As a third-culture Taiwanese kid growing up in the West, I experienced a constant tug-of-war between the American culture that surrounded me and the Asian traditions I was raised with. Navigating these two worlds is something that most Asian Americans and Asians growing up in the West can relate to. Feeling they were mutually exclusive, I made a conscious effort to fit in by being American the only way I knew how.
During my college years in the U.S., I celebrated Thanksgiving with my friends’ families, attended fraternity parties and football games, and made sure I never partook in any of the traditional activities I grew up with, including Lunar New Year. I was consciously and actively highlighting how American I could be and shunning how Asian my roots were.
I was consciously and actively highlighting how American I could be and shunning how Asian my roots were.
As I prepare to celebrate the Year of the Tiger this year, I look back at that time with mixed emotions. With so many instances of anti-Asian hate and violence recorded in the last couple of years, I finally understand that our Asianness has never been the problem. We have a right to celebrate the holidays and partake in the traditions that matter to our respective cultures — in fact, we should encourage it.
By not doing so, we are erasing a part of who we are in an attempt to fit into a society that may never truly see us as one of them.
It took living in the U.S. and pretending to fit in for me to understand that there are slight cultural and value differences between my peers and me that I may not be able to, and should not have tried to, erase.
For example, I am looking forward to living with my parents when they retire and taking care of them, which is more common in Asian and Asian American households than in others. Also, I happen to find the thousand-year-old egg — an ingredient that has made many celebrities squirm in a previously problematic segment of “The Late Late Show with James Corden” that has since been revised due to overwhelming backlash — delicious, especially when added in congee.
And, I have learned that these differences are OK.
Asians living in the West should not be made to feel less than or othered for expressing these aspects of their identities.
The only time I celebrated Lunar New Year during college was my last year of studying in 2014, when I took the winter term off and decided to spend it with my parents. That year — with no “cool American crowd” to fit in with — I got to eat all the typical Chinese dishes that had been passed down from generation to generation in my family for the special holiday. I helped put up Chinese New Year scrolls (red parchment paper with new year wishes printed in calligraphy) around the house. And most importantly, I got to spend my parents’ favorite holiday with them and finally enjoy it for myself.
Before that year, I never felt a personal connection to the holiday. Like Maitreyi Ramakrishnan’s character, Devi Vishwakumar, in Mindy Kaling’s hit Netflix show “Never Have I Ever,” I often felt a desire to escape my cultural heritage or at least hide it. During my extended family’s gatherings on traditional Chinese holidays, I had probably behaved the same way Devi did in the Ganesh puja episode of season one — making fun of traditional cultural practices and longing to be out doing “normal things” with my friends.
The 2014 Lunar New Year allowed me to bond with my family and connect with my cultural heritage in a way that I was unable to before. It was the first time I was looking at the festivities through a lens unfiltered by what my Western friends or media might say, or rather what I thought they would say. I enjoyed a much-needed reunion with my family and savored dishes that I had not had in a long time. In that moment, I learned how to embrace both the Western culture I learned at school and on TV and the Chinese culture my parents raised me with. The key, I found, was to identify the particular traditions, ideas and values that resonated with me from each and celebrate or practice those.
This Lunar New Year, I will unfortunately not be able to visit my parents in Europe, where they currently live, because of the pandemic. Nonetheless, I will be celebrating the holiday with my relatives in Taiwan. On the actual day, my sister and I will wake up early to eat vegetarian dumplings, something our family has done since I was a child, and video chat with my parents to wish them a happy Lunar New Year.
Especially with Covid and the discrimination and violence Asian people around the world have faced as a result, it is important to cherish our respective cultures and connect with our communities through the celebrating of holidays. As Korean American journalist Michelle Li posted on Instagram — in response to an anti-Asian, racist comment she received from a caller after sharing that she and many Koreans traditionally eat noodles for New Year’s Day dinner — “we should all be given the chance to bring our full humanity to the table.”
Unabashedly celebrating the holidays that mean something to us, even if they are not observed in the U.S. or wherever we live, is doing just that.
The decorations we put up and the food we eat may be “very Asian,” as the caller who complained about Li put it, but that Asian identity is part of who we are. Asian Americans, third-culture Asians and Asians living in the West should not be made to feel less than or othered for expressing these aspects of their identities.
By celebrating Lunar New Year, or any non-Western holiday for that matter, in the U.S., we are actively creating the space for our experiences and broadening what it means to be American. Especially at a time when the “Americanness” of people of color continues to be questioned, each one of our celebrations is an act of subversion that rewrites the narrative about who belongs in America and whose lives matter.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
