Many years ago, I worked into the evening at Microsoft. As I waited for a task to finish on my computer, I thumbed through a magazine. It was an issue of A. Magazine, an Asian American-focused magazine. A friend comes by my office to ask a question. After a few minutes, he looks at the magazine cover quizzically, and I respond with, “It’s an Asian American magazine.”
His response shocked me, “You’re the least Asian person I know.” For context, this is a friend who met me shortly after I arrived in Washington years before. He had never heard me speak in any language other than English. I arrived here for my first professional job, and all my friends were people I met at work. Therefore, only two observations indicated that I was of Chinese heritage: my surname and, to a lesser degree, my facial features.
However, I still found that response a bit off-putting. I’m the child of Chinese parents; I spoke Cantonese at home before any other language. The entire blue-collar Cantonese community in South Florida was like an extended family. I worked at around ten different Chinese restaurants. I literally bleed Chinese.
Observing this as my heritage month
As I scroll through posts on my timeline, I see many references to AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) Heritage Month. If I celebrated a cultural community, it’d be this one. May should be my month.
However, ‘Asian’ is not a community in the way many others are. It spans too many languages and cultures. Not all Chinese people can speak among themselves, much less with other nationalities like Japan or Korea. There aren’t unified standards for being ‘Asian’. I’ve often described us as an archipelago, together but distinctly different. I found it profoundly naïve to believe that something as trivial as ‘the Eastern Hemisphere’ can unify us.
Yet some things bleed through. This implicit reverence to ‘the elders’ of the community, even when they spew nonsense, carries through. The strange Asian compulsion to take your shoes off upon entering another Asian person’s home carries through.
I may occasionally utter a single Chinese phrase to my Chinese friends to convey an idea, and they smile and nod in recognition. I consider them my cultural siblings, much like I consider my Korean and Filipino friends my cultural cousins.
Being a part of the community
Each morning, as I prepare for work, I see my reflection in the mirror. When I see myself, I don’t think of myself as Chinese. As I ponder my activities for the day, those ideas do not sound in my head in Cantonese, my first language. I may navigate an entire day without seeing a single Chinese character or hearing a single word in Cantonese.
I won’t tell you that my de facto community is now Caucasian or even American; it is more computer geek than anything else. I didn’t choose to extricate that element from my life; it’s more like a muscle that atrophied from disuse. My Chinese community is like that close friend from college (or your last job) who helped you survive it all. You both vow to keep in touch, but you don’t. Life gets in the way; other tasks become more immediately important.
Occasionally, that community comes back in a way that blindsides me. I could be when a friend brings his lunch to work, leftovers from the night before. I can see the distinct dish of scallion-and-ginger chicken, and it makes me homesick for my mom’s cooking. Or it could be a friend who’s ailing from his workout when I get the distinctive whiff of Tiger Balm. Sometimes I notice that I respond differently to the same situation than others do. For many years, I believed I was uniquely wired differently; in recent years, I came to understand that it’s my “collectivism versus individualism” struggle.
I occasionally reflect on the words “the least Asian person I know”. I don’t operate in those circles; my Asianess is not something I have built into my life or routine, but I still feel guilt when I hear them. My relationship with my community is charged and nuanced.
The cost of membership
On an ordinary day, I may turn to look at my wife as we eat pizza out of a cardboard box and sit in front of our television. In a quiet moment of reflection, I recognize how extraordinarily lucky I am that she found my writing through a simple web search. She persistently reminds me that if you can be anything in this world, always be kind. She has turned someone with a beaten and calloused soul into a kinder person. She makes me a better person.
I have no interest in discussing how it is ‘wrong’ for me to be with her for me to preserve my cultural or racial purity. Many years ago, a close friend of the family instructed me to “go back to China and find a bride; it’d make your mom happy.” That moment filled me with profound disappointment. I am extraordinarily lucky to be with her; I don’t care if she has blue eyes and comes from European descent.
As I grew up, I was often called an ABC (American-Born Chinese). That’s the polite term. Other terms include banana (yellow on the outside, white on the inside). Among the Cantonese, they often used Jook-sing, a derogatory term for an effectively half-breed. It didn’t matter that I was full-blooded Chinese, and I spoke Cantonese fluently. I never learned the 2000-word alphabet to read and write Chinese; that made me a second-class citizen.
For me to spend any time learning to read and write a language that I’ll rarely read or write is logistical nonsense. Furthermore, any conversation that leads to criticism of my wife simply because she’s not Chinese will get you excommunicated.
Your most authentic self
If I have any advice in my years on this Earth is this. I’ll fly in the face of Asian collectivism and tell you that you’re allowed to be happy. There are nearly 1.5 billion Chinese people. It is not uniquely your job to preserve Chinese cultural or racial purity; 1,499,999,999 other people can pick up that torch. You owe it to yourself (and everyone else) to be the best person you can be. This is often what we call your most authentic self.
The label ‘Asian’ describes me; it doesn’t define me. ‘Frank’ is a complex Venn diagram of many overlapping circles. These include circles for: geek, blogger, toastmaster, AFOL, and yes… even Chinese, and American. Do not allow even one of these to gnaw at your self-esteem. Listen to the voices that have earned the right to be close to your heart; ignore the haters.
To borrow from Brené Brown (as she refers to Teddy Roosevelt’s “Citizen in a Republic” speech), be the person in the arena, not the one in the cheap seats. Be brave with your life, ignore those who aren’t.