Voices on the New Diasporas - an MIT student journal
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One Small Mountain
by Christina Yiwei Zhang
“Can you tell me what this says?” he asks hopefully. I pause for a second and look carefully, as if I might be able to read what it says, as if I might be able to pull out some understanding from what’s written in front of me, but I’m lying to myself.
I can’t read Chinese.
“Nope, sorry,” I shrug after what I feel is a reasonable time has passed. I joke, “I’m such a horrible Chinese person.”
“Well, second worst. You’re not as bad as ---,” he plays along. We chuckle at the hopeless state of a mutual friend, but inside, I’m not smiling.
I am an ABC. American-born Chinese. Chinese-American. It really doesn’t matter in what order you put the words. I spent most of my childhood years up until I was fourteen enjoying the comforts and joys of a southern culture. A very white southern culture. My parents, ever education-minded, scraped together what they could to send me to a private school in South Carolina. The public schools were mediocre at best, and, being among the worst schools in the nation, they didn’t exactly appeal to my parents. So I was enrolled in one of the Southeast’s finest private schools, Porter-Gaud School.
The school was as far from diverse as they come. I was one of two Asian students in the entire school, and since the other Asian girl was in high school at the same time I was stepping into a first-grade classroom, we rarely ever met, much less bonded. During my years at the school, I never noticed anyone making fun of me because I was Chinese. When I graduated from cafeteria food to bringing my own food from home, some of the other kids asked me why my meat was pink or why my eggs had brown lines on them. I suppose in my childhood naiveté, I always thought they were just curious.
I think my mother was much more acutely aware of my being Asian than I ever was. A few years after I left the school, she recounted a story of driving in line at the school to drop me off when some teenagers sped past her, pulling at their eyes to make them slanted. And she tells me that I was a lonely child for the first two or three years at the school. I remember not having many friends at first, but I always had remembered it as being because I was an unabashed tomboy when I was young, unlike the other extremely prim girls. I was hiking my skirt up my waist to run down the soccer field while they were setting out their teacups on a side bench. It wasn’t because I was Chinese, not according to how I remembered it.
An incident I do distinctly remember happened when I was walking back to my classroom from music class in third grade. I was beaming inside because even though it was a rule that students could only play one important role in a musical production every year, I had just been chosen to play a lead role for a second time and with a solo. A girl in my class walked up behind me and tentatively tapped me on the shoulder. To my surprise, she apologized for having been angry and jealous that I had gotten a second lead role. I didn’t know she had been angry, but I nonetheless politely accepted her apology.
And then she complimented me on my clothes. Up until this point, I hadn’t ever paid much attention to my clothes (I was still in my tomboy phase), but even to this day, I remember what I was wearing when she said that. It was a yellow, lumpy sweater with matching sweatpants, and they were unmistakably Chinese. At the time, my parents couldn’t afford to buy me many pretty little dresses like the rest of the girls wore all the time. I had a few dresses that I would wear sometimes, but I was never consciously aware of what I’d put on that day. My mother was still picking out my clothes and laying them out on my bed every morning. But somehow I knew that in that girl’s effort to apologize, she had picked out the worst thing she could see and tried to make it better, and I remember feeling distinctly self-conscious about what I was wearing the moment she gave her compliment.
This wasn’t some opening of Pandora’s box, mind you. Apart from that incident, I never again thought much about how different I looked. I soon made a large group of friends and went on through middle school and the first year of high school in complete, if not perhaps oblivious, happiness. My clothes did change, but more in the mundane effort to fit in as a normal teenager than to fit in as a white person. For all I knew or cared, I was just like them and they were just like me.
In the summer of 2002, my family left South Carolina for Maryland. That state was certainly foreign to me in every way, but perhaps most jarring was the complete culture shock I experienced; attending my new (public) school with its twenty-two percent Asian population was akin to walking around Shanghai for the first time. I was overwhelmed even before my introduction to being Asian:
“You must be Korean.”
“No, I’m not. I’m Chinese. Do I look Korean? I’ve only seen Koreans on TV before.”
“What?”
“So do I really look Korean?”
“No you dress Korean. Most Chinese kids dress like FOBs.”
“What’s a FOB?”
“Fresh-off-the boat? As in they dress like they’re still living in China.”
“Oh.”
“You know you’re a complete twinkie, don’t you?”
”A twinkie?”
“You know, yellow on the outside, white on the inside? White people who want to be Asian are eggs.”
“I’m not a twinkie!”
Aside from my indignation at having my personality and appearance reduced to a piece of junk food, I was greatly surprised by the assumptions people made. Asians were faced with two potential situations – dress poorly and you’re a FOB, dress well and you’re a twinkie. Dress well and you’re acting white.
My manner of dressing wasn’t the only “twinkie” factor. Everything from my mostly white friends to my soccer and field hockey sports screamed “twinkie” to other Asians. Other kids called me one of the few “normal Asians.” As for me, I started to hate whatever typified Asians, mostly because those things were simply not me.
It was during college that a friend asked me why I wasn’t in the Asian American Association on my campus, one that has an unusually high number of Asian students relative to white students. My response began tame, a careful explanation of how I felt groups such as those tended to encourage segregation of races and ethnicities among students, but it quickly evolved into:
“…they are exclusive, they are the type of Asians who only speak to other Asians and who speak their Asian language on campus rather than English, they are antisocial, they care little for hygiene or decent appearance, they are submissive yet can’t see beyond their own affairs, they are the ones in the theatres who talk while the lights dim, they are embarrassingly unaware of their surroundings, they are awkward and lack social grace, they don’t understand humility, they care about the end result and not what it took to get there…”
And I stopped, abashed and ashamed. How did this happen? Why have I become like this? How is it that Chinese food and holidays are about the only Asian things I’ve every fully embraced? It turns out I was the harshest, the most critical, the most discriminatory against my own race. Each and every flaw I saw, imaginary and real, was magnified tenfold in my eyes. It’s not that I didn’t want to be Asian. I simply did not want to be what being Asian entailed.
I had been telling myself all this time that acting Asian was something that I’d never want to do, just as I had told myself countless times over that if given a second chance at being 5 years old and choosing between soccer and Chinese school, I’d pick soccer again in a heartbeat. But in my desperation to push away from acting Asian, I only succeeded in being left with a great deal of regret: I regret not knowing the basic geography of China. I regret that my sparse knowledge of Chinese history comes from a middle school world history class. I regret that I speak with such a strong obvious accent on my Chinese. I regret my small Chinese vocabulary. I regret the fear and embarrassment I feel every time I speak to my relatives in my broken Chinese. And perhaps most of all, I regret being unable to read Chinese.
The only characters I can readily recognize are for the words one, small, and mountain. Every time someone asks me if I can read some phrase, sentence, or paragraph in Chinese, I pretend that my search is for the meaning of the words. But in truth, it is a search for those three characters. It is my search in hopes that out of all the meaningless characters, I can at least find one small mountain.
© 2007 MIT E-merging Journal
