6 Years of my life in the United States have been a constant chase to fit in (or just merely survive), especially in my high school years, because not being able to fluently speak a foreign language in a foreign land was probably the loneliest and most depressing path to be on. With the 2% APIA population in my suburb, it felt like everyone was fascinated by my life story but not a lot of people wanted to be my friend or get to know me well. Have I become a storytelling machine or was I still alive with emotions? I couldn’t tell sometimes.
Coming to Michigan, I was excited to finally befriend Asian Americans and emerge in a community I resonated with, only to find out that my political identity as a Hongkonger is not something a lot of people in the A/PIA spaces care or know about. My existence as a Hongkonger is both living as a colonized being as well as being complicitly silenced by the Chinese totalitarian government, from building pipelines of Chinese transnational industrialization and collusion between Chinese government official to the incarceration of Hong Kong student organizers and activists. It is why I don’t identify my nationality as Chinese, despite being Han-Chinese descent. My views on Chinese (or global) imperialism sometimes felt unimportant and invalidated. I believe that all Chinese-colonized Lands should be free: I stand with the Tibetan and East Turkestan Uygher people; I stand with the Taiwanese and its Indigenous people; I stand with my working-class people in Hong Kong. It doesn’t stop me from rambling about my Hongkonger politics though, because my existence and my family’s existence, as Hongkongers, have been nothing but political since British colonization. This constant internal identity battle being both privileged as a Han-Chinese and East Asian descent and the struggle to live under both Chinese imperialism and post-colonization is what fuels me to learn about global power structures and my very own complex identities every day.
As corny as it sounds, my personality nowadays reminds me of the video of Cole Sprouse in Riverdale saying, 'In case you haven't noticed, I'm weird. I'm a weirdo. I don't fit in. I don’t want to fit in. Have you ever seen me without this stupid hat on? That's weird.' Being more exposed to experiences I had in Grand Blanc and organizing on campus allowed me to become more self-aware and gain experiences that I never thought would present to me. Now that I met more Asian Americans in college, I often get this comment, 'Damn, the transition from Hong Kong to a suburb with nearly no Asians must’ve been hard.' Truth is, it certainly was. But heck! Life wasn’t meant to be easy, especially living under systematic global oppression. I would say, though, I would not change my decisions if I could do this over again, because I would not be doing what I am doing today without learning my identity in white spaces and meeting the cool people in the Arab and Black community back in high school.
Now, I’m just striving to unlearn and learn my leftist politics with a decolonizing lens every day. As a person of color, I have learned that institutions can strip away almost every part of our being. But my activist friends always say 'existence is resistance': it’s why I am passionate in the truth, the knowledge, and I try to speak up when needed. Luckily, I was blessed enough to find my people along the way. There was Athena, a Filipinx American I met in high school who unapologetically expresses herself through her artwork. Then, there were Jaire, Matt, Derek, who taught me about music cultures, Black and Indigenous liberation, global capitalism and imperialism crises through satires of memes and leftist twitter threads. There was everyone in Michigan in Color who gave me an opportunity to grow in this space and learn how to spread radical love. Harnoor, Sivanthy, Priya, Eileen, other A/PIA activists and activists of color that inspire me every day... The list keeps adding on. (Sorry if I didn’t give you a shoutout. Too blessed to have so many amazing people in my life) At the end of the day, I don’t see the need for myself to fit in anymore, knowing confidently that I am the only one who can internalize my own being with my most beloved friends alongside.
---reposted from Uncover: APIA University of Michigan
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