I cannot believe there was a time I was convinced I could abandon prawn mee or lo mai gai. I tell people I have never been ashamed of my identity because I am so proud of who I am right now. But it’s a Herculean task to try to unravel the tight ropes I have wrapped over my insecurities and tap into why I wanted to withdraw from my culture in the first place.
I think I have been conditioned to avoid this type of conversation because I feel a level of cringe just as I begin typing out my ethnicity. I am half-white American and half-Malaysian Chinese. A lot of people don’t understand what being Malaysian Chinese means, and I stopped explaining it as “you know, like Michelle Yeoh?” because the amount of people who are unaware of her existence discourages me. Identifying as Malaysian Chinese refers to being ethnically Chinese while living in Malaysia. I always try to make this important locational and cultural distinction, just like anyone with roots in Taiwan or Hong Kong might.
Cultural preservation is an active state of mind that requires deliberate effort. One has to persistently identify oneself as a participant in a cultural community; otherwise, they are suspended to its outskirts.
In an undetermined era some time between the end of elementary school and the beginning of middle school (mindset fluctuations are perplexing to measure exactly in time), I made an unspoken agreement with myself to quit my culture. I would never perfectly fit in any clear-cut mold, especially since my family lived in the United States, where molds are already miscellaneous and prone to change, an uncomfortable realization that ignited a desire for conformity to ransack my judgments.
My mom never taught me Malay because a lot of the Chinese people in Malaysia use Mandarin and Cantonese to converse with each other. But I wasn’t completely fluent in either, and the inconvenient gaps in my knowledge frustrated me. Rather than be a shell of a Chinese speaker, I concluded that it was easier to only speak English.
When I decided to become monolingual, I pictured a stream of Chinese characters zooming out of my ears, taking every piece of my stored language with them. I was satisfied with this displacement because I thought giving this language up would help me feel less complicated inside. I could just be American, whatever that entailed.
I was unforthcoming in my approach, not outwardly showing how I tried to distance myself from the language, media and food, which was by far the most challenging to avoid. I would generally remain silent when any related conversation came up, unwilling to commit to a response.
I was determined to relinquish this part of my identity, but lingerings of my favorite foods or cherished phrases made me occasionally falter. If anything, I had a misguided notion that it took strength to let something go, particularly something as extensive and beloved as a culture. I became uncomfortable interacting with anything that reminded me of how much I loved being Malaysian-Chinese. And at the same time, I didn’t feel any closer to being uncomplicatedly American.
The hardest part was knowing that I let my mom down. She did her best to encourage my heritage, especially as the only fluent Chinese speaker in my household. She drove an extra 30 minutes to send me to Cantonese babysitters and signed me up for weekend Chinese school. Her disappointment when I would frequently reply in English was something I thought was necessary and had to be accepted, like swallowing a tough pill. The best way to describe how I imagined my transformation is the visions in “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” where the past avatars resolutely vanish one by one.
I am unsure when my perspective fully changed back; the process occurred gradually, like solids melting into liquids and then dissipating into gas. By the end of middle school, I no longer actively avoided chopsticks in favor of forks, but it took more time before I felt that decisive action was needed to embrace a more involved connection with my culture.
The first time I read Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie” was in 10th grade English class. It was the peak of the pandemic, and I couldn’t care less about the monotonous Zoom classes I was forced to sit through. In groups, we had to pick from a list of short stories to analyze. Someone in my group had previously read “The Paper Menagerie,” so we went with that.
I’m known to cry when interacting with media, especially when I’m alone. I cry every time I watch the end of the short film “Bao” and the Pixar hit “Inside Out.” But I had never been drowned by such a vigorous wave of sorrow as I was when I read this short story.
The story follows Jack, a mixed-race child with a white American father and a Chinese mother, who rejects his culture when he faces backlash from the community around him for discrepancies such as playing with different toys and eating a different lunch.
When my assigned group broke into breakout rooms (I curse whoever created such a concept), everyone tiredly drudged through their analyses. I was dismayed that no one seemed as metamorphosed as I was. I was shaken for days after reading the story, deflated and despondent inside.
I not only related to the story — I felt the author crafted it especially for me.
Like the main character, I loved my culture before outside influences infiltrated my viewpoints, pushing me toward a path of conflict and alienation.
I knew I had made a grave mistake. The two to three-year period where I convinced myself there was no point in trying to maintain my “Asianness” felt wasted. I had paranoid thoughts that my mom would die feeling disconnected from both her home and current country like the mother in the story. I looked around the house for days, trying to see how she categorized objects as American or Asian, harsh and foreign or familiar and reassuring. Suddenly a timer was placed over my head, recording how much longer I had to learn from her, now that I finally wanted to.
Ensuingly, I had to go through cultural rehabilitation. I was replying to my mom in English more frequently, so switching back to the succinct sounds and familiar but distant tones of Cantonese was like re-learning long division. Additionally, my mom had grown more used to speaking English around me. I was now reminding her to address me in Cantonese, an initiative she liked to hear.
The summer before I started college, my mom and I went on a one-month Asia extravaganza where we visited cities from Singapore and Taiwan. The main reason we flew across oceans was to go back to Malaysia, where my mom had lived half her life. I had gone a couple of times as a child, but as a young adult, this was a completely different experience.
When we came back to America, my mom and I debriefed all of our favorite memories: the boisterous monkeys inside the cave temples, drinking Teh Tarik every day even though the lactose continued to wage war on my bodily processes and buying random knick knacks (my favorites including a mini cat lamp and a pink phone stand) from Mr. DIY because the favorable conversion rate allowed my mom to loosen her clutch on her wallet. At some point, she offhandedly remarked that this trip would probably be the last time I visited Malaysia and saw family members in person, considering I would be preoccupied with college and, afterward, a real adult life. Melancholy exhausted my spirit.
I understood why she wanted us to have this trip so badly, taking the time to plan everything out an entire year in advance. She realized the implications of raising her children in America and sacrificed the cultural environment she loved in pursuit of the “American Dream.” I wasn’t the only one who thought I would quit my culture. But now that was the most depressing feeling I could imagine.
Re-reading “The Paper Menagerie” while cooped up in the Michigan Union, I have to take multiple breaks. I will make it through three paragraphs, feel my eyes water and my heart clench, stop to placidly scroll through my phone and repeat this process until I reach the end. I am embarrassed that I can’t keep it together just to read a couple of pages, but it has been so long since I immersed myself in this story that its cuts and slices feel just as raw.
I face a sense of impending doom that I will be the end of my cultural line. Either through deliberate choice or the forced unfoldings of American assimilation, my destiny seems pre-determined. I don’t want this burden weighing on my shoulders, a parasitic creature prattling in my ear and biting chunks out of my flesh. It sincerely takes intention and perseverance to sustain a culture instead of falling into a limbo of passive withdrawal. I want to un-quit my culture and try to maintain as strong of a connection as possible, even if my attempts are futile.
Daily Arts Writer Tara Wasik can be reached at tarawas@umich.edu.