September 6, 2016 - 20:59
This summer I spent a lot of time thinking about being Asian-American and my proximity to whiteness. Being Asian-American in a town that’s 95% white means that sometimes your race is made invisible, and other times you are the most visible person in the room. And there’s a lot of tension between those two modes of being seen. This summer, people admitted to me that they “forget that I’m Asian.” But I was also called an “Oriental” and I was accused of eating dogs (ugh). So, it’s a confusing experience.
And to be perfectly honest, when I really try to dig deep into being Asian-American (and in my case, a light-skinned East Asian woman) I never feel satisfied. At times it feels hard to racialize myself because I feel like I have so few resources to work with. A lot of the Asian-American academics I read this summer thought of race as being in a different sociological order than class, and from there, proceeded to write a class analysis instead of a racial one. A lot of the conversations that were publicized about Asian-Americanness were about representation in Hollywood and terrible depictions of Asian countries in movies. These are important, but I felt like I was hearing the same things over and over again (from AA folks who als didn’t have much to say about antiblackness in their own communities). It’s an alienating feeling. I felt at times like I couldn’t find the vocabulary to talk about my Asianness. I moved on and began to consider the “honorary whiteness” that is sometimes granted to light-skinned Asians.
I’m not always conscious of my Asianness. My childhood was a time when I refused it and distanced myself from it—my mom recently complained that she doesn’t understand why I hated the Chinese lessons she signed me up for when I was little. I didn’t know how to tell her that it was because I was ashamed of being not-white. I have a really hard time explaining to my mom that even though she didn’t put pressure on me to assimilate, everyone else did and they did a good job because I barely feel a connection to China, even though I’m desperate to feel one now. This summer I was especially conscious of how much I wanted to reconnect with my Chinese heritage because I feel incomplete existing any other way. So when I packed up and moved back to lily-white New Hampshire, I made an effort to actually talk about being non-white, all the while challenging myself to question the space between whiteness and Asianness and the bridge I embody between the two.