In this, I am like many ethnic stereotypes of mothers: When I hear people are unhappy, I want to make them food.
My kitchen became smoky as I made fried rice tonight, and I recalled this article about college students or college-educated kids moving into cheap apartments in Chinatown and complaining about feeling alienated by their neighbors who weren't the Model Minority chinks or the (half-white) Asian girlfriends of white hipsters. They complained about the pervasive smells of fish and 'ethnic' cooking.
I was born in Maryland, right outside of 'the nation's capital', which is a phrase I would hear a lot in slogans on television and radio. The marble memorials became a place I was more often just forced to visit as we showed visiting cousins around. I resented the Air and Space Museum.
Though American from birth (though I spent much of my first year in Hong Kong), I was the son of immigrants and a shy boy, so I never really picked up a lot of things other kids took for granted. I didn't get a lot of American traditions, but I also could not read Chinese characters or really follow the arcane Hong Kong movies or serials and I hated the taste of lotus paste in the moon cakes that came out around the autumn moon festival.
Part of the strangeness of neo-paganism for me was this reclamatory celebration of equinoxes and solstices, when these were already events to have big family dinners on. I navigated a space between American and Chinese, which were separated identities.
It is hard to explain this: It is not that I vividly experienced and recognized this dissonance as a child. My life was seamless in moving between school and my parents' home and my grandmother's. But my life was also a strange mix of peering at the inscrutable lifestyles of my classmates with American families and playing by myself in the long hours at Maa Maa's house as my parents worked.
I found my own way to fill the time there and, later, at my own house where my maternal grandparents watched me. I carried around massive books of dinosaurs and marine animals and filled notebooks with Pokémon of my own creation. I played Sailor Moon or Power Rangers. I did not really know about parties or sleepovers, but I knew all 151 Pokémon and I knew about sea anemones and I knew there was no such thing as brontosauruses because I knew someone got confused when they found an apatosaurus fossil.
And I never knew what a meatloaf really was or what it involved or why it was consumed until a few years ago. Meatloafs are still strange to me. Meanwhile, rice was an excruciatingly boring part of every dinner and I didn't understand how my classmates ate dinner or why rice was something that could be unusual or a 'favorite food'. Maa Maa pursued me to eat the eyes of the fish on those weekends as my parents worked weddings, and my sister was always the one more willing to eat new things.
It never occurred to me that this guy who harassed me was racist. He would talk about having called my home and my mother picked up to say, "Flied lice! Flied lice!" It was annoying and I ignored him, but it didn't occur to me to categorize these actions as 'racist'. They just were. And my mother worked in an office; if anyone was picking up at home, it would be my father.
In time, I would become bitter at the dissonance. As I became tired of the Lincoln Memorial, I became tired of being unable to be American without the 'Asian dash'. And this anger turned inwards in something I only now recognize as 'internalized racism' and I wanted to be Not Chinese. I never recognized or thought about what I would be without my Chinese ethnicity, except a blank ethnicity means whiteness in our white supremacist society, and I think I understood that on a base level.
And it was also more than that. "I hate being Chinese," I said to my mother once on one of my family's forced walks through the neighborhood to save us children from our fatness. Her response was quiet and denying and ultimately irrelevant. It was the summation of my fourteen-year-oldness.
It was me responding to the overwhelming nature of the world, of so many intersecting ways of being and living. Solving being me. It was responding to a home I was quietly, desperately needing to escape and to hating my body and to a society where it was so much easier being white and to being simultaneously in and out of the closet.
And in more time, I would come to settle in being a gay/queer Chinese American, with Hong Konger parents and villager grandparents. I would learn to excise my racialization as 'Asian' or this 'Chinese' that subsumed multiple East Asian identities into one ignorant term, my orientalization, my treatment in a racist society, all that from my cultural heritage. I would learn to use a wok and reconnect with a language that is clumsy from me. How I began to get to this point is a different story, one that involves cemeteries and butterflies.
As the soy sauce quickly bubbled away in my wok, I relished it all. I felt a wild desire to be living with good friends who will let me buy groceries for the household and cook for them all every night. I wanted to feed people. I have a brownie in the fridge that I plan to microwave, but tonight, I really desire a honey bun from my new favorite Chinese bakery hidden in Rockville. Or a Portuguese egg tart. Or one of their chocolate croissants. I think I have to go put that brownie in the microwave now.
It is not about being proud of my heritage, though that is part of it, nor about 'balancing' separate identities. It's about not having separate identities. It's about taking all these social forces and identities and assumptions and hierarchies and oppressions and deconstructing them for myself, shedding them like a moth who has pupated for far too long.
I am not free of intersectionality, of course, or kyriarchy or privilege or oppression. That is not what I mean. More accurately, I can
see it all more clearly, because I can begin to emerge from double consciousness. What was dissonance becomes integration. What was resentment becomes recognition. I can see myself more clearly now, oppressor and oppressed and how neither excuses the other.
I should try to not make fried rice while in my pajamas. The smell clings to my shirt, my skin. Though I will launder this smell off, I viciously savor being that guy who fills the apartment and the hall with scary, foreign-smelling smoke. And I am still that guy when I make IKEA meatballs and pasta in alfredo sauce tomorrow night.
