Finding home between two worlds

growing up yellow in a black and white world

北京 (Beijing) — April 2024

This essay is Part I of a series on learning to reclaim our cultural shadows, bridging our identity between two worlds, and pioneering new dynamics with our parents.

• Part I: Finding home between two worlds

• Part II: The unraveling of old family scripts

• Part III: How to travel with your parents and not lose your shit

As I’ve processed my trip to China, so much has come up around the ways I’d become splintered over the years as a result of suppressing and rejecting my Chinese identity.

When we reject or avoid core parts of us, we become fragmented versions of ourselves. Becoming whole again starts with being with and accepting the shameful parts of ourselves we’re terrified for the world to see.

Because of my tenuous relationship with being Chinese, I’ve never been one to celebrate Asian American & Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month. After harboring a lifetime of shame, I’ve realized that it was precisely my lack of understanding and appreciation for the richness of the culture I descend from that perpetuated the fragmentation within myself.

It feels particularly meaningful to write the series this month for my younger self and all the children who have grown up straddling two worlds, feeling as though they didn’t belong to either.

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When I was young, my greatest fear was being found out that I wasn’t really an American kid. It’s a funny secret to keep when at first glance, my features immediately gave away that I was an Asian girl.

Because I couldn’t do much to change the way I looked (despite my attempts), I subconsciously dedicated myself to ensuring that I presented as American as possible in every other way. In the 2000s, assimilation was all the rage. I embraced being the token Asian friend, surrounding myself with friends who looked nothing like me, and worked hard to uphold my reputation as a “banana” — yellow on the outside, white on the inside.

It wasn’t always this way. As far as I can trace it, this story began in the years following our move from Queens, a borough of New York City rich with cultural diversity, to a suburb north of the city, home to white picket fences. Life in suburbia was a big upgrade from our small apartment in the city — or so it seemed.

Despite initially opposing the move away from my elementary school, my friends, and everything I knew, I grew to love the freedom of suburb living and having ample space to run around with the other neighborhood kids. Plus, our new town was significantly more homogenous than Queens. Being surrounded by Caucasians gave me the false sense that we were really becoming “Americans.”

And yet, below the surface, my mental model for what it meant to be “American” was slowly narrowing. As I looked around, few kids looked like me. My differences — parts of me I was once proud of — grew stark, serving as liabilities on my quest to fit in. To be American was to be white, to be born in the United States, to eat “normal” food, to watch football on Sundays. To be American was everything I was not.

As the oldest of two, I possessed a strong, fiery sense of self that my parents nurtured. I suspect this is why I felt comfortable in my skin for as long as I did — before insecurities around social dynamics, identity, and puberty began to take hold of me.

This dynamic was the backdrop of my life entering my teenage years. As I came into my own, that fiery energy was redirected at my parents. Subconsciously, I had grown to blame them for gifting me with the vulnerabilities that being Chinese presented in trying to fit in. If only they were more American and less Chinese, they’d understand me.

While seemingly two distinct relationships, my subtle resentment for my parents and my heritage were deeply entangled, further exacerbated by our generational friction.

In every parent-child relationship, there is a generational divide — words, feelings, and sentiments lost in translation. If it were just generational discord, I might have emerged relatively unscathed, but our relationship was mired with cultural nuances that, as a teenager, I had no appreciation for, and as immigrants, my parents had no words to communicate as they raised me in a culture they barely knew.

It’s only now that I understand that we were up against so much more. We were trying to pioneer an entirely new family dynamic: one that blended cultural intricacies with generational complexities in a time in my parents’ life when they were just trying to survive.

a cultural cross to bear

Like most immigrant parents, my parents wanted me and my brother to integrate seamlessly into American society and encouraged us to get involved in activities that American kids took part in — playing sports, going to camp, learning instruments.

As a result, so little of the richness of Chinese culture made it into our day-to-day lives. Instead, we adopted American traditions that meant little to my parents while preserving what seemed like idiosyncratic aspects of our culture.

The one exception was Chinese School.

Every Saturday morning, we had an extra half day of school, serving as a reminder that being Chinese was an inconvenience and that we weren’t just ordinary American kids.

There were subtle reminders too: like our remote controls wrapped in saran wrap, a dishwasher repurposed as a drying rack, a strict no shoes in the house policy — and not so subtle ones like the intense focus on performing at school and the belief that failure was not an option.

All these nuances seemed strange in comparison to the way my friends lived. As a result of isolating myself from having close Chinese American friends who could relate, I assumed these idiosyncrasies were unique to my family when in reality, they were products of the culture and environments my parents had grown up in.

I looked around at my Caucasian friends who had parents who were largely hands off. They had relationships with their parents that I envied. I often thought, Why can’t we just be a “normal” family?

It wasn’t until I moved to the Bay Area years later, surrounded by Asian American friends, that I learned: the way I grew up and felt was entirely normal.

the pursuit of belonging

It was because this cultural divide that I constantly felt like I was straddling two worlds. One at school and one at home. As I got older, the massive gaping hole between me and my parents widened — I grew high and mighty as I adopted my American beliefs, challenging my parents and their ingrained Chinese beliefs.

As a child I never felt like I belonged in my family…I felt weird and alone in my small world. Because nothing was normalized, and there were no conversations or TikToks about the unsaid stuff — how emotions can be overwhelming, how bodies work, how relationships can suck, how parents just don’t understand, how normal people are lonely — I thought something was wrong with me.

…What’s so powerful (and hard) is that the more my siblings and I talk about and share our experiences, the more I think everyone in my family felt the same way. A little on the outside of the myth of what we were supposed to be. I have a lot of empathy and compassion for my parents.

— Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart

When I first read this passage in Atlas of the Heart, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I had always felt misaligned with my parents, but struggled to articulate why. Beyond that, I felt disconnected from our lineage and heritage — I was oceans away and hardly knew the land and people I descended from.

When we traveled back to China every few years, I felt like a guest in someone else’s home — not like a child returning to her motherland. When our relatives told me and my brother that it was obvious in our mannerisms that we were American kids, I felt a surge of pride.

When I was old enough, I was eager to fly the coop and moved to Boston for college.

Then, in my late 20s, I felt called to San Francisco — for its agentic culture and access to the outdoors. What I hadn’t anticipated was the profound impact the city’s demographics and history would have on me.

In moving to the Bay Area, I went from being a minority to one of many Asian Americans — a homecoming that I hadn’t realized I’d needed. It’s only now that I see I’d been in search of a place to belong all these years.

It was settling down in San Francisco five years ago that paved the way for my journey inward. A journey that led me to repairing my relationship with my heritage and my parents. Ultimately, that brought me back to China last month where I healed broken parts of a younger me. And for the first time in my life, I was overcome with the feeling that I belong to this family, to this lineage, to this heritage. And they belong to me.

Thanks for reading!

Up next: reflections on getting to know our families as an act of getting to know ourselves and becoming a cycle breaker

How has your relationship with your parents evolved? What “shameful” parts of yourself did you reject as a child? Let me know in the comments or say hi on Twitter!

Paid supporters: I’m planning to host an online circle on the themes I’m exploring in this series like repairing relationships with our parents and integrating cultural shadows — hit reply or comment below if you’re interested in joining :) More to come.

Thanks to Ryan for reading drafts of this essay and for being my biggest champion as I’ve walked the path of bridging my two worlds.

If you enjoyed this essay, you may also like:

The power of representation

The unraveling of old family scripts

Dancing with our shadows

Thank you for triggering me