"In the suburbs east of San Francisco, we were one of a handful of Chinese families, and my classmates teased me and snubbed me from early on. I tried to fit in, getting a perm and donning Guess jeans, Esprit canvas tote bags, and other signifiers of suburban girlhood in the late 1980s — and I’d no sooner use chopsticks than bind my feet. At home, and at Chinese restaurants, I insisted on a fork, in a muddled form of protest, of patriotism, to claim that I was truly American. My parents must have tried to teach me how to use chopsticks, in the murkiness before my memories begin, but eventually, they had to let it go. They had demanding careers in science and engineering, and it must have taken everything in them to get our family through the day, let alone try to stem the tide of assimilation.
In college, I started taking a tentative interest in my heritage, but knew no better than my non-Chinese friends where to go for a late night bite in San Francisco’s Chinatown. We ended up at a dive with paper napkins and Formica tables, the air heavy with grease. Without a word, the waiter dropped forks in front of them, and chopsticks by me. My friends protested. I felt pleased, but then almost immediately like a fraud — hyphenated, never quite American or Chinese enough. Most likely, the waiter had decided he didn’t want the hassle of coming back to deliver forks. Maybe, more often than not, tourists didn’t know how to use chopsticks. And I didn’t either — at least, not correctly, not then and not years later, despite my father’s renewed efforts to teach me."What a beautiful piece of writing. Absolutely read the whole thing.
I'm reminded of a passage in Roy Choi's great autobiography about his life as a first-generation Korean-American, L.A. Son, and how his father would hit him if he ever caught him speaking Korean. (The idea being that excising Korean would hasten his learning of English.)
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