“My parents immigrated to the US in their early twenties from China-- this is an abridged version of their complicated story. Basically, my mom immigrated here by herself because, due to the strict immigration laws, my dad wasn’t able to come with her even with his master’s degree. It was just really hard to get in. My mom had a PhD so she came on an educational scholarship type arrangement. So it was difficult because they had just gotten married and now had to do long distance. And you can imagine that the situation was even more complicated because my mom barely spoke English and now had to figure everything out on her own. They immigrated to the suburbs of Illinois, so there were just no Asians, not a lot of diversity, obviously riddled with racism. People definitely gave her shit for not speaking English well and treated her poorly. So she has a bunch of stories about the racism, but that’s more of her story to tell. It was not easy- she came here with no friends; I feel like that’s the case in a lot of immigrant stories. When my dad eventually was able to come a year and a half later, they had no help. On top of that, it was just not a hospitable environment. Anyone at the time who didn’t speak really good English were pretty much ostracized; people just ‘othered’ them. They were able to get by because my dad got a cafeteria job at my mom’s college and they would eat at the cafeteria because my dad was washing the dishes. It’s honestly heartbreaking. Anyway, so fast forward, I was born, so I'm a first generation American. I grew up in Urbana, Illinois, which is the midwest as fuck. And yeah, it was definitely very obvious that I did not fit in because I was one of maybe four Asians in the entire school. So yeah, I grew up wanting to be white. I was super embarrassed that my parents didn’t speak good English. I wasn’t teased too much for being Asian but I obviously did experience ‘othering.’ People would make fun of my food, always ask me stupid questions, and you know, make fun of my eyes. It was just very cookie cutter, Midwestern racism because of the lack of Asians. So at this point, my parents had their small circle of Chinese friends. I was just very separated from my culture. I would go back to China with my parents, and that was really the only time I was ever really Chinese. As soon as I was home, I would switch gears and be white, basically because all of my friends were white and I had no other Asian friends. It felt weird because I felt like I was leading a double life because I had no connection with my Asian American identity. I would speak Chinese with my parents only at home and then spoke English when I was at school. I mean yeah, there was a lot of shame just because it wasn’t cool to be Asian where I’m from. There were so few Asians, and all of the Asians that were at my school were categorized as the stereotypical nerdy and weird kids. And I didn’t want to be that. So I did the absolute most to separate myself from them, which is largely why my personality became so fucking white presenting. This is so sad, but I remember when I was growing up, I would literally pretend like I couldn’t speak Mandarin. If someone asked me, I would act like I couldn’t speak good Chinese because I wanted to be so far away from, like, Asianness. The internalized racism was so fucking crazy. It took me a long time to slowly come into my Asian American identity and be proud of my heritage. High school in Orange County, California was so different, to say the least because literally everyone is Asian there. So it was now cool to be Asian and that just transformed my whole perspective. And that was really weird to me because I had spent my entire childhood taking on this whole identity of taking on this token Asian. I was the one Asian girl; that was who I was. Obviously I realized that it wasn’t embarrassing that my parents couldn’t speak perfect English, but it was so life changing to meet so many new people whose parents were also immigrants. It felt like I had permission to just be myself.”