Saturday night at dinner, Mr. A and I were talking about the post I wrote that day and we started talking about own experience growing up Asian in America. More specifically, we were talking about his own struggle to come to terms with his racial identity.
I don’t know how much I have talked about Mr. A’s childhood (especially in this context) but here are a few key experiences he mentioned.
- Mr. A grew up with two immigrant Chinese parents (as well as two sisters).
- Mr. A attended a camp for Taiwanese kids in America for a week each summer for a number of years.
- Mr. A’s parents took him to Chinese community activities like Chinese New Year.
- They ate mostly Chinese food at home and at restaurants. Pretty much every day, if what he says is true.
- Mr. A’s parents were culturally Taiwanese/Chinese so he got a good daily dose of traditional Chinese values like expecting academic excellence, filial piety etc.
- Though they didn’t speak Chinese at home, Mr. A attended at some Chinese school.
- Mr. A visited Taiwan a few times when he was young.
- While he didnt’ have much of a relationship with his relatives in Taiwan, he did have several cousins and an aunt and uncle who lived in the states with whom he had a relationship.
- Mr. A attended a Chinese church.
If I were an adoptive parent and I provided this much cultural exposure for my kid, I would get a lot of pats on the back for doing all that stuff to put my kids near other Chinese people.
Did all of that insulate Mr. A from feeling uncomfortable in his Asian skin? Did it help him grow up confident and proud of his heritage and racial identity?
Nope.
In adolescence and in college, he had a big, fat identity crisis.
Sure, there were factors that contributed to his lack of connection with other Asians. For one, his parents have mental health (and personality!) issues that meant they didn’t have any close relationships with other Chinese families or Chinese kids. They lived in a mostly white neighborhood and he attended school with mostly white kids, so he didn’t have much of an opportunity to make friends who were also Asian. (He knew kids as acquaintances, but not as his close friends.)
When I think about little Mr. A, it makes me sad for him. He felt like he didn’t fit in with “typical” (white) kids, but because his family was weird he didn’t fit in with other Chinese kids either. He felt really isolated, unattractive, and alone.
I think another major problem for Mr. A was that he didn’t have close relationships with other Asian/Chinese adults, so much so that he thought his parents’ own particular brand of crazy was just how all Chinese people are. He didn’t have any role models for how to grow up to be a happy and healthy Asian American adult. His parents, being neither healthy or particularly adept at negotiating life in America, were not much help in that area.
I don’t want to exaggerate Mr. A’s identity crisis, but I can say he was 23 when I met him and it was still something he was working through. One of the things I remember him saying was that he never felt like he fit in here. He felt like he always looked different and that different wasn’t a good thing. He didn’t know how to act appropriately in either mostly white environments or when he was around mostly Asians. He felt like a misfit, no matter where he was.
In college, Mr. A spent a lot of time and energy learning Chinese, so he could go to Asia and see what it felt like to just be a face in the crowd. That year he spent in China was a huge turning point for him. I remember him saying “I always thought I was Chinese until the moment I stepped off that plane. In less than 5 minutes, I realized ‘Whoa. I am SO American.’” That year, being Asian in Asia only confirmed that he didn’t fit in there either. (One good thing that came out of it, though, was he finally got the message that he is not ugly. I suppose all the swooning Chinese girls and Korean hotties throwing themselves at him made a big impression.)
I don’t think that Mr. A’s experience is particularly unique, especially for many children of immigrants. Or maybe for people growing up without strong connections to a community?
In the end, it has all worked out. Mr. A has figured out his place in the world. He is happy, healthy and has a strong sense of self as an Asian American. As parents, Mr. A and I are trying to improve upon his childhood experience by giving our girls more roots and more connections. It doesn’t mean our girls won’t struggle, but hopefully they won’t struggle as much.
I know my husband went through a lot of the same things, despite growing up in a Korean family, near the largest Korean community in the U.S. It’s hard to be Asian in the U.S., no matter how ideal the circumstances.
About the mental health issues, I think immigrant life is so stressful that it can cause psychological problems for people who might otherwise have been okay. Not saying that’s the case for your inlaws, but I’ve seen a lot of people crack under the pressure.
I didn’t have an identity crisis per se, but from the age of about 8-16 I was under insane pressure and came very, very close to cracking. On one side, in the U.S., I had other children screaming racial slurs in my face. On the other I had the feeling that I’d never be accepted in Japan as Japanese, so it wasn’t even worth trying.
I definitely don’t think Mr. A’s experience is unique. A lot of first-gen Asian immigrant parents don’t understand these identity issues well, because they grew up in countries where they were in the majority. So they move to places where their kids are easily isolated without really thinking through the consequences.
I’ve met multiracial Japanese-Americans who grew up in places with strong communities (Hawaii), and their childhood was as different from mine as night and day.
I’d have to say that my experience was similar to Mr. A’s (luckily though my parents were mentally stable!) and I went through my own little search for identity when I went to college and – finally met other Asians my age! My husband grew up in San Francisco and was surrounded by Asians so I don’t think he went through something similar. We now live in a very diverse community and our closest family friends are also Asian. Just last week my almost 7 year old daughter and I were randomly talking about race (I can’t remember the exact context.) And she said, “I think being Asian is the best. I think having black hair and brown eyes is the prettiest.” I was really surprised she said that. I know I would have never said that when I was a kid. She may be a bit vain when she gets older, but when it comes to identity, I think she’s going to be o.k.
I’m neither asian nor American, but I struggled with identity issues as a francophone raised in an anglophone city. I think it’s important for kids to know other kids AND adults who are like them, but that they also struggle to figure out how to live up to adults’ expectations for them and to figure out how they fit into society at large. Kids need support from their parents to do this, but chances are that even with that they will struggle. At almost 30 I’m still wrestling with how to claim my identity (there are other social factors at play here too, of course).
Sounds like Mr A’s experiences are the same as my friends who were born here to immigrant parents from China and my friends who were adopted from Korea as infants. They thought they would fit in more in China/Korea until they went there and realized they stood out as Americans. My friend Matt put it “I don’t belong in either world.”
I think because of those conversations with both adult adoptees and ABC, I can at least talk to my kids about those experiences. And try to include as much diversity as possible in their lives.
I went through a minor identity crisis during college as well. I grew up surrounded by Asian Americans, and so many of my friends and fellow classmates were Asian Americans, that that was the only setting I felt comfortable in. Then I went to college and encountered a population that was mostly white. THAT was an eye opener for me. But there were still plenty of Asian Americans in my school, and I gravitated towards them. I can also identify with the social isolation part because my parents, while “normal”, were not social people and plus I had an autistic brother. So we rarely had interaction with other Chinese families, and we had no extended family in the US. I, too, was shocked to discover that not all older Chinese people are clueless, bookish homebodies.
Every one of those bulleted points about your husband (except the one about visiting Taiwan a few times, b/c my husband has never been to his parent’s native China) was experienced by my husband as well. And now? He still knows no Chinese, in spite of Chinese school and Chinese church, and still doesn’t really think of himself as Asian.
Mental illness plus a “different” family subculture – are not just an immigrant or Asian thing. His situation sounds very familiar to me – white, 7+ generations in America; but our home dynamics made me the oddball in our fundamentalist Christian community and school when little. Once we left the religious environment, life was a lot better, but I had zero common cultural currency with mainstream white kids. I was adopted by a clique of Taiwanese-American fellow nerds, who I found a lot in common with in terms of home dynamics and interests; but while those relationships were great individually, in the group I got a lot of grief as the token white kid.
It primed me well to become a first generation emigrant/immigrant myself, looking for something to assimilate into. But I worry what kind of complexes I’ll give my kids eventually.