1999 Charles River Review: Identity Crisis

I lost and found myself on the Boston T the other day, when the Sox were playing at home and the trains were crowded. Crowded can't describe it. Defying the laws of physics and personal space, scores of us crammed ourselves in front of the white line and behind it, filling every square inch of that car with a kind of intimacy that should only be shared by lovers. I felt an odd sense of camaraderie with these strangers. We smelled and experienced far more of each other than any of us desired. Backs pushed against breasts; faces faced armpits.

Once positioned, I scanned the faces crammed about my own, noting the variety of features and the similarly stoic expressions we all bore. I closed my eyes, tilting my head to ensure sufficient oxygen, and started counting. After a hundred, I switched to humming jingles in my head. Everyone seemed to avoid conversations that would have to be shared with so many. Swaying and clutching to keep balance, we collectively rode and coped as the wheels screeched along the tracks. Suddenly, a woman spoke out.

"The problem," she said, "is that we let too damn many in."

As if the conductor really had any control over that, I thought. Everyone knows how people barrel onto these trains. She said it again. I opened my eyes. She was looking at me.

"We shouldn't let so damn many in."

This time I understood her perfectly, as did all the other people who regarded our sudden, strange pairing with a mixture of surprise and morbid curiosity. I was now connected to this woman as if we were both part of a bloody two-car crash. Everything started moving in slow motion. I felt panicked and sensed the crowd backing up slightly. I suddenly had more than enough room to breathe, but couldn't. Everyone looked at me, waiting for my reaction.

Those adept at power plays and politics talk of the "rage response," which is how individuals react after being attacked. The response is not necessarily anger or revenge. Even worse is the desire to explain your way to respect, with hope your tormentor will undergo some kind of enlightened reformation and stop picking on you.

As I stood there, my history began flooding through my head, and I ached for this woman to know it all. I wanted to tell her in perfect, carefully selected English that I was born in Houston and that I believed, for much of my childhood in Miami, that I was blond and Jewish. Most of my friends were. I was a regular at their Passover Seders and Bar Mitzvahs. Like Gish Gen's Mona in the Promised Land, I had a hard time understanding other Chinese people, understanding their English. I would simply give up with the guttural, singsong tones of Chinese. I wanted to say how the unexpected reflection of my own face could startle me.

I started exploring my ethnicity in college, after getting over the fact that I would never be tall or have a nose that would adequately support eyeglasses. College was the first place I regularly saw other Chinese people. I panicked when I walked into Freshman Biology and faced row after row of straight black hair. The presence of so many Asians intimidated me. I forgot I was one of them.

The first time I went to China, I was 12 and thoroughly confused. Excited by the amazing journey my family was about to take, friends dramatically threw out the "homeland" word, leading me to believe that I was about to discover something truly essential about myself. My family would be among the first Chinese-Americans to return to Communist China. Return was the word used, but "venturing into the unknown" was a more apt description. No one, especially we, had any idea what to expect.

For months before our departure in 1978, my siblings and I practiced with our chopsticks. Technique is scrutinized in China, and the Chinese can be the snobbiest of people. We would not get points for simply delivering food to our mouths. As I practiced, I savored the expectation of two months of my father's kind of cooking. My siblings and I always preferred his exquisite Chinese cuisine to my mother's mediocre casseroles, which always seemed to feature tunafish or potato chips. My father, the only true Chinese immigrant among us, never said an unkind word about these culinary experiments. Theirs was truly a modern, cross-cultural marriage.

That was something else I longed to tell the woman on the Green Line whose eyes still burned into mine. My Chinese mother was born in Philadelphia. Her name is Elizabeth. She refused to wear fur in college and shocked her relations when she bolted for UC Berkeley after the University of Pennsylvania. She has an enduring love affair with the English language and still struggles, as I do, with the Chinese she faithfully studies twice a week as a foreign language. But I knew the resentful woman standing before me would fail to appreciate the irony.

I don't consider myself remarkable looking in any particular way. I'm not so attractive that I hold the eyes of strangers for longer than the requisite split second. Nor am I so unusual or unfortunate that I garner lingering, sympathetic stares. I mostly travel through life as one of the crowd. Similarly, I've rarely felt distinguished or ostracized for my ethnicity. I know there are still clubs and organizations that would shun me, but as I'm not wild about golf or organized lunching, I'm rarely positioned for such rejection. There is the occasional pass from men with Asian fetishes, but I find those folks fairly easy to identify and avoid. Something else I didn't say to the Green Line woman is that I secretly realize I can be just as racist as she. Perhaps I am worse because I have caught myself separating from those who are my own. I felt a sudden stab of guilt that I so desperately wanted her to know that I wasn't "fresh off the boat."

When I arrived in China that first trip in 1978, not a single thing felt familiar. I was secretly horrified and embarrassed by the whole culture. Armed with the obnoxious egocentrism that is universal to all preteens, I silently criticized the locals for eating with their mouths open. I made faces when they burped loudly during meals. I regarded the spittoons, and those who used them, with disgust. I did not yet understand what it means to accept manners that are foreign to my own. I was appalled at the habits that came from a culture that was supposed to be mine, and that was the worst part, feeling foreign in the very place I expected to feel at home.

In China, my family stood out so sharply we might as well have been purple. The "true" mainland Chinese knew we didn't belong. It could have been our clothes, our cameras, or our haircuts; perhaps that we still had all of our teeth. We caused traffic jams as people on foot or bikes would stop and stare. Every time we paused, a huge crowd would build. They pressed in just shy of actually touching us. I felt like a zoo animal, observed with equal parts fascination and fear, and I longed to go home, back to my normal life in the states. Once, I yelled at some gawkers, in English of course. Nobody moved. They just stared at me as if I were crazy.

The food made us sick. I was depressed to learn that most of what I thought to be Chinese food was actually a kind of Western bastardization. That summer in China, I remember eating mostly entrails and fungus. One gourmet meal left me traumatized. My smiling uncle proudly pointed to the turtles and eels splashing about in the family bathtub. They would be our dinner that night.

"We should send them back," the woman said, and with her words I was thrust into identity limbo. She wanted to send me home to a place I wish I knew, but I don't. I am hit with enough low-grade insecurity about not being "Chinese enough." I secretly harbor jealousy of Caucasian friends who confidently roll out their perfectly enunciated Mandarin or some complicated Tai Chi form. If they can write characters, I want to kill them. It's embarrassing for me to admit that I am basically illiterate in Chinese, and I sometimes feel that non-Asians who have mastered this difficult language are taking something that doesn't belong to them. But it doesn't belong to me either. And so I stood, swaying and injured on that train, feeling like a stranger to my heritage and an outcast from my nationality.

Visible immigrants will always receive the brunt of slurs and verbal abuse, no matter how long they've been in this country, says Eugene Eoyang in his book, The Coat of Many Colors. It's a color game. A German immigrant can blend in pretty quickly, while the Korean cannot. Eoyang theorizes that the word "immigrant" will become more negative as the proportion of the immigrant population in this country becomes more non-white.

I know I wasn't the only person of color on that train. I was simply the easiest for that woman to identify. There were many true immigrants on that train. I just happened most to look like one. None of this really matters. No politically correct volunteers came rushing to my rescue, and for that I am grateful. Eventually, one must face one's bullies alone. A response was required only of me. I'm sad to admit that it was neither bold nor generous, enlightening, or witty. Those kinds of replies never come to me until weeks after they're needed.

"We let too damn many in," she spat again.

"So, are you volunteering to go back?" I gently inquired. "That's really not necessary."

"I was here first," she yelled in my face.

At that moment, my stop came up. I considered staying on, just to argue, but I knew we wouldn't get anywhere. There was no need, no purpose, and no time to explain myself. I was tempted to scrutinize her history, her stories, and her heritage to be judged against my own, but I realized that act would have only made us equals on a cruel playing field. With resignation, I stepped off. I never did tell her that "first" doesn't matter. I still believe there was room for both of us on that train.