enough
My life has not been centred around not enough, no. Parents in health care fields, and one who grew up in enough poverty to teach us to seriously hoard what’s on sale took care of that ok. I have never seriously wanted for any physical need, and only rarely for emotional, and mostly through my own unwillingness to speak up. I have not wanted, and I know for this that I am lucky.
I have managed to get this far in life without a coherent cultural identity. I fancy I’m pretty good at figuring out what people want me to be, and since I’m antisocial I can often fake it as long as I’m dealing with them–but some things I can’t fake. Like, say, speaking Cantonese. Or, even if I went out and learned Cantonese, my grandparents’ dialect, which is this podunk dialect from the Three Districts in Guangdong.
To a lot of Caucasian North Americans, I’m not white; I’m a little too dark and my chin is a little too slopey and my eyes are shaped not-quite-average. I am not white. Not quite. And inside, I am not white–not quite. But I’m not quite Chinese, or even American-born Chinese, either. There are many people for whom I will never be Chinese enough, and in the face of that judgement it is far easier to fold my mother’s side of the family behind my perfect American Newscaster accent and just be a boorish Westerner.
Maybe that’s what they want, anyway–not someone who once raged at her father for being so excited about creating a child who was the fusion of two cultures; not someone who wants to put double-happiness on her wedding invitations but can’t read the Chinese half of the printing; not someone with a big honking German nose and a southern Chinese chin and twenty-eight badly flubbed words of a dialect that nobody who’s anybody speaks anyway.
Sometimes it is easier not to “claim my cultural heritage,” as if by dint of lineage I have some special entitlement to the especially picturesque details of southern China. As if those who are “more Asian” than I have some greater claim–as if I have not worked hard enough to retain some Asian identity in the whitewashing sea that is my natal country.
But as uneasy as I am about how other people judge how well my behaviour fits their expectations based on my ethnicity, I’m coming to realise that a coherent cultural identify is not something I am entitled to. It is something that most people have and therefore ignore, but its ubiquity does not make it irrelevant, nor does it make it a necessity.