Learning to Love Across the Cultural Divide
My mom’s first impression of America was that she had reached the end of the world. Flying from Shanghai, the only city she had ever known, into Albuquerque, New Mexico, was like landing on another planet. She didn’t speak English fluently yet—she had had no plans to leave China, until she fell in love with my dad and he got accepted into a PhD program in the United States—and with her wavy hair and dark eyes, many assumed that she was Mexican and often spoke Spanish to her, which confused her even more. But more frustrating was when they started yelling at her, as if she were hard of hearing. After that experience, she made sure I grew up speaking with an American accent.
On my fifth birthday, my family moved from Los Angeles to Indianapolis. I had wanted Barbies for my birthday, but instead I got the Midwest. My parents soon settled in a predominantly Caucasian suburb that was known for having a good public school system. We didn’t know yet that it was also deeply Republican: We now lived in the middle of a state that would later elect Mike Pence as its governor. On a day-to-day basis, living in a community filled with people who generally didn’t look like you just meant that you stuck out. It meant people on the phone wondering if they had correctly called the Zhang household because they didn’t detect an accent in my voice. It meant strangers asking me where I was from, no, where was I really from. It meant my mom could speak to me in Shanghai dialect in public like it was our secret code. It meant learning about the American Revolution in school and hearing about the Cultural Revolution at home.
Growing up, my parents had told me being born in America meant that I could one day become president. (This was back when the idea that anyone could become president didn’t sound like a threat.) It was their way of telling me I could grow up to be anything I wanted—but when I was 5, all I was wanted was to be American. Like, really American.
Until I entered high school, I could count the number of Asian friends I had on one hand. Mostly, there just weren’t many Asian families in my school district. Assimilating into American culture wasn’t so much a choice as it was the only option; it also meant accepting a new normal—one that was determined by my peers rather than my parents. I bought school lunches, shopped at the mall, watched American movies, and learned the intimacies of the Britney vs. Christina and Biggie vs. Tupac rivalries. At home, my mom continued to cook Chinese food every night for dinner and watch Korean dramas that seemed to go on for decades. Later, I would join a sorority, learn French instead of Mandarin, study abroad in Europe, travel to different continents, and have friends whose backgrounds ranged from Haitian to Swedish. In college and in New York I at least was able to define my own version of America, where diversity was celebrated rather than stamped out. In the mail, my mom sent me moon cakes for the moon holiday, noted when Chinese New Year was, and let me know they ate noodles on my birthday. I continued to exist in the in-between, where I was “the Asian” to my American peers but “the American” to my Asian relatives.
“You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable”—that's what Ta-Nehisi Coates wished for his son. The year was 2016, and I had recently joined a book club, for which we were reading Coates’s Between the World and Me. Around the room, the people in the group related instances when they had experienced racism and sexism; it was a cathartic release in a year that seemed to attack the very diversity that we not only embodied but also felt had so enriched our own lives. That feeling would only continue to linger, as #OscarsSoWhite trended, white nationalists marched in Charlottesville, and Donald Trump shouted about walls, mocked a Puerto Rican accent, instituted a “Muslim ban,” moved to end DACA, and bemoaned all of the “shithole countries” whose citizens dared to fulfill this country’s promise and try to become American, too.
Trying to keep my head above the torrent of news, I thought back to all the ways as a child I had defined being first-generation Chinese American by what it was not (American) rather than what it was (a chance to be more). I picked up the phone and called my mom. “I want to learn Mandarin,” I said.
Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with one new essay appearing each day for the first two weeks of February, until Valentine’s Day.
