Written by Barrett Yueh (2022)

My parents tell me I am descended from the famed Song dynasty general Yue Fei, who was framed and executed for treason. This is apparently a big deal — he shows up in history museums, niche art galleries, textbooks, and has a temple in Hangzhou. But as personal as it is, it’s hard for me to get excited about this piece of history; it is foreign, distant, the bragging rights of a family different from my own. Where I grew up — an overwhelmingly white suburb whose racism was less of the violent variety and more of the oh your English is so good type — no one understood or cared about the rarity, meaning, or history of my surname. 

There is a word for Chinese kids like me who have grown up in the States their whole lives: bananas — yellow on the outside, white on the inside. It’s a label that highlights our Americanization, our willingness to absorb a new culture, how easy it was for us to abandon our heritage. I used to think banana was funny and above all, true — Chinese words sit in my mouth with the precarious, rehearsed accuracy of someone who understands the mechanics of pronunciation but not the nuances of grammar, I hold my chopsticks wrong, haha the ABC struggle is so funny, et cetera — but now, the term banana is associated with an ugly truth: You are white. Chinese is a costume reserved for special occasions. 

The wittiness of labels like banana trivialize the cost of acquired whiteness. They make it funny, casual, something for our first-generation parents to laugh at derisively when they see us struggling to read a menu. But Americanization isn’t a conscious choice; for many of us, it is a survival tactic. Speaking a foreign language — especially one as tonal and harsh as Mandarin — got me teased in school. People don’t yell ni hao at you because they actually care about the language, they do it to embarrass you, bait you, mock you. I was terrified people would find out my middle name, a transliteration of my Chinese name, because I knew the harassment would never end. In middle school I was easily embarrassed by the questions and judgment my lunch got for the way it looked and smelled. (Even today, my complicated relationship with food goes beyond calories into existential crises about cultural origin and identity.) When I began struggling in physics and math in high school, people asked me, What kind of Asian are you? What kind of Asian can’t do math? Getting called a chink in high school was tame compared to the dangerous mix of racism, misogyny, and infantilization I face as an adult. I love Asian women. (Gross.) Asian women are so exotic. (We’re not, you just live under a rock.) You’re so pretty for a Chinese girl. (Is this supposed to be a compliment?) You’re the hottest Asian I’ve ever met. (I don’t even have words for that one.) Asian women just have their values in the right places, you know? (Translation: I assume all Asian women grow up in patriarchal societies where they learn to submit to their male superiors, and I think that makes them great sexual partners.)

When I was younger, cutting away my Chinese heritage was an action I took willingly, even enthusiastically. I stopped speaking Chinese at home. I rolled my eyes when my mother called me by my Chinese nickname. (The name still fills me with a gut-punch reaction of disdain and irritation, and the shame and guilt I feel for hurting my mother with my instinctive exasperation cannot be described.) I skipped meals and threw out lunches. (This, too, hurt my mother — Asian families show love through acts of service, and this includes food — and worse, it hurt my father, even if he didn’t show it. I now understand he supported his mother and younger brother with a combination of food stamps and his after-school job when they first came to this country. He was in high school at the time. It was impossible for him to comprehend why I would throw away food, devastating to see he’d raised a daughter who apparently didn’t care about waste.) I slacked off in math classes because it was easier to endure the humiliation of being told I wasn’t trying hard enough than to hear that I was a defect and shame to my race. It was like trying to disown a family member; I was so desperate to deny and whitewash my own history. Being Chinese hurt me — physically, socially, emotionally — so I stopped being Chinese.

But now I realize none of it was, or ever will be, enough. How could it be? Short of getting plastic surgery to reshape my eyes and nose, I will always look Chinese; as a result, I have spent years regretting the vigor with which I rejected my Chinese-ness, the hurt I must have caused my parents. I have entered adulthood with a foreigner’s grasp of my cultural history and native tongue, and for what? So that people can be impressed with my command of the English language, and tell me how neutral my accent is? So that I can blend in with my peers, but not my own family, flesh and blood? So that I can be hired by employers who want to look like they have a diverse workforce without compromising their efficiency or requiring visa paperwork? So that my white male colleagues and classmates can have an intelligent conversation with me in English, treat me with respect, even, and then tell me that they get off to my exotic features? 

This is what being a banana is: just Chinese enough that I cannot be American, but so undeniably American that I can never pass as Chinese. I feel like I am in some sort of Purgatory, waiting for a verdict to be delivered from above. Every day, I walk the tightrope between defending the country I want to view as my own and committing treason against the other. Maybe it’s too late. I don’t speak Chinese. Every time I write a card to my grandmother, I have to check with my mother to make sure that I’m thinking of all the right characters. My non-Asian peers are more literate in Chinese than I am. Now that I no longer live with my parents year-round, I eat non-Chinese food more often than Chinese food. I infinitely prefer studying European affairs to Asian politics and business, something that will always confuse my relatives. Whether or not I meant to, it’s clear that I’ve already chosen a side. 

Yue Fei was posthumously exonerated and venerated as a hero. The story goes that he had a tattoo, painstakingly carved into his skin by his own mother: 盡忠報國. Stay loyal to your country. The romantically-inclined like to think this was why he was exonerated; no man willing to declare his patriotism so painfully, with his own blood, would ever betray his country. I try to think of a place that might truly fit the definition of my country, my homeland — maybe Hong Kong, maybe Arizona, maybe the village in Sichuan where my paternal grandfather’s family lives — and come up empty. There isn’t a single place that I feel would value my blood the way it deserves to be valued. Though this knowledge should make me angry and jealous of Yue Fei’s tattoo, so assured in its owner’s identity, I have actually found comfort in the tattoo’s story. Even with the knowledge that he would die stateless, branded a traitor to his country, Yue Fei died proudly and with honor. So I will not spend anymore time mourning the heritage and culture I have lost. I will not live and die regretting what I have done to myself. I do not need reassurances; I am not guilty of anything. It does not matter what anyone else says, banana or not. Yue Fei knew he was Chinese. So do I.