When I was younger, I told my dad that I wasn't Chinese, that I had no culture. Then I promptly burst into tears. The only holiday we really celebrated in a traditional way was Halloween—the most important Chinese holiday, Chinese New Year, usually landed on a school day, so we were never able to do much more than a red packet of money. I knew no traditional Chinese songs or dances, was foreign to things such as the Chinese yo-yo, had nothing in my room that would suggest my roots. When International day came around, we couldn't even produce a stereo-typically Chinese dish.
Several years later, I now recognize that my conviction that I was not Chinese was the culmination of celebrations of culture and heritage such as International day, which I always spent watching people who didn't even speak Chinese present. Not everything was quite so ostentatious as International day. It was also the journal entry I wrote about Chinese New Year (which my teacher read to the class) which I based off information found not in my memories, but on the internet. It was reading Grace Lin's The Year of the Rat and thinking of my own bedtime stories, which were generally about Archimedes and Galileo.
Nor could I identify with Chinese Americans. I was not Tiger Mom's high-achieving, straight-A children. I was not ashamed of my differences—I had no differences to be ashamed of, I thought—unlike the protagonist of "The All American Slurp". I did not hate Chinese and Chinese school—though I began to complain about Chinese school after understanding that it was the norm—unlike all the narrators of Chinese American short stories I had ever read in English class.
The funny thing was that I didn't really have friends who fit the portrait of a Chinese American either. One of them complained once that she found "The All American Slurp" offensive for making Chinese people seem exotic and ignorant (also, no Chinese person I've ever known slurps soup). I hummed, unwilling to agree or disagree, but I now understand what I disliked about her comment. This was not her story, or my story. This was the author's story, and she had the right to tell it as she understood it.
The real question is, why was my conclusion after reading these works that I wasn't Chinese? Why did we feel exoticized by short stories written by west coast authors a generation older than us? The various nerds I had met in literature who had different experiences from me didn't convince me that I wasn't intelligent (okay, I did have my insecurities, but nothing quite as significant). I understood that there were different ways to be smart, or even American. Why could I be those despite never really having identified with a literary portrayal, but not Chinese?
I find this especially interesting considering I had, on reflection, identified with characters that were intelligent or American, just not in the way I required myself to identify with characters that were Chinese to truly be identification. Hermione's superior memory and work ethic and bushy brown hair didn't mean I couldn't see parts of me in her trust in authority and isolation from her friends. And unlike some, I never really found race a barrier to that "Yes, exactly" sensation—possibly because I'm not one to imagine what people look like. No character is me, but many characters share something with me.
And yet when it came to Chinese Americans—the people who look the most like me, grew up in a culture most similar to mine—I could not look past the differences to the similarities, and could not accept that some of them were very different from me. I could not even look past the lack of traditional ornaments and holidays to the Chinese I spoke or the rice I ate or the sayings I knew or the values that were influenced far more by my Chinese heritage than my American education (perhaps because I thought of foreign cultures as exotic, and these things were not exotic to me). For some reason, I read these people's stories and I wanted to see me.
Looking back, I now think that it was, somewhat ironically, that emphasis on representation in the media. We needed more African Americans, and females, and etc. I learned, in books and movies because African Americans and females and etc. needed to see themselves (among other reasons). And of course the premise to that is that people of your race and your gender are like you, are at least more likely to have experiences limited to that group.
Except it isn't true. Most Chinese Americans—to say nothing of Asian Americans in general—in books and stories are no more similar to me, in my admittedly biased experience, than any other demographic. Even when they have similar experiences to me (Chinese school), they have different reactions to them, and experience them in different ways. The "So Chineez" episode of Fresh Off the Boat comes to mind, in which the mother also feels she isn't Chinese because she doesn't live a "Chinese lifestyle", but she proceeds to start living that (stereotyped) lifestyle (Chinese people rarely actually wear the chi pao, and that's Manchurian in origin). I decided to stop thinking about myself as Chinese, and perhaps would have if my grandmother hadn't fallen into a coma and my mother left to see her out of filial piety more than affection, if I hadn't read my writing and felt the shadow of a culture far older than me or my parents.
Perhaps I truly understood the influences my roots had on me because I found people similar to me, far more similar in all the most important ways (the ways that allow me to have a meaningful debate) than many people of my race, and in whom I could identify culturally inspired differences.
Which is why, though there is great diversity within minority groups, I'm not saying that representation isn't important. There are some experiences that right-handed people, for instance, aren't going to have that left-handed people do, and those experiences have value and expand our worldviews, and this is only more significant when it comes to something like race. And of course, an inaccurate portrayal of a society's demographics leads to an inaccurate view of that society's demographics. But I am not much more likely to identify with those of my racial demographic than those not; my race is not the most important thing about me.
And yet when we talk about minority groups, we tend to pretend that they are homogeneous (women in movies tend to have little diversity in body shape, black criminals—aside from the other issues the media has with this—are a reflection of black culture, Muslims apologize on the behalf of their religion); we tell individuals belonging to that group that they need to represent their group. I once read a comment that the lack of diversity caused by Thomas Jefferson's 70% "Asian" incoming student body was harmful to its students' development, and while this statistic should raise some eyebrows, I would argue that the lack of diversity caused by it being a STEM school with an admissions process is far more significant.
(There are over two hundred fifty "dialects" of Chinese, most of them not mutually intelligible.)
I understand now that just because I can relate more to some non-Chinese people—even characters—and their experiences than to most Chinese American characters and their experiences doesn't mean I'm not Chinese, or Chinese American. To a demographic form, I belong to an even broader category, and I've gotten used to classifying people by race, but saying someone is Asian makes about as much sense as asking if they speak Asian. (You can now ask people if they speak Chinese without sounding ignorant—not Indian, though, which I've heard several times).
Being Chinese or Asian American is part of my identity, and there are some things that can only be understood by second generation children raised with similar cultures and social expectations to mine. But there are many other labels I belong to, and some are far more important to my identity.
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