Written by Jessie Hsu (2022)

During my freshman year at university, I spent my first Lunar New Year away from my family. As a kid, it wasn’t a holiday that I particularly looked forward to or dreaded. The food and time with family was always nice, but I didn’t hold the same level of excitement for it as I did Christmas. It’s not like I would walk through my neighborhood and see houses upon houses decked out in Lunar New Year decorations like they would be with Christmas lights. So while I knew I would miss sitting around the dinner table with all my relatives and my mom’s beef noodle soup, I thought I’d be, for the most part, ambivalent to it coming and going while I was in my dorm in Boston three thousand miles away from home.

Instead, I found myself in the first days of February seized by a deep-seated anxiety and sadness as it dawned on me, the gulf between my culture and me that seemed to grow with my decision to go to school in Boston. I’m incredibly lucky to have been born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, perhaps the place in the US with the longest and most extensive Chinese immigrant culture. And while Boston is still a place with a flourishing Chinese-American community compared to the rest of the US, it still isn’t close to what I’m used to back home. 

So came this sense of urgency and need to reconnect. Fear that if I didn’t do something about it, my culture would slip quietly away while I was too busy catching the T and lamenting over exams. But I found the question of how to reconnect so difficult to answer. In fact, it still is. 

I feel like there are a lot of Chinese immigrant parents in the Bay Area whose children seem very neutral about their culture growing up; they neither reject it nor show particular interest in it. Part of growing up in the Bay Area meant that I was fortunate enough to have at least a small handful of Asian peers in all my classes at school, and racism was experienced largely in the form of microaggressions, rather than outright violent attacks which could have in turn made me want to shed my heritage. I felt no reason to reject my culture, but I also didn’t try to learn any more about it than what my parents taught me.

As a child of immigrants, there can be this incredible shame that comes with asking your parents about your culture. In attempting to reconnect, I know that my parents are the best and most accessible resource for me. But for many children of immigrants, suddenly starting to ask questions and show interest after years of ambivalence is often met with a mildly shocked and amused “Why are you asking now?” that leaves you feeling very foolish. And it makes the asking feel insurmountable.

On top of all of this is another dimension that feels harder to navigate, harder to talk about. Both sides of my family are from Taiwan, so my heritage is specifically Taiwanese-Chinese. I’ve never been to China. When I go back to Asia to visit my extended family, it’s to Taiwan, to my parents’ hometowns of Taipei and Chiayi. While there is certainly a lot of overlap in the two countries’ culture, popular resources or opportunities to connect with Chinese culture outside of my family often don’t feel like they quite fit because they’re focused on mainland culture. They feel like my culture, but two steps to the left. My culture, but the edges bend in a way that I’m not used to. In Western culture, I feel the absence of my Chinese heritage. In Chinese culture, I feel the absence of my Taiwanese heritage.

Every day, I’m reminded of how complex Asian American identity is and how heavy it can feel sometimes. US-China relations are never not a hot button issue and one that is constantly talked about. But I have to watch my words because any grievances with China I raise can be and will be taken and twisted by someone who wants an excuse to be Sinophobic. It’s amazing the amount of Sinophobia that rears its head in allegedly progressive and inclusive groups when US-China relations come up. But at the same time, with Taiwan and China’s fraught history, defending the mainland feels like a betrayal. Logically, I know that correcting misunderstandings about China and calling out Sinophobia is the right course of action when it comes up, but there is a tiny part of me that feels like I’m ignoring my Taiwanese heritage and giving into mainland hegemony. And at the same time yet again, engaging with my Taiwanese heritage feels like a constant attempt to reconcile all of the above with the rest of the history that comes with the region. The years under imperial Japanese rule. The fact that Han Chinese culture in Taiwan only exists as it does as a result of centuries of forced assimilation and sinicization of the indigenous groups that live there and have lived there long before the Han Chinese arrived in droves on the island.

This is all incredibly difficult to talk about with anyone but myself. If even I myself find it confusing and overwhelming to think about, I’m at a loss at how to communicate this to anyone who isn’t me, and much less any white American who has neither the experience a person of color has nor the experience an immigrant or child of immigrants has. But ultimately, I think the attempts to do so are necessary.

With all of these parts at play, the reconnection process is long, difficult, and vulnerable. It is also every bit as worth it as it is all of those things. There is no easy answer, no straight path, no end to the road of personal cultural discovery and rediscovery. But I manage. I call my mom from school and ask her what brand of shacha sauce we normally use. I stand next to her in the kitchen at home and watch as she makes pork chive buns. I put on a Mandarin song from the mainland. I watch a Taiwanese drama and listen to the actors speak in Taiwanese Hokkien. I remember that, for all its complexity, my cultural identity is still a source of joy and most importantly, an inextricable part of my selfhood.