When I was young, I thought being “Chinese” meant we were all nerds, mannerless, loud, and were the ones to bargain at retail stores. My family was never like this, so I was a bit confused. However, this is what society taught me to believe. The traditional oriental lifestyle was strangely depicted in my picture books growing up: long braided hair, pale skin, and dresses known as qipaos. The occasional “Ni Hao Kai-Lan” was closely correlated to my identity of being “Chinese.”
As years passed, I slowly began realizing how different I was, and how much I wished to be an “American.” My parents always told me that though I was born in America, I was “purely Chinese,” and that stuck with me forever. How I looked determined how others saw me, and how I fit into society. People are not born carrying stereotypes. They are picked up throughout their life. The first stereotype I was associated with was in third grade, when a short plump boy assumed that I had to have been smart because “you’re Asian.” My peers would ask me, “how’d I do better than you? You’re Asian?” I laughed with them, gripping onto myself, not thinking much about it. Feeling a bit awkward and uncomfortable, I forced myself not to wince visibly. Of course, knowing that being “Asian” meant “smart” did not necessarily offend me. It just felt strange. The snowballing of stereotypes progressed about the way I looked, the food I ate, or the typical “Asian” mannerisms. The stereotypes from my peers made me resent my culture, and feel ashamed. Every day I was brainwashed by my peers of what it meant to be an Asian American, as most people could not even tell us apart. I learned from my peers that Chinese people ate dogs or Chinese people ate rats. I did not even learn that from my parents. Everything was ethnocentric and I felt ashamed.
Though I was ashamed, I realized that I could not run away from my culture. Things began changing when my grandfather came to live with us when he got cancer. My grandfather was a strange character, and he loved to talk. Slowly I conversed with him every day, and I would listen to stories about his life. The same culture through someone else\’s eyes looks completely different. Growing up in the United States left me with a one-sided view on my culture, and my grandfather showed me the other perspective by sharing his stories. He spoke mostly about how wasteful we Americans were but also how lucky we were. Growing up, my grandfather almost starved to death twice, surviving only because his neighbor brought him a 20-pound bag of flour. His life consisted of faking his age to work at 12, dropping out of school at the end of elementary, and becoming the manager of a roast-duck shop soon after his wife got pregnant. He would remind me of how fortuitous it was to grow up in such a privileged place and how I never had to worry about coming home with an empty stomach.
My true understanding of Chinese culture came mostly from my grandfather. He would usually start off the day with a “chen yu” which was a chinese idiom that described certain vices and virtues in life. One of my favorite idiomatic expressions were “si hai wei jia” which directly translated to “live as a hobo,” while actually meaning, “make every place your home.” My grandfather shared stories of his many near-death experiences growing up. I never realized how lucky I was, and that my culture came with so much depth. The stereotype of “all Asians are smart” transformed into “my family is extremely hard working,” the “small-eyed” morphed to “unique features that suited our faces,” and the “dog-eating” became “an endless exploration of all the wonderful dishes my culture had created.”
My idea of being a Chinese American was shaped by my peers rather than the realities of my identity. The words from outsiders that never understood my culture showed me a single-sided view, leading to my disapproval and embarrassment towards being Chinese American. Sometimes I would run home and scream to my dad, “Why can’t I watch TV? Why do I have to go to Chinese School? I wish I was never Chinese!” My dad would never think much about it, and instead he would tuck me to bed and say, “This is who we are, and life is not easy.” To this day, I will never forget the way people stared at me when I began eating my homemade lunch grandma packed or anything that was not “normal” to them. But from learning about my identity everyday, I never seemed to care anymore about the judgement. I stared deeply into my peers’ eyes and giggled as I said, “What? It’s delicious.”
When you grow up in a completely different place than your family, you do feel left out and incomplete. But conforming and listening to stereotypes from everyone else is not the real way to understand your culture. It is through natural experiences and living life with empathy that made me understand what it meant to be Chinese-American. We established our own community within an unfamiliar society and we continue to construct and mold our identity in this country.