of us. Even from the Chinese lens, there are so many regions and provinces that self-select and protect too. I’m “from Beijing” - what do you think of me now? And not to mention, that purely based on language, there are so many terms and colloquialisms I don’t know: curse words or words about sex or words about drugs that I’ve never been introduced to. Even this last winter, I tried to ask my dad what the Chinese word for “hungover” was - and no good answer.

I keep thinking it’s the perpetual question of this time in my life. Through some work and more exposure to the world, hopefully I’ll come to understand myself better, but it is a hard balance to strike. Where do my principles lie? Where do I want them to? Endless.