It’s spring break, 2022, and I’m in Spain. We just got off an 11-hour flight, and my friends and a couple of people we met at our hostel are sitting at a tapas bar. At the table next to us, there’s a middle-aged woman with long wavy hair and crinkles in her eyes, giggling and pointing her finger at me: “Chino, chino, chino!” She seems delighted.
Her daughter turns towards me. “Sorry, that’s my mother. We’re from Argentina, and I think my mom’s never seen an Asian person.” Sensing her genuine amusement, I smiled at her and nodded, not knowing a lick of Spanish myself. I could tell she meant no harm; she was simply entertained.
Afterward, our friends who were with us, from Holland and Germany, said, “What she did was so fucked up.”
“Oh, is it?” I hummed. It was strange, but I’d seen worse. “Yeah, I guess I’m used to it.”
They looked at each other. “How bad is it in America?”
“It depends. Where I grew up it was pretty bad.”
There’s a scene in Minari where the family visits the local church for the first time. They are in a town in rural Arkansas, and the only Asian family there. “What’s that?” Two white children point at a series of random objects and ask the young daughter, Anne, what their Korean translation would be. They giggle as Anne impassively and patiently recites the words for cookies, grapes, and bread for their entertainment.
When I told my friends in Los Angeles that this same thing happened to me, they were shocked. But kids are kids, and kids are curious about the things they don’t know. Where I grew up in Oklahoma, that just happened to be the color of my skin, the shape of my eyes.
“Tell me if this is Chinese.” My second-grade classmate then drew lots of horizontal slashes crisscrossed with vertical ones, or to my second-grade brain, an elaborate tic-tac-toe grid.
“Hmm, it kind of looks like the word for ‘well’,” I offered. I then drew out the word 井 for him.
Mason was my friend, and he was a sweet kid. I wanted to be nice. I reasoned that it did kind of look similar.
This sort of ritual was not uncommon, and it wasn’t just Mason who would ask me. It also wasn’t just random scribbles on paper. Sometimes it was verbal. “Is this a Chinese word?” And then they would unleash a stream of gibberish of “ding, dang, dong” and similar sounds.
I don’t remember how many times it happened, or knowing how to feel. I don’t remember if I was annoyed, or embarrassed, or just curious — curious why this part of me was such an object of fascination. I just knew that every time it happened, I was reminded that I was foreign to them.
We’re on a bus. It’s either kindergarten or first grade. I’m sitting alone, and the boy in front of me turns around. “How come your eyes are so small and ugly?” he says.
I’m indignant. My eyes are small, yes, but that doesn’t have to make them ugly.
“Well, why are your eyes so big and fat?”
“At least they’re not squinty.”
“At least they’re not buggy!”
I learned a lot that day. I learned that I was different, and that my otherness was tied to the way I looked. I learned that because I looked different, it also excluded me from being pretty.
This back and forth went on for a bit. Our chaperone sat two seats ahead of us. She was also alone and within earshot. In retrospect, maybe she truly didn’t hear this exchange. But the impression left on me was clear: when it came to defending myself, I was on my own.
I’m in the third grade. We’re playing Poptropica in the computer lab. I look over my friend Vivian’s shoulder, one of the only other Chinese Americans in my grade, and I notice that the avatar she was building had blonde hair.
“Why is yours blonde?”
“Hm? Oh, I don’t know. I just think it’s prettier.”
The next time I was redesigning my Poptropica character, I changed mine to blonde, too. I don’t remember if I kept it or not.
“Ching chang chong!” Kyle yelled. He pulled his eyes back in a gross imitation of my face. This happened regularly in the fourth grade. Later that year, I found out his grandfather was Chinese. I was surprised.
I imagined what it would be like if I had a kid, who then had a kid, who then grew up to alienate and bully other children for the color of their skin, who looked just like me. That made me sad.
In the tenth grade, Kyle called me a chink. I whispered to my friend that his grandfather was Chinese, and that I was afraid that if I married someone who wasn’t Asian, I would have grandkids like him. “Kyle,” my friend yelled back, “you’re the reason she’ll never marry a white guy.”
If you listened to the array of substitute teachers trying to make out my name on the roll sheet as they called attendance, we would begin a painful and yet familiar ritual. First, a pregnant pause reserved exclusively for ethnic names. Then, a creative barrage of how you could rearrange the letters of the name “Mei” — I’ve gotten “Mee-uh”, “Mye-uh, “Mee”, and my favorite, the most faithfully Anglican reading to the letters in Mei: “Mee-eye.”
“Here,” I responded. There wasn’t any point in correcting them. Sometimes they were embarrassed, sometimes they didn’t care. Sometimes they were politely curious about how it should have been pronounced. The most interesting interactions happened when they wanted to know how to pronounce my last name. This was much more of an endeavor, and it would go something like this:
“How do you say your last name?”
“Zayng.”
“Is that how you really pronounce it?”
“Well, no,” I would say sheepishly. “But it’s kind of hard to say, so I just say Zayng.”
“Tell me how you really say it.”
“Okay, it’s Zhang.”
Then they would make some careful attempts at the correct pronunciation, through which I would gently correct them during however long they decided to stretch this out for. They were being genuine, and I didn’t realize this before, but by taking the time and effort to learn how to pronounce my name properly, they afforded me a sort of equal respect and dignity. But I didn’t realize this in elementary school. I just felt more uncomfortable the longer this ordeal took, especially since it was in front of the entire class; in a twisted way, this respect for learning my name came at the cost of the discomfort of being singled out for it.
Summer of 2022. I was sitting with a couple of my close friends in a near-empty Chinese restaurant in Seattle. We had all come to know each other through an internship at a tech company, which, culturally, I would describe as a career for overachieving yuppie-types who also value having ample time for diverse hobbies such as hiking, bouldering, or being a foodie. One of them grew up overseas, so I suspected they were unaware of the sort of locally grown racism I encountered in Oklahoma.
I was trying to explain cultural appropriation to them. They were confused as to why Asian Americans bristled at white people donning cultural garb. My Brazilian friend, who grew up in Dubai, shared that her close Indian friend gifted her a sari. She knew that she could wear this in India, and it would be fine. I imagined a picturesque scene of her walking along some unnamed street in India wearing the sari and local Indian women smiling approvingly. Since I had never been to India, the 2-second clip in my head was probably more akin to AI-generated art.
“I just don’t understand why it’s a big deal here. People in India would view it as appreciation. And people in America would change their minds about me wearing it if they knew I got it as a gift. But why should that make a difference?”
The classic example I bring up as cultural appropriation is the prom dress incident. In 2018, a white girl from Utah wore a qipao as her prom dress. She had no relation to Chinese culture. In the prom photos, she and her exclusively white group of friends were seen bowing mockingly, all with their palms pressed together. Asian Americans were incensed.
“Yes,” she countered, “but mainland Chinese people online didn’t find any issue with it. In fact, they liked it and thought it was cute. Why are Asians in America so sensitive about this?”
A myriad of emotions flashed within me. I felt indignance, and with it the need to appear rational and detached as I intellectually condemned this prom dress action as factually racist. But on a deeper level, I felt an inward pressing need to defend the legitimacy of the pain I experienced as an Asian American. Both are hard to do, especially at the same time.
“I mean,” she continued, “cultural appropriation is a sensitive rebrand of cultural exchange. Take the t-shirt for example. Without trade and cultural exchange, and other people trying on other culture’s clothing, things like this wouldn’t exist.”
I felt a haze of emotions. A sort of deep forlornness at the idea of a qipao being compared to a t-shirt. I knew this wasn’t even her intention. Regardless, I could feel tears welling up.
I don’t even know why my friend’s t-shirt comment made me so upset, and I was even a little bit ashamed at how wounded I felt. I stared up at the celadon wall, paint peeling at the edges, seemingly at nothing, willing my thoughts and my heart to slow down. I knew that they were waiting for me to respond, but I stayed quiet, for fear that if I spoke I really would begin crying.
And that, in my mind, would have shown how emotional and therefore irrational I was, which would then extinguish any ethos I had in this conversation. I felt it was imperative that I could justify my pain in a wholly “rational” way for them to afford it respect. Somehow, by showing my pain, I feared it would invalidate my pain.
The reason that Asian Americans found the qipao prom dress to be culturally appropriating while native Chinese people found it charming is, as most racial dynamics boil down to, due to power. In China, the majority of people there are, unsurprisingly, Chinese. What this means is that being Chinese was the norm. Children were not bullied, belittled, ostracized, exoticized, or othered for being Chinese. You couldn’t be traumatized for being Chinese in China.
In America, this was the opposite case. My Chinese-ness was an indicator of my foreignness, my otherness. My small eyes? Ugly. My yellow skin? Strange. My name? Unpronounceable.
As my classmates waved around their circular ham and square cheese slices in plastic Lunchable packages, the dumplings I brought home from lunch were met with bewildered faces and a comment of “stinky”. I used to be mortified at wearing my qipao out. I felt a sense of shame that I didn’t belong to society the way my white peers did, and wearing a qipao felt like an excruciating way of admitting this fact.
If a Chinese girl wears a qipao in China, it is fine. If a white girl wears a qipao in China, it is also fine. If a Chinese girl wears a qipao in America, she is at best more exotic, and at worst an alien. So, why would it be alright for a white girl to wear a qipao, especially with no association with that culture, and have it be seen as quirky or cute when a Chinese girl wearing that cultural dress is a walking reminder that she does not belong?
I wish I could’ve articulated this in that moment, at the dining table with the checkered tablecloth. But I was frazzled, and eventually the conversation drifted ahead, though I was frozen in place.
Sometimes, I feel like I’m not a real minority. On one hand, I’m clearly traumatized enough by my Asian American experiences that I’m writing this. On the other hand, I go to USC, and I’m not a rare breed in white-collar jobs. I live a relatively cushy life: “I should stop complaining,” I tell myself, “after all, other people have it worse.” I find myself disregarding my own trauma because I’m a “model minority.” Because my identity and my achievements are weaponized to put other minorities down, I sometimes feel I cannot rightfully claim the title of being a minority, which is completely unfair; my experiences tell me I am, even if my inclination is to invalidate myself.
I hope people can better understand this specific sort of pain of Asian otherness. What has imprinted on me from a young age is a deep sense of being a “perpetual foreigner,” that even if I’m a natural-born citizen and I speak perfect English, that, to them, I’ll never be truly “American”.
Although I can never be the perfect, quintessential blonde American girl, there is something inextricably American about me. I’ve only discovered this recently, after some international travel, noticing my sigh of relief once I land at an American airport and look up at signs in English with Calibri font and the stars and stripes in the background telling me I’m home. When I’m abroad, I begin to understand how American I am — my accent, my values, the quirks I intuitively understand about a strange holiday, like Thanksgiving.
I’ve only now begun internalizing the fact that I am truly American, even with the slew of identity baggage that I’m still making sense of — and perhaps that makes me all the more American.