Frustrations of an American-Born Chinese
by Melissa Chan, Staff Writer

An irate Cantonese woman approached me on the train the other day. She was asking for directions on how to get to some place on Eighth Avenue. Her knowledge of English was basically non-existent and apparently she was desperately seeking a Chinese face of understanding and familiarity. Unfortunately, she found me. I had the Chinese face, fully equipped with tight cornered eyes, black hair, and dark brown eyes, the usual features - but underneath, I felt like a fake. I understood the questions she was asking me, her Cantonese words dancing about in my head like bok choy being tossed in a wok. I silently picked apart every phrase so meticulously that I might as well have whipped out a Chinese-English dictionary and looked everything up right in front of her. Soon, the desperation became mutual and I felt a strange urgency to end this embarrassing situation. I took a deep breath and I tried to say in Cantonese, "I do not speak Chinese." However, midway through my excruciating dialogue, I seemed to have forgotten how to say "Chinese" in Chinese. I could only muster, "I do not speak," which, if I had only said that from the very beginning, would have made this encounter beautifully brief and much less painful. Before she left hearing distance, I heard her say, 'Stupid American teenagers."

After coming away from experiences like these, common in Chinese restaurants, in encounters with distant relatives, and on any street corner in Chinatown, I feel like a has-been, or even worse, a never-was. They serve as reminders exaggerating my cultural faults, stepping on my pride of being American-born but of Chinese heritage. There is a pervasive feeling of degradation that stems from a void of cultural knowledge. It is not that I wish to deny my culture but I feel like American is my culture. Living in America is all I have seen, all I have breathed, all that is here and now. Without a doubt, my family has instilled in me all the Chinese values, including a natural sense of self-discipline and a heavy emphasis on education. There will always exist the legacy of a Chinese heritage but, with every subsequent generation, there will be a dissipation of language, traditions and cultural ties. This change should not be viewed as a loss of the old culture but as an enriching transition to the new. By making the conscious decision to move to America, there lies the implication that the American culture has been officially allowed to insinuate itself into an immigrant's family. It should be expected that change is inevitable and with everything gained from adopting an American lifestyle there comes an immeasurable amount of loss of "cultural identity."

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The Chinese side and the American side have been inseparably joined and, if one is missing, the other cannot satisfy the whole.

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The very scope of the term cultural identity is debatable. My understanding of cultural identity is that it is the facet of oneself that is derived from family roots and heritage. However, I currently perceive my cultural identity to also include all the last-minute modifications to the original plan, a certain blending that may seem negligent to the past but embodies a powerful sense of self and understanding of how I want to live my life in the future. My view of cultural identity is not one that has been enforced upon me but comes from self-knowledge and the empowering results of choices that I have made. Having been exposed to two cultures and needing to bridge them, I filter out the wonderful things within each that speak to me the most. In this way, perspective and selectivity engender feelings of self-awareness and identity that are truly my own. The Chinese-American culture is a culture in its own right. The Chinese side and the American side have been inseparably joined and, if one is missing, the other cannot satisfy the whole.

However, a considerable number of traditional Chinese look down upon the Americanization of the family's hopefuls believing that being half-American is being half-empty. In their eyes, the youth is their immortality, a continuity of themselves. The sight of the family becoming so changed from what it once was must be an annoying and painful fact to endure. But the change they are disappointed with is also frustrating for me. I feel stuck; neither here nor there, but somewhere in between that they cannot bring themselves to recognize. My pride is constantly attacked and, at times when others make me uncomfortable in my own skin, I assure myself that I am a true Chinese-American.