Voices 2: Didi and Lucky

The voice in this blog is actually speaking for two. She embodies the split that many children of immigrants, Asian or not, live. For some, it is not a choice. The parents see to that. Some parents forbid a child from speaking anything but English. Others refuse that tongue. And some, too many, are caught in-between. Neither nor or both and. The double identity is heavy and requires skills most of us do not have to worry about developing. This writer has made a choice. For now. In this country we often say the apple does not fall far from the tree. But sometimes the wisdom of clichés cannot cover the choices individuals make. I hope she will take her Kerouac ride and find the other Ocean is not as far away as she might think. I am grateful to her for the honesty and courage it took to share this with us. We all can learn from her. I know I did and do.

When I see my sister, I can conjure an image of a skinny girl wearing nondescript jeans, a

basic V-neck, and the same pin-straight, shoulder-length haircut that she has sported since kindergarten. Predominantly, I think of her diminutive, slumped posture, her quiet voice that often assumes an apologetic tone, and her defensive eye-roll that she should have outgrown a decade ago. She is twenty-three, has an insurance job, lives at home with my parents, and is still dating the only guy she has ever been close to. The guy is Asian. My sister is Asian. And I, too, am, by genetics if not by choice, Asian.

I can only vaguely mentally sketch my sister because I rarely see her or speak to her, and we are so different that when I attempt conversation, it almost always ends in uncomfortable silences punctuated only by our awkward head nods,  the acknowledgement that yes, nothing has changed, we still cannot speak. There exists a Pacific between us, bridged shakily by childhood memories of playing Power Rangers and eating lemonade popsicles in the grass together as our mom puttered around the garden. There exists a Pacific between us because I decided years ago that I resented being labeled as “the Asian” whereas she has made a home for herself in the curves and crevices of the word, in the particulars of that identity. 

My sister emanates the kind of acute self-consciousness that I have seen in so many Asian-Americans and that I myself have nestled in. It is the kind of self-consciousness that emerges from being pigeon-holed as the smart, passive, rule-following student and from being the butt of casual jokes involving exaggerated “ching-chongs” and other crude parodies of the Asian tongue. I dealt with this self-consciousness by struggling to transcend the stereotyping, to be perceived as a person with an American name rather than as an Asian template. She dealt with it by embracing the stereotypes.

While I was goofing off with the girls who owned American Girl dolls and ate pasta for dinner and Oreos for dessert, she hung around the kids who we had always been friends with-- the daughters and sons of the other Chinese immigrants that my parents picked. While I was arguing for permission to sleep over at a white friend’s house (sleepovers with the aforementioned Asian friends were no problem at all), my sister was in her room studying quietly. I tried on a medley of majors in college and finally decided upon English Literature. My sister entered college majoring in actuarial science and graduated with exactly that degree four years later. I am about to get in a car and drive across the country with plans to find a waitressing job once I hit the West Coast. My sister is living and working in the same 15-mile radius that she has occupied since elementary school and will soon marry the nice Asian boy she has been dating since high school.

I resent my sister because I feel that being Asian in our American culture has made her timid, that the Asian values of stability and conformity have handicapped her experience here. I resent her because she has resigned herself to embodying a stereotype that I have fought against, and because between our common genes and a common childhood, I fear that her armored cover of the Asian identity affirms the strength of certain cultural mentalities and values that I may never eradicate from my psyche. In struggling to cast off familiar Asian stereotypes, I have actively defined myself against “that which is Asian”. An Othering that still swims within the sea of my own identity and that emerges with sharpest clarity when I look at my sister and see her meekness and then fear it is also mine.

Does she conceive of herself in this way-- as the timid Asian girl, never confronting the foreign, complacent enough to exist cocooned beneath those tenuous silk layers of safety that she has woven: her Asian friends, her job crunching numbers, her residence at home with my parents? I can’t say for sure, because we don’t talk. If she were anyone else, my resentment might merely be the bemusement I feel when I hear snatches of conversation between Chinese students in the library as they decide, between whispered giggles, which dining hall they will pick to go to to eat dinner, or spend too much time seriously discussing where their study group should meet afterward. But she is my sister, and I want to shake her out of this apathy that keeps her running in laps around the same prescribed path. I want her to struggle to define herself outside of a cultural identity, if only to assuage my own fears that I cannot or have not succeeded in doing so completely.

Of course, the vast discrepancy in our lives cannot be wholly attributed to a decision to be “Asian” or “not-Asian”. We have different dispositions, and hers likely leaves her more inclined to pursue an insurance job than to read Beckett. And I am not untroubled by my own decision to define myself against Asianness.

Sometimes when I overhear those fragments of Chinese conversation in the library, my detached bemusement is followed by a surprising twinge of nostalgia as I remember growing up with my parents’ chatter at the dinner table or the Sunday afternoons I spent pronouncing new characters at Chinese School.

It is about navigating the two poles that I have traversed as a first-generation Asian growing up here: somewhere between the me that never dissented to doing extra math problems for my parents and the me that carefully chose to hang out only with white friends lies the identity that I might have formulated without the fraught struggle to be not-Asian, to be not-my-sister. Similarly, I feel that if my sister would step outside of the wholly Asian identity she has sequestered herself in, she would break through some of that self-consciousness that clings so parasitically to many Asian-Americans. Perhaps then, we could collapse the space and silence between us.