Oh, You're American?

So, I'm back.

How very anti-climatic. But then again, the whole affair -- the packing, the good-bye dinners, the last-minute get-togethers - all felt very anti-climatic indeed, as if the circumstances weren't permanent but a mere ruffle in an on-going plan. Don't lose hope, there's always time to change your mind!

I feel the same way about coming home as I always do; a little glad, a little sad, but mostly very, very displaced. Part of it has to do with the jet-lag and part of it has to do with emotions that I have yet to sort out (it's hard to care about anything even remotely important when your brain is telling you: sleep! wake up! sleep! on repeat) I read that you need one day of recovery for each time zone you cross on the way back and going from Manila to SF meant crossing 9 time zones. So, 6 more days and I should be back to normal, right?

Maybe.

Just take it easy, everyone I know has said to me so far. Ease back into it. Relax. Take your time. No need to rush. 

What's left unsaid: You're back home, where you're supposed to be. Get happy.

The important take-away point: Now is not the time to feel pressured to 'returning to my normal self,' whatever that means. Of course, I can no longer clearly recall what my 'normal self' feels like in America, having been my 'normal self' (or an entirely different self?) for three years in two very Asian, very un-American countries.

On the plus side, Taiwan is more similar to the U.S. than Japan ever was, especially culturally. I didn't commit very many cultural taboos in Taiwan, other than looking Asian while proclaiming to be from America. After awhile even I began to question myself: Am I really American? Or is that just what my passport says? For some reason some people found it really hard to wrap their heads around this phenomenon. You would think that Taiwan's obsession with the ubiquitous Taiwanese-American Jeremy Lin (see? there is such thing as nationality-hyphen-nationality) might have made it easier for Taiwanese people to grasp the whole concept of "Asian-American," but no matter who I talked to -  young person, old person, friend, parental figure, stranger - everyone's initial reaction was nearly always the same.

"So you're Chinese-American?" (emphasis on the Chinese part)

"But you simply don't look American." (Because all Americans are white, tall, and eat hamburgers every day for breakfast)

"How interesting! How rare!"

And then: "Oh you're from California? No wonder. There are a lot of Asians there, right?" (Asian-Americans, I always wanted to correct, but usually didn't. And depends what part of California you're talking about.)

I'll have to admit, on days when I wasn't mildly exasperated from repeatedly explaining my oh so very unique situation  -- yes, I'm American, no, neither of my parents are white --  I almost felt offended by the constant questioning, the intense curiosity, and the aha! look in people's eyes when I agreed, once more, that yes, I'm ABC. I didn't want to feel this way, and maybe I shouldn't have, but these kinds of comments had a way of gnawing at me, especially over time. I got plenty of them the two years I lived in Japan as well, so you'd think I'd be used to them by now.  However, part of me just assumed this was because Japan has always been especially weird about the whole nationality vs ethnicity issue, weird as in being radically different from what our interpretation of it is in America. I thought Taiwan would be different. And it was, just not as different as I initially presumed -- or hoped.

And I don't want to sound dramatic or anything, but it does wear on the soul a bit when an individual you barely know (or even someone you do know, which sometimes makes it worse) proclaims to know more about your nationality than you do, as though they are so determined to put you in a neat little box, to make sense of your 'special' situation, that they don't care if the box doesn't fit or how you feel about it. So you make sense to them, because how you view yourself isn't important at all. Where I come from --  where is that again? -- pushing self-created identities onto others is a cultural taboo and can be insensitive, even ignorant, but most definitely politically incorrect.

Maybe only once in my life have I encountered someone who told me that I couldn't be American because I didn't 'look' American. (Because all Americans are white, tall, and eat hamburgers every day for breakfast.) Obviously this person was being a racist asshole, but at least she knew she was being a racist asshole when she made the comment. She was acutely aware of what effect her words would have on someone who came from an immigrant family, yet was born and raised on American soil (which, by American standards at least, makes you pretty darn American). Yet she said them anyway. So it was easy to dismiss her as an ignorant prick, because she was one. By that age I had accumulated enough wisdom and self-worth to know that the petty words of a bigoted asshole had no bearing on how I viewed myself or others like myself.

But in Taiwan, even though I was still, for the most part, an individual who knew better than to let others' ignorance bother me, didn't always mean that no offense was taken, precisely because the people making these blanket statements didn't know that their words could, and sometimes did, cause discomfort, annoyance, and yes, even pain.

A question that often plagued me was: Why does it bother you so much what they think? It wasn't as though my nationality was contingent on anyone's interpretation. Yet it continued to bother me when people said, "Are you really American?" As though daring me to prove it. (Show me your white father!) More than I would have liked to admit, it bothered me because it wasn't just about me and how they saw me, with my Asian face and body, but rather, how they saw all Americans in general. For them, the two things just didn't mix. From their points of view, if your parents are born in one country, and you are born in another, your parents' nationalities still reflect yours, because you share the same blood. Just because they happened to move somewhere else and give birth to you in that particular place didn't mean your blood changed. It didn't automatically make you part of that country. You are part of your parents, so where they're from, you're from.

Maybe a part of me has allowed myself to think like that as well, when I was very young and even occasionally as an adult. 

I have thought long and hard about what constitutes my nationality long before other people deemed it appropriate to tell me so. As an Asian-American, it's kind of hard not to. In fact, this was a huge focal point of Pacific Ties, the news-magazine I worked at for more than two years in my university, identity-forming years.

What constitutes the Asian American identity? On the one hand, of course we're Americans. We speak f'ing English and eat burgers for breakfast, for god's sake. On the other hand we, along with our families, still celebrate Chinese New Year (or Lunar New Year) and some of us can even speak the 'mother tongue.' The best of both worlds, right?

Sometimes this feels great. And sometimes it just feels confusing. To many Japanese and Taiwanese (and probably to a lot of other people, to be honest), it feels strange.

But for Americans, identity is what we give ourselves. We're bombarded with quotes like "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent" and all those other warm fuzzies related to being yourself and being an individual and not giving a shit what other people think.

Except as humans, despite our very best efforts to maintain a mental fortitude worthy of everyone's envy, of course we give a shit. From time to time, of course we care what others think, and of course on some level it affects how we view ourselves.

As an American, and as an Asian, I am no exception.