Neither Asian nor American
On the 2023 Oscar night, I was at a friend’s K-drama watch party. For the entire night, I was fidgeting, refreshing @theacadamy Instagram non-stop, and broadcasting the new award winners to the room. In yet another unrested scroll, the Everything Everywhere All at Once poster emerged. A surge of thrill rushed down my spine. “Michelle Yeoh got the Best Actress,” I screamed, “and the movie won the Best Picture.”
“Let’s go! Asian representation in Hollywood,” someone shouted.
“I just really like the movie and her acting,” I mumbled.
My excitement for an Asian-cast sci-fi comedy sweeping the Oscars seemed natural. The fact that I look Chinese—and I am Chinese—seemed enough to justify my attachment to the characters on the screen. Just like I was invited to a K-drama marathon, the fact that I come from a different part of East Asia seemed tangential. At the end of the day, we look similar enough to stick with the same group of “other” for the rest of the population. With everything, at everywhere, I am asked to identify myself as Asian in a snap.
I plunged into this self-recognition of Asianness on my first day at Yale, after 18 years of being born and raised in Beijing, China. The college nestled me into a support system of minority groups: Asian American Cultural Center (AACC) sent invites for boba nights, Chinese American Student Association (CASA) hosted parties called Lunar Ball. Only in their emails did I read that my cultural heritage has to be “expressed” or “celebrated,” as if it would be lost without an exuberant parade. The communities I was tugged right into, due to my skin color, keep reminding me that Asian presence is either consciously raised, or buried into oblivion among other vibrant subcultures on campus.
You have to voice up for your community, they say. But what exactly is my community? No one seems to care enough to explain: What does it even mean to be Asian? Is it boba—the milk tea originated in Taiwan in the 1980s, and the transliteration of a Cantonese pun meaning both tapioca balls in the drink and women’s plump breasts? Is it something lunar—the calendar based on moon cycles that marks Chinese festivals, while also used elsewhere like in Jewish culture? Such awfully vague symbols generalize Asian cultures into unity. They carve out a niche to cuddle the insecurity out of lacking in sameness, to fabricate a sense of belonging that borders on self-deception, and to foster friendships contingent on boba shop hang-outs. In fact, even when we narrow Asians down to the Chinese, there is a nuanced yet deep abyss from within the group. Take Lunar New Year as an example: Every year, Yale’s Chinese internationals make dumplings first, clean up the kitchen in AACC, before CASA comes in to make their own dumplings. When my Chinese American friends feel offended upon the omnipresent follow-up “Not California, where are you from from?”, I provide the crisp, satisfying answer: China.
The desire to cling to one another—as clamorous and excessive as it seems today—formed a necessary coalition to combat discrimination in the 1960s. Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement and anti-Vietnam War movements, historian-activists Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee coined and popularized the pan-ethnic term “Asian American.” Prior to their invention, Asians were only refered to with racism and colonialism—“oriental,” “yellow,” “Asiatic,” or “mongoloid.” “Asian American,” as an umbrella term, gathered rallies large enough so that the subgroups no longer vanished into waves of political demonstrations. According to Pew Research Center, the term now describes around 22 million people living in the United States, who trace their roots to over 20 countries in East, Southeast, and South Asia.
Decades after the historically effective construction of Asianness, this shared identity leaves me disoriented. Once in a boba catch-up, I asked a friend if someone was “Asian.” He answered with a smile, “Yes, but a different type of Asian.” I had never felt so ashamed in front of him my entire life, not even when I drunk waddled on High street at three a.m. While we are all engineered to call ourselves Asian, my hardwired association for an East Asian face discounted the fact—which turned out to be the truth—that he was of Indian descent.
My bewilderment continues, when the Yale College brochure counts me as a data point in both the 16.2% of Asian and 11% of international students. I hear my Asian American friends complain about their parents pressing them to go to law school, and my international friends worry about immigration policies making it harder to stay in the U.S. Yes, I grow up in the East Asian tradition of Confucianism and subscribe to the value of education. But I have never quite understood the restless, perpetual, and seemingly indispensable craving for mainstream social approval. In the eyes of the “tiger moms,” living a life equates to throwing oneself into cycle after cycle of cutthroat competition. Only by winning at every step, beating everyone else, can one reach the glamorous, ultimate award of success. The stereotypical Asian parents program their children’s life as if a greedy algorithm in optimization problems: selecting the best option available at every moment. However, compared to Chinese Americans, I witness a much lower percentage of such symptoms in my Chinese international friend circle.
In Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, when Amy Chua calls her controlling parenting style “Chinese”, she is likely referring to the particular taste of Chineseness in her immigrant family. In other words, what drives her ferocious, fully-armed, attack helicopter parenting is a deep sense of insecurity as an outsider, and an incurable fear of being marginalized. The more she strives to fit into a “model minority” template, the more she finds herself in a “bitter clash of cultures” with Western-styled mothers, the farther away she stands from the roots of Chinese culture. The stereotype Chua represents simply maps out a utilitarian, non-cultural affiliated methodology to “make it” in a foreign society. In short, the entire “tiger mom” scheme leans into an Asian American immigrant mindset, not a stayed-home Chinese one.
The frustration doesn’t end with being seen as yet another product of hardcore, borderline abusive family dynamics. As a Chinese international, I worry about being engulfed in a shade of politics. Almost every Yale Daily News article regarding China concerns the Chinese Communist Party—rarely for, overwhelmingly against. Stripped of agency, students appear either as victims of Yale-China relations or objects in political activism. The fact that one comes from China, especially the mainland, leaves her no room to escape from the tinge of red hanging over her head. Political discourse has blended into the backdrop of her everyday existence. Such a close tie between my Chinese identity and the ruling party of my home country acts as a constant reminder: No, you’re not American. This thread of thought ends up entangling with threads of emails in my inbox, from cultural houses and student associations proudly manifesting an Asian, but more importantly, American identity.
When I posted Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Oscar-winning poster to my Instagram story, I saw myself socializing in a boba shop at Yale, a place I used to never visit back in Beijing. I heard my mother calling my wardrobe “too Americanized.” I thought of my Chinese friend recalling his midnight study sessions of football games to “fit in” when he started boarding school in Connecticut. It has finally occurred to me that identity is a curved mirror—a projection of not reality, but self-perception. If we ever aim to look beyond skin colors, the least step we can take now is to recognize the nuanced differences within each reductive, overgeneralized, racially descriptive term. There are endless ways for me to squeeze my Chinese-looking face into a blurry image of Asianness, or a broad canvas of Americanness. However, I still long to tease the trueness of myself out of the affirmative, sweet-sounding “Asian American” label: I am neither Asian nor American.
