I Am Who I Say I Am
I Am Who I Say I Am
The Legacy of a Pregnant Nun
*Trigger warning this piece depicts sexual assault and suicidal ideation
The musky air with a faint hint of fish sauce greeted us when we got to my Tito Jose’s house. The property consisted of four houses, a small garden, and a few farm animals. Last time I had been here I was probably eight years old.
Identity
Sometimes when I consider my journey with identity, it makes me cringe - so much of my time, stress, energy has been expended on my dwelling on it. I feel like this is a typical staple of the young diaspora community, most notably children of immigrants
Search: asian, amateur
“Asian” is a loose and arbitrary term. People (maybe not all people, maybe not you, but people) think: the Big Three (Chinese, Korean, Japanese) or Filipino or Thai or maybe a loose, clustering conceptualization of slender girls with slanted eyes - just the right amount of ethnic ambiguity to intoxicate and intrigue. It’s a large continent, but these are the ripe pickings that float upwards in popular imagination.
Asian Ambiguity and the Search for a Cultural Home
My face is very ambiguously Asian. You can tell I’m Asian, but you can’t tell if I’m full or half, or what kind of ancestry I have; and this ambiguity plagues me wherever I go. “Where are you from?”, “Where are your parents from?”, and “No, where are you really from?” are all questions I’ve gotten not only abroad, during the four years I lived in Scotland, but also at home in Los Angeles. So many people have asked me “what” I am…but I don’t really know myself.
On White Privilege and Losing It
As a child I was never taught white privilege and thus was never able to verbally recognise it. But that didn’t mean that I didn’t feel it.
(In)Adequately Asian
Throughout primary school, the other Japanese children - including fellow hafus - made it a habit to tell me that I’m “not really Japanese”. They told me I wasn’t allowed to eat Japanese foods, namely the onigiri loving made by my Irish mother who tried to give me some connection to my lost other heritage. Most notably, I remember being in my primary school library with my class. As I put back my books another student came up to me and asked if I could translate a sentence written in Japanese. I couldn’t. Or at least not fully. The girl said, “Ashley said you wouldn’t be able to”.