Clashing identities when the minority is a majority
By Tiffany Lew
My little cousin was the first person to call me a “bai gwai.” I was 14. We were at a family gathering. She was about 9 and had recently immigrated with her family from Taiwan to California. The only English she knew was from watching The Simpsons. I knew enough Mandarin to know she had just called me a “white ghost.”
I smiled and continued chatting with my sister. But those two words were enough to pull me out of my body. For a moment, I felt like a ghost peering out of the shell of a person — one who appeared Chinese, but spoke English.
The words were new, but the feeling was familiar. It was the usual struggle of juggling multiple identities and cultures. I told myself that millions of people, descendants of immigrants, must feel this way at some point in their lives.
Immigrant parents instill discipline. Their children listen.
Immigrant parents work long hours. Their children contribute.
Immigrant parents don’t speak English. Their children translate.
These were the things I often repeated to myself. The problem was that they didn’t sit quite right.
The San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles, is one of the major valleys of Southern California. It’s also home to one of the largest Asian American populations in the U.S., and non-English-speaking parents are the norm.
Growing up there was not your typical American suburban experience.
People would often approach me speaking Mandarin, and then were confused, even surprised, if I responded in English. My classmates often moaned about how their parents couldn’t speak English. It was an appeal for empathy.
I would pretend to relate, but the problem was I didn’t.
Although both of my parents are of Chinese descent, my dad was born in California and didn’t speak a word of Mandarin. His family has lived in the U.S. since the 1940s. My mom was a more recent immigrant, so she’d speak to us in broken English.
Others in the community took notice of this apparent dichotomy. How could someone who is of an older generation and looks Chinese speak only English? Was he too proud to speak Mandarin, the language of his ancestors? My dad didn’t quite fit in to the immigrant narrative that my classmates and I had learned about in books like The Joy Luck Club and Woman Warrior.
Whenever my family and I ate out or went grocery shopping, I’d hope I wouldn’t run into my Chinese classmates. Once, we were at a Shanghainese restaurant with my grandma and aunt on my mom’s side. Naturally, Mandarin dominated at the table. My dad spoke English to my sister and me so as not to be left out of the conversation.
Mid-sentence, I spotted a classmate at the table behind us. My face heated up. With my mouth shut tight, I hoped my dad would just stop talking. That he’d stop speaking English, or that Mandarin would miraculously flow right out. That I could prove he was really, actually Chinese.
The classmate approached me at school the next day. “Your dad doesn’t speak Chinese, huh?” he said, his words heavy with disdain. I ignored him, as if I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Your dad’s, like, white,” he added.
Many of my family members are biracial, and I’d imagine that they had also felt the same way. We all had parents who came from cultures and backgrounds that were vastly different from each other.
But I’d almost envy my biracial family members because the dichotomy was clearer — nobody expected their white American parents to speak Mandarin. Simply knowing “ni hao” and “xie xie” was worthy of praise from strangers.
It wasn’t until college, when I met Asian Americans whose parents were also born here or who spoke fluent English, that I realized that there is no single immigrant story.
As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said, the danger of telling a single story is that it becomes the only story.
The story I thought was valid had clear-cut lines: Two non-English-speaking immigrant parents have American-born, English-speaking kids. They speak Mandarin at home, just as people expect. The kids struggle with the push and pull of American culture and the high expectations of hard-working parents.
I wanted to erase the parts of my story that didn’t fit that ideal. But I finally realized that there isn’t a narrative I need to follow.
We’re making up our narrative as we go.
