Chinese-American by Selina Lam

American but Chinese. Chinese but American.

Too American to fit comfortably in the box of being Chinese without feeling people’s lingering stares shiver down my spine as they think, “Great, another American-born Chinese,” with a slight curl of their upper lip. I sniff my clothes, trying to find the hints of the “foreigner” everyone else pinpointed in a sea of muddled scents swirling through the crowd.

When I gaze into my mirror, I see a girl who looks like them, but does she belong with them?

My cheeks grow hot with shame when I struggle to string together words like golden beads on a fraying red string, fusing English and Chinese until it becomes a new language. I’m brought back to my childhood, growing up to the audio of English fairytales while being spoken to in Chinese by my mother. My first word wasn’t spoken until the age of four, the two languages refusing to concede from taking over as my brain struggled to accept them both. In February of 2016, I went back to China to celebrate my grandmother’s 80th birthday. I remember standing at the register of a cafe in the busy Beijing airport, mumbling, “我要一， uh, 杯, what’s the word for coffee, oh!— 咖啡? The barista’s eyebrows scrunch together, trying to decipher my pointing at the menu and erratic filler words, all while my throat begins to close up and my stomach somersaults when I’m the reason other travellers tap their shoes on the wooden floor impatiently. In their minds, I have become an inconvenience, and the grains of their patience trickle down the hourglass until no grains remain.

Too Chinese to yield to American standards, but still suffering from the stereotypes of being expected to be the smartest in the room while my hands are left grasping for invisible puzzle pieces to complete the picture. Asian characters on the big screen are rarely more than the quirky nerd, exotic female, or rebellious teenager, old Hollywood shortening the list of roles to only those they deemed appropriate. It leads me to wonder if I’d be better off born with blond hair and blue eyes. Red is the hue of my face, snickers filling my ears as immature middle school boys wave a hand in front of their noses, wrinkling their noses at the “smell” of my lunch, carefully hand-packed with love from my mother.

So now the question reveals itself in my mind, unfurling from the cloud of smoke it hid behind to resemble the flashing neon signs of Shanghai at midnight: Where do I belong?

As my bones grew longer, they have also grown to accept this truth. Neither world belongs to me, not fully without an erratic edge of myself sticking out like a sore thumb.

Instead, I exist somewhere in the space between the two planets in my universe, occasionally brushing atmospheres, one painted crimson with yellow stars, the other striped red, white, and blue. The halves of my soul merge when I open gifts on Christmas day and receive red envelopes on Lunar New Year. They gravitate towards each other when I crave pizza one day and baozi the next, living in coexistence as I drink coffee in the mornings but sip Jin Jun Mei tea carried across oceans by friends at night.

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Although, my two selves still clash like fencers battling for the tie-breaker point when modern mentalities meet traditional values, sometimes threatening to split my life down the middle, questioning my definition of filial piety while ruining delicate relationships with relatives. My parents suffered in silence within the complicated familial relations; my mother, who could only watch as a mere banana was snatched away from my brother’s chubby hands with the blatant excuse of it being saved for my cousin, the daughter of my uncle, while she carried bags of grapes and whole watermelons to share with my grandparents. My stubborn heart held grudges, blood infuriated when I heard the stories, desiring nothing more than to cut ties, but my parents reminded me they were family. You can’t turn your back on family.

All the same, distance caused our contact to dim, a lightbulb darkening as time passes on. Oceans separated me from my grandparents, leading me to grow up in a childhood without going to my “grandma’s house” down the street to eat the stereotypical baked cookies or spending summers living with them in China. Instead, our communication was limited to phone calls with unstable connections at times when the moon hung high in our sky but the sun shined on the other side. And the only points of conversation remaining for us were meaningless small talk. I never felt a connection, there was no string tied from her heart to wrap around mine, so the words that remained in my throat were a simple hello and empty wishes for her to take care of her body. As I grew older, the desire to force myself to find a common topic faded, like the color of my parent’s hair as their age caught up to them. Spending summers in China with my grandparents became a far-fetched dream, one I ran farther and farther away from the more stories my older brother told me of generational trauma, of where his abandonment issues stemmed from.

Yet, my heart was deprived of my history. I wanted to know my roots. When projects in my classes required us to create a family tree, my heart swelled when my mother would tell me stories of her father cooking my favorite braised pork for her, as she stood on her tip-toes on a stool, watching him whip out his secret skills. I laughed as my father told me about his adventures climbing up the lychee tree in his backyard to steal a few fruits before his grandma climbed up herself to catch him. I marveled at the fact that even if he was one of three children in a poor family, there were still some memories of love squished between the struggles. And with each story, the 8,076 miles separating me from my family seemed to grow a little shorter.

Even being born and raised in America, I found comfort in being surrounded by the handprints of China. My mother warned me of Chinese superstitions, teaching me to never stay on a hotel's fourth floor because it sounds like death in Chinese, while in America, bad things happen to people on Friday the Thirteenth. China says to always wear red on any special occasion for welcoming luck and prosperity, and white is the color of mourning, not black like it is in America. We ate Chinese food and celebrated Chinese holidays like Mid-Autumn Festival by eating mooncakes and playing the games my father did as a child. But we also slowly syncretized with American culture, eating Turkey at Thanksgiving and watching fireworks on the Fourth of July, celebrating the independence of a country I’ve always felt foreign from.

For much of my life, a fear of what other people thought about me infested my veins. If I could choose any superpower, it would be the ability to read minds, if only so I could put mine at ease.

Even now, my insecurities often relapse, wishing to conform to society’s measures of worth and gain the empty approval of those who refuse to acknowledge the poison polluting the roots of our world. My journey down an unknown road of looping streets and trick rest stops led me to the destination where I realized I didn’t have to give up any part of myself.

I gaze at my mirror again and see a girl who is both Chinese and American. She isn’t one or the other. She’s both, two countries filling one body and soul to their expanses.

She is Chinese-American.