My First Political Moment
“Your dad is a Democrat?” My friend’s face was full of disgust. It was 2008, and Barack Obama was running against John McCain in the presidential election, an event I didn’t particularly care about at the time, and would not care about again until 2016. All I knew was that my dad would be voting for Obama, who was a Democrat, and that John McCain was a Republican and a “gross old man.” My dad pulled a face when he said it, contorting his mouth and rolling his eyes in a way that was meant to make me laugh. When I asked my mom who she was voting for, she shrugged and said, “Same as Dad.”
I had been standing with my friends in a circle when the topic of the election somehow came up. It is embarrassing to reflect on the frankness with which we talked, so proud to be testing out words too big for our mouths, trying to make ourselves appropriate candidates for grown-up conversations. We went around the circle, asking “Who are your parents voting for?” It immediately triggered in me the sense of desperate allegiance that children have for their parents when they have nothing else to leverage in arguments or pin their values to.
At the time, it was not anything more than a quick jab to my self esteem that was common in most of my friendships at the time. My friend was just another Mean Girl and I felt embarrassed that I let her be mean to me. I don’t remember what the rest of my friends said, or even if the conversation continued after that. But I understood in that moment that I became a representative for certain values that stood diametrically opposed to my friend’s, and that the tension carried far more weight than I was prepared to consider. The most shocking revelation, however, was that not all Asian people were like my parents.
All my closest friends were Chinese-American girls whose parents, like mine, immigrated to America to pursue postgraduate degrees and find a place for themselves in middle- or upper-class suburban New Jersey. My school always had enough Asian kids to make me feel comfortable, but not as many as J.P. Stevens, which was a thirty-minute drive down the Parkway with enough Patels in one grade to fill five straight pages, as my friends and I would gleefully discover in the yearbook room. So in that shameful moment, I learned that even within the community I thought I understood, people could be very different.
Later, this friend would also be the girl to teach me words like “egg” and “banana”, and that by doing things like listening to pop music and thinking white boys were cute, I was a banana: yellow on the outside, white on the inside. I immediately hated the label, and learned after fourth grade that there was no right way to be Asian, only wild stabs at belonging to one group or the other. She and I drifted apart, I learned that not all Asian people had voted for Obama and eventually, a clear divide appeared between me and my white classmates. I came to learn that we were not schoolchildren anymore but members of a society, in which sometimes groups of boys at the mall would pull their eyes back into slits at you, or call your father a Chinaman on the subway.
I could no longer talk to just anyone. I began to resign myself to the societal rules that distinguished Asian people from other people, and I was often forced to shoulder the representation of an entire group wherever I went. I became uncomfortable in any situation where I was the only Asian person, because I knew what kind of assumptions my face carried. Entering a room of new people became a nerve-wracking math equation. How many Asian faces could I count? How many people could I trust to understand me, really?
I feel regretful that my first inklings of the political spectrum emerged from a crude series of associations made out of fear. Through my survival logic, the same kids who I felt threatened by, whether warranted or not, were reduced down to traits like white, Catholic, Republican. The media I consumed and the interactions I had confirmed my belief, and the cycle continued. As a result, my adolescent years turned into an attempt to disavow my Asianness altogether, as though if I proved that I was different I could exist in some apolitical void. In this fantasy, I would not have to feel angry at perceived injustices done to me, nor would I be complacent if I ignored them. I would be free.
Not a day goes by where the politics of my existence does not influence my choices. And I think that, like other children of immigrants, my political consciousness must have started much earlier than I thought. The moment we understand who we are, existence is constant realization of the forces that govern us all, a struggle for power where it can be won, a fight to remain in a country that could never be ours to begin with. And isn’t that political, in every sense of the word?
