My Invisible Identity In America
I identify myself as an Asian-American but I’m not Indian, Chinese, Japanese or Korean. I am an immigrant. But I’m also an American citizen. I am a Cambodian-American and sometimes I tried to hide to the fact that I am a Cambodian. Why? Simply because it’s too difficult to explain what the hell is Cambodia to people who don’t know. Outside of my country only about 20% of the people I talked to (including strangers) knows Cambodia. When people look at me they confused me as Filipino, Hawaiian, Vietnamese, Thai, but no one had ever mention Cambodian. When I turn to media, I see Chinese, Japanese, Korean but never Cambodian. As a student who study media, I started to notice how invisible my race becomes.
First, let us start at the beginning of how Cambodian came in the first place. In 1975, Cambodia was under the communist Khmer Rouge, which is a painful time for the country. In 1979, the Khmer rouge is over people started to look for their lives once again. That’s when many people decided to moved to the land of opportunity, and one of those people is my uncle. Spending time alone in America, he finished college and got a job and sponsor my grandmother to come to America as well. A few more years after I was born they decided to sponsor my family to come here as well. But not everything is smooth. It took 10 years for our paper to go through the government and finally get us approved to move to the United States. I was so excited to come to a country that look so beautiful and free on television, being so naive about what I am going to find out during my stay here. I was 15.
During high school, I would always try to hide my identity. Since I look different I get the occasional question of “Where are you from?” which i probably reply you wouldn’t know, if you do I would be impressive. If they press on and keep asking, I would say “Cambodia” then it’s the “ahh” then the conversation ends. Other times people would assume that I’m Filipino because there a lot of Filipino in my school. The reason I hide my identity is because I would think that there’s no point in explaining, I can just try to be an American. I was ashamed that I was different, and not american enough. But no one would think of me other wise because I don’t have an accent. In Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind, he was forced to learn the english language at a very young age, I was similar. I was put into english school at the same time I was attending elementary in Cambodia, because my parents understand that one day english will be more important.
Throughout the year of finishing High school to attending college, I find myself getting more comfortable with explaining my race and culture. I realized the importance of embracing one’s culture, and that’s when i started to realized my race is invisible to the media. That’s when I realized that term asian-american mostly applies East Asian, and those who are South or Southeast Asian doesn’t quite fit the category. This brings us to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argument in her article “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, which is that the subaltern were always represented by people who look at them from the outside. In our case, East asians are our representative they speak under the umbrella term of Asian-American.
That’s not to say that Cambodian-American are few, from what I understand Cambodian American has made their own culture in places such as Long Beach, the city with the most Cambodian American population.
The Cambodian-American diaspora struggle to fit into the Asian-American stereotype due to their lack of education and constant poverty. Craving to fit into the American Culture, Cambodian-American took to the Hip-Hop and get inspiration from Black Culture. Hip-hop artist Yung Tee, wrote a song about the Cambodian-American culture, which promotes the culture and awareness of our existence.
There are some of us who try to make our voice heard, but who is listening? This isn’t a problem that only Cambodian-American face but most diaspora community in the United States face the same crisis of being misrepresented in media or there’s no representation at all.
