A Culture in and of Yourself

You ate only a pound of meat a month?” My cousin, Yuan—looking up from his phone for the first time since we’d sat down at the table—says, interrupting Aunt Li. “That’s crazy. Is it even possible to live on that?”

“We’re alive, aren’t we?” my mom says teasingly. Yuan shakes his head and grunts, and then turns back to his phone. The next day Yuan orders for dinner a 24 oz. steak—one and a half times what our mothers and fathers ate growing up in Cultural Revolution era China—but can’t bring himself to finish it. He leaves half of it on the ta­ble, to be thrown away with used napkins and gnawed corncobs.

“I’m Chinese!” I exclaim. “Just like Mama!”

“No,” my stepdad says, squinting at the sun. He’s cleaning the newly constructed pool in our backyard, and I’m doing my multiplication work­sheet at the table on the deck. “You’re American, just like me.”

“No, I’m Chinese.”

“Well, were you born here?”

I hesitate.

“Yes,” I say, finally.

“Then you’re American.”

“But I don’t want to be American.”

“You should be proud to be American,” my step­dad says, “It’s the land of opportunity.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I say.

“You will when you get a little older, rina”

“I just don’t get why you’re dating her,” Gordon* said.

“Just because you’re enjoying being single right now doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy being in a re­lationship,” Scott—my boyfriend at the time— said, wearily. “Stop trying to convince me that being exclusive is the same as death.”

“No, man,” Gordon said. “I don’t get why you’re dating her. She’s too Asian-looking to be pretty.”

A silence—Scott’s shocked.

“Did you hear yourself just then, Gordon?”

“What?” Gordon put his hands up defensive­ly. “I’m just being honest. We’re friends, man. I should be able to tell you what I think.”

“That’s really wrong of you to say, dude.”

“Don’t get all offended on me. If I would never date an Asian, I should be able to tell you that I would never date an Asian.”

Scott nearly punched him, but left instead. He calls me on the way home, fuming, and tells me what happened—but he’s surprised when I tell him I wish he hadn’t told me.

“I just thought you’d want to know,” he says.

“I know enough already.”

Though at 6 years old I may have staunch­ly called myself Chinese, there was—and still is—a lot about being Chinese that I didn’t com­prehend. In childhood, the annual pilgrimage to my mother’s motherland was a blur of unfamil­iar relatives, apologetic half smiles, and grasp­ing for words everyone would understand. My uncles would tsk quietly at my inability to read and write Chinese characters, and my alabas­ter-skinned cousins would be horrified when I talked about wanting to get tan before I returned to the U.S. But I feel a similar—if substantially smaller—sense of loss being home, in the States. Like many, in elementary school, I begged my mom to let me eat cardboard cafeteria food because the other kids thought my rice and twice-cooked pork was “weird.” And moving to Missouri from Las Vegas—a city with a thriving Asian-American population—I found myself try­ing (and failing) to find authentic Szechuan food and being told, more than once, that my English was just so impressive given my circumstances (I was born in Tallahassee, Florida.)

The pressures and expectations for first gen­eration Asian-Americans that come from non-immigrant Asians and non-immigrant Americans are, in many respects, contradictory: a foreigner no matter where you go, you are told to conform to two different—and extraordinarily irrational—ideals.

Unsurprisingly, these contradictions in expecta­tions often manifest themselves in first genera­tion worldviews. Amongst my friends, it’s com­mon to worry about whether your children will be able to speak your native tongue—especially when your accent is so heavily American—while simultaneously disparaging the exchange stu­dents that speak only Chinese and only to each other. On one hand, we feel a sense of shame for not knowing more about our culture, and on an­other, it feels superior to be more Americanized, to be separated from it.

At times, I’ve had difficulty wrapping my head around my cultural identity. Realizing that my relatives’, classmates’, and societies’ expecta­tions were unconquerable was key to recog­nizing my cultural identity. Sure, there may be a lot about being Chinese that I don’t under­stand—but at the same time, there’s a lot that my cousins who grew up in China, don’t under­stand about it either. There is no “better” and no “worse” Chinese-American. You are not “more” or “less” Chinese (or “more” or “less” American)—you are both, at the same time: it’s a state of being, rather than a spectrum. Though it’s impossible to be completely isolated from external influences, trying your best to recog­nize the societal expectation behind your opin­ions or desires can make the world a lot easier to understanda.

Even though his worldview is not shaped by the hardships of the previous generation, my cousin Yuan is Chinese. And even though she moved to the States and gave up her Chinese citizenship almost 30 years ago, my Mama is Chinese. And even though she’s never had to defend it against racism and prejudice, my aunt is Chinese. And I am Chinese—even though I wasn’t born there.