Caught Between Two Worlds

My Journey Towards Self-Acceptance

Lucia Ku

How would you define the term “American”? Someone who likes to eat hamburgers while they watch a sports channel every weekend? An obnoxiously loud tourist who refuses to learn the local language and who wears the same five t-shirts every week? Of course, these are all just stereotypes that many misinformed people like to imagine when thinking about Americans. What about the word “foreigner”? What specific characteristics would immediately categorize someone as “not American”? How would one be able to tell if someone actually grew up in a foreign country? Perhaps they could draw a conclusion based on whether or not they had an accent, the way they were dressed, or their mannerisms. Either way, the only sure way to know is to directly ask the person. However, like most Asian Americans, I never got the privilege of being able to clarify where I was from. And even in those rare chances that I did, the questions were all based on preconceived assumptions that I was a foreigner. By “foreigner,” I do not just mean it in the literal sense, but also in the sense that neither the “American” world I was born into nor the “Asian” world with which I culturally identified fully accepted me as one of their own.

Growing up in a predominantly Asian community in Elmhurst, I never really had the chance to experience what it was like to thrive within a diverse community of people. From elementary to middle school, most of my neighbors, classmates, and friends were all of Asian descent. I never had the experience of not being part of the “majority,” so to speak. Therefore, although I was aware of all the stereotypes and racism against Asian people as a whole (thanks to the internet), I never really had a memorable first-hand experience of it happening directly to me. I guess one could say that I grew up in a rather sheltered environment and that being able to do so was a privilege in and of itself.

Fast forward a few more years to 2014: I was an excited high school freshman, ready to embark on a new chapter in my life. Academically speaking, I was prepared to study hard and earn good grades. However, socially, I was not prepared for the difference of environment that my high school had to offer me. I remember walking into my first class on the first day of school with an overwhelming feeling that something was off. It took me a while to realize what it was, but after I did, I could not just push it to the back of my mind and act like the thought never occurred to me. I was the only Asian person in the classroom. Compared to my previous experiences of being constantly surrounded by people who all looked like me and came from the same culture as I did, this was a drastic difference. It was the first time that I felt ostracized due to my ethnicity. However, since I grew up in New York City, one of the most diverse cities in the world, it was not like I had zero experience with being around people of different ethnicities and cultures. Any time I walked down the streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, or Staten Island, I would be greeted with tons of people who had come from various diverse backgrounds that were vastly different from my own. Although this new environment was a new experience, it was not an overwhelming one.

Gradually, I came to realize that it was not just the fact that my high school had a large number of other ethnicities that made me feel different; it was also that the school had an extremely low number of Asian students as a whole. According to multiple bar graphs and pie charts of my school's ethnicity rate, less than 7% of the students enrolled there were of Asian descent. The majority of these Asian students were foreign exchange students from Asia while only three other students within my grade, excluding me, were Asian American.

Naturally, since there were so few Asian people within my high school, assumptions and stereotypes began to form. In my personal opinion, I believe that psychologically, humans have a habit of categorizing things once they see any sort of pattern or repetition. Since such a small number of Asian students were enrolled and almost all of them were from Asia, one could make the assumption that any time they saw an Asian person in a classroom or walking down the hallway, they were foreigners. I do not blame them for making this assumption, but sometimes I start to wonder, what if it were the other way around? What if the roles were reversed, and the majority of foreigners were white? Would any white person still be categorized as a foreigner? Such were some of the thoughts that constantly flashed through my mind as I was constantly reminded by both my classmates and teachers that they did not really view me as a true “American.”

One particular instance that stuck in my mind was something that happened during my freshman year of high school. We were lining up to enter the auditorium one day, and by chance I sat next to a young girl in my grade. The environment around us was loud already, and neither of us really cared about what our school had to show us in the auditorium, so naturally, we struck up a conversation. The conversation was going pretty well until she suddenly turned to me with a friendly smile on her face and said, "Your English is pretty good. Where did you learn it from?" Needless to say, I was shocked. Being born and raised in New York City, I had no accent, I was reasonably fluent with the American discourse in this community, and my grasp on grammar and pronunciation was fairly decent as well. I had no idea how she’d drawn the conclusion that I was a foreigner other than from my ethnicity. It dawned on me that from the moment she laid her eyes on me, it was already pre-established in her mind that I was a foreigner. No amount of perfect grammar or New York City accent could convince her I was otherwise.

Another instance that stuck with me happened at the end of my sophomore year of high school. I was heading home after having just completed one of my regents exams. Suddenly, one of my favorite teachers stopped me in the hallway and asked how my exam went. I told him that it was okay, and he proceeded to ask if I was heading home right now. I told him I was. He followed up with a confusing question: “So you're going to get home tomorrow?” I stared at him with a perplexed expression on my face and asked him what he meant by that. "I mean on the plane. To China." I was dumbfounded. Not only was I in his class the entire year, but I also wrote a large number of papers that demonstrated the thorough grasp I had on the English language and its discourse. It both shocked and disappointed me that he also adhered to the stereotypes that were present within my high school for its Asian population.

After consuming all this information, one might think that I had formed a closer relationship with the small number of Asian people in my classes during my high school years. That is only partially correct. Although I did become friends with quite a few foreign exchange students, there would always be an invisible language and cultural barrier that separates us. Unlike several of my fellow Chinese Americans, I did not speak Mandarin at all. I could understand the language to an extent, but when it came to actually speaking it, the words that pop into my head are predominantly English. I did not have a tight enough grasp on the language to be able to translate things from English to Mandarin inside my head. However, I could translate a simple phrase from Mandarin to English easily, as I sometimes do for my parents at home. Therefore, I was stuck in a weird in-between place of half being able to participate in their conversations and half not being able to since I was not completely fluent in their discourse. There was also the experience of immigrating to the United States from a foreign country that I was not able to relate to. I was considered too "Americanized" for them.

Ultimately, my experience in high school introduced me to new questions of self-identity that I never thought of before. I discovered that being Asian-American meant being stuck between two different worlds: the western/American world that I grew up in and the Asian world I culturally identified with. Neither one of these two worlds claimed the entirety of me, and yet without either one of them, my identity would be incomplete. It took me quite some time to accept that it was okay to not belong to either world completely, but once I finally did, I realized that being Asian-American was not necessarily a bad thing. Although it was true that we did not truly fit into any certain cultural sphere completely, this new experience of a middle ground was a uniquely distinctive experience in and of itself.