I tell my white friend something about my immigrant childhood, maybe something my parents said or did. I’m sharing very matter-of-factly because it is something I find totally inane. But then they look at me in disbelief. I had expected a laugh, or a smile at the very least. Instead, I’m taken aback by her response: “I can’t believe your parents would say that to you. It is amazing how well-adjusted you are as an adult, given how harsh your parents were.”
My parents are normal — strange sometimes, strict about some/many/everything for sure, but also ridiculously generous and funny in their own way. It only takes experiencing these moments of “othering” a couple of times to realize that some stories are meant for specific audiences.
I take the same story to Lil, who also grew up in an immigrant household, and she immediately appreciates the situation. She knows without knowing everything: “Oh, I totally get why she did that. How funny!” Sometimes, she tells me an equally ridiculous story about her parents, and we snort and belly laugh and say, “Yes! Yes! I can’t believe your dad would say that and also, of course, he would!”
The white listener of my childhood stories notices my parents’ inability to communicate fully in English or understand Western cultural nuances, and ends up hyper-focusing on their Asianness. I don’t worry about this with Lil. Even though the details of our stories differ in geography traversed (Korean Canadian by way of the Philippines vs. Chinese Canadian by way of Malaysia), languages spoken (Korean vs. Hakka), and eggs eaten (soy sauce and chili powder-marinated eggs vs. tea eggs), the brushstrokes of our stories are the same. They are the same in that we both get asked “What kind of Asian are you?” (How polite) or get yelled, “Chinese! Ching Chong!” (Not polite). Go back up the chain of ancestors and you’ll see that before they shared similar immigrant stories, the same bearded men instilled in…
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