milking the same story & a slight scuffle with sotomayor

Even three years after living in the country, every day I am forced to confront the fact that I still do not feel Chinese. There are less obvious signs of it—my pronunciation is better than most of my ABC friends who grew up here, many whose last visit to “the homeland” was years ago; I feel more comfortable speaking in Mandarin to my friends’ parents even over English; and the like. In China—one time in a very blue moon—I happened to score the highest points on a Chinese essay in my grade, and I still remember my classmates looking at me like a saint. In China I had done everything to qualify myself as “Chinese” enough by the standards of that culture. I completed my arc from an academic failure to getting into one of the best high schools in my city through the Zhongkao; I was taking an extracurricular class at the time on Chinese literature (a very rough translation of 古诗文, but I digress), which some of my classmates had not even heard of; sometimes they deemed me more Chinese than even them. Many, many times my father has wondered why I had not stayed in China. He points out my high-scoring Chinese essays and my Chinese test scores, which everyone in China does, what even I now recognize as an enigma, and a miracle, and says with his full chest how well I would have done there.

All this to say—he does not understand why I, on a subconscious level, so abhor the thought of returning to China for college and for my career. No matter what I do, I think—no surface-level accolades to flaunt with friends of colleagues—could outweigh the simple math that no matter what I do, I will always be twelve years behind my same-age classmates in China, now in high school, preparing for the Gaokao, with all their lives laid out in gold in front of them. It took me the longest time to condition my inner monologue into Chinese; back in America, all that learning simply slipped off like something wet and slick and it could have been like it had never happened at all. All of it—because I still stutter, my brain still malfunctions formulating Chinese sentences, and I say idioms in the wrong order and mispronounce them and gesticulate with my hands—points back to the same grief. Often I wonder if it is ego, that I simply can’t stand the thought of being so full of this unalterable, ingrained egregiousness. I am probably stubborn, and stupid for it. I can’t stand the thought of a lifetime being trapped in a place where I must mentally lag in every interaction with a native speaker. Maybe it is because I have built much of my identity around writing; I can’t stand the thought of being trapped in a second language all my life. I may be presumptuous and petulant for it. But I have grown to see immigrants in an entirely new light, in deep admiration that is equal in magnitude to my abhorrence of the act of immigration itself. And I may be overstating in my mind the cruelty of it, immigration, but it is always an act of cutting that is not clean, some pulling of the roots, the arteries, that I will never not see as a headache, a canyon, a traumatic, baffling mess.

Anyway, since I am apparently trapped in a state of psychoanalysis, I do believe that some of it is because I am Chinese and the thought of failed assimilation into what, ancestrally, is mine, carries more emotional baggage than say France or Lithuania with a clean blank slate. I am a perfectionist and a hyper-theorist and I have realized that I have made each of my younger cousins into mental symbols of my emotional dumpster. I realized this while in China and reading the encyclopedia to my younger, first-grade, precocious cousin of six on the couch of my grandparents’ house; two weeks ago, my grandfather had sat me there to read to me a children’s book of Chinese idioms. Anyway, I was thinking of this because I was thinking that Sonia Sotomayor’s claim on the all-encompassing nature of the LatinX culture was awfully accommodating, that you needed no true stake to be part of it—a birthright. On the couch, the whole time, I was thinking about younger Precocious Ivy who at three years old had memorized all the Tang dynasty poems in the little purple flip book, her voice so clear and enthralled even from the audio of my grandfather’s phone. In China, for Zhongkao, I had to memorize one hundred and sixty-eight, and now after a mere 1.5 years in the Great America I have forgotten them all. I am rambling, but I cannot get over the grief of alternate universes. That’s quite dramatic; but I wonder if there is a world in which I am not a traitor to my blood or I actually learned how to be funny in Chinese or I had kept journaling in Chinese every day like I had promised myself in the airport. A spectrum of culture; sometimes I cannot believe Sonia Sotomayor felt credible enough to make that claim when she, herself, still spoke Spanish. If I study abroad in France someday I think there would be no stir. But in China—and this is what I noticed the most—I have no “otherness” as an excuse. I have everything to justify and that is detestable. For every new person I meet comes the decision whether to disclose, shamefully and determinedly, my interesting little background which is not even simple enough to slot in as a side quip, or accept that I may be exposed as an idiot as the conversation goes on. I think about this and then I think about all the people dying in the world. You can only debut once, is a phrase I come back to often on this topic, and my mind has been colonized by English since long long ago. I cut my bangs on a whim my first year in China, when everyone had them. The hairdresser misheard me and the butchered strands still have not grown out. To anyone, I looked like any other Chinese girl.