[dropcap]I[/dropcap] first noticed it at lunch—how my classmates always brought foods that were different from mine. Their lunchboxes were filled with Nesquik Chocolate Milk, Lunchables of crackers and ham, Cool Ranch Doritos, and string cheese, striped like orange candy canes. The flashy fonts and characters danced as my classmates tore open their shiny wrappers. I gazed longingly between their eats and mine—mushy fried rice in a clunky metal Thermos—wondering why I never got lunches as crinkly or dazzling.
I began to notice other differences. My Hello Kitty bookbag broke the streak of Jansport backpacks that neatly lined the cubbies. On Pajama Day, I showed up to a sea of tank tops and flannel bottoms in my button-up pajama set, its fabric peppered with anime characters. As I waited for the bus, I could see the other students staring and snickering, as if saying, “What are you wearing? Didn’t you get the memo?”
But I hadn’t. I didn’t know of Poptarts or the Olsen twins, nor did I understand the difference between the Orioles and the Steelers. My parents were more concerned with putting wholesome food on the table than indulging in snack food or following American media. And why should they have done anything different? They were forty-something Asian immigrants, content with their ways of life. They already had identities.
As a child, I ached to belong to suburban America. It was a game my classmates played, one of which they knew the rules—but not me. I was a nonparticipant, a foreign spectator in my own community.
Desperate to escape my outsider status, I stopped attending Cantonese school and told my parents I wanted to start buying school lunches instead. At home, I refused to eat rice with my meals. I devoured my first Poptart. I developed a severe aversion to everything Asian, afraid of branding myself un-American.
First and second-generation immigrant children straddle two worlds. We leave home in the morning to engage an entirely different society at school. We all have lunchbox moments. We’re unsure what to do with our motherland’s quirks and flavors. How do we navigate our differences? How do we fit in? Where do we belong? Our parents and classmates both want us to be like them. How do we ration ourselves between two cultures?
Each one of us struggles with these questions. Some of us bury our cultures, like I tried to do. We scrub ourselves clean of alien roots. We forge spaces for ourselves in an all-American narrative. We pretend we are not ourselves. Others proudly retain their homeland’s habits. They hear the snickers of people who don’t understand their mother tongue and snicker right back, unfazed.
There’s no right answer. Merriam-Webster defines “identity” as simply “who someone is.” Maybe you only identify with one of your cultures, whether American or the motherland’s. Maybe you embrace both parts completely. Maybe you’re on a spectrum, or maybe you’re still trying to figure it out. That’s okay, too. Despite the inherent tug-of-war that comes with a hyphenated identity, a true conflict only arises when you feel compelled to be someone else.
It wasn’t until I was fifteen that I learned I could be American without having to prove it. So what if I didn’t go to baseball games or drink chocolate milk with a brown bunny on the bottle? I’m fluent in American English. I possess the naïve individualism characteristic of American teenagers. I was even born and raised on the East Coast. I’m here, and I always have been; that ought to be proof enough.
It took equally long to understand that I could be American without erasing myself: that I was allowed to be Asian, too. I came to these realizations when I met Miriam. A senior in my fashion class, Miriam was a living, walking hub of Asian culture. She had bleached her black hair to a light red and styled it like a cosplay wig, bangs and all. She wore color contacts and dressed like a Japanese schoolgirl, pairing pleated skirts with pastel blouses. While we sewed skirts onto mannequins in class, Miriam passed around her Harajuku fashion magazines and interpreted the captions for us. She loved J-pop and Korean dramas.
An impressionable freshman, I was drawn to Miriam’s passion. Her fascination mostly confused me. It teemed with pride, an emotion I had never attached to my ethnic origins. She owned her Asian identity, a quality I spent my childhood trying to hide. I wanted Superbowl parties and Abercrombie jeans. What did she see in Asian culture?
Curious to answer my question, I picked up a copy of ViVi magazine at the local Chinese supermarket. I was enamored with the glossy pages: the way the entire magazine was built like a lookbook for a music video, the ash blonde Asian models—it excited me for the same reason I had first rejected my motherland: it was all so different. Best of all, it was mine.
I was hooked. Through my borrowed obsessions, I forged a connection to the part of my identity I had once scorned. I had always been Asian-American, but for the first time, I wanted to be.
This summer, my family visited Hong Kong for the first time in fifteen years. On the way to the airport, I asked if we could search the street markets for a set of pajamas. The ones that button up and have character prints, I said. The ones we used to wear as kids.
My mom looked at me from the passenger seat, her brows crinkled in amused puzzlement.
“I thought you hated those.”
I opened another can of Taisun’s grass jelly and imagined the bustling street markets of Kowloon. I wondered what pajama options the vendors would carry. Maybe there would be a pair just like my old ones. I could even haggle with the vendors myself. I smiled. I wondered if they would notice my accent.
Maybe we don’t need to divide ourselves. Maybe we’re Venn diagrams. We exist as the intersect between two cultures, and we can reach into both worlds at our discretion, exploring these parts of ourselves at our own pace. Maybe we don’t need to belong to them: they already belong to us.
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