Learning to Embrace My Asian Identity

Last year, I ran a marathon in Minnesota, a state I’ve never been to, and stayed at a hostel with dozens of people I did not know. I chatted with some people, but I was on my own without my spouse and without any friends.

I thought it would be a weekend where I flew into Minnesota, ran a marathon, and then went home, almost like a business trip. But I made some friends I vibed with very well, and I surprised myself and learned a lot about myself in the process.

The morning of the race, people were waking up and making noise at this hostel at a very early hour. I woke up around 4 a.m. and saw a group of four guys in the hostel who seemed like really good friends getting ready to walk to the start line of the marathon. I asked if I could join them, and they graciously let me join their crew.

Oh yeah, they all happened to be Asian guys, like me.

We conversed about running since most of us were in Minnesota for the first time just to run a marathon. I thought they all knew each other from the same city, but it turns out only two of them knew each other before that weekend. They were, by and large, strangers who just got along very well. They met the night before. When the race was over, we all spent the whole day together, drinking beers, conversing about our lives outside of running, relationships, and respective Asian heritage and experiences.

Of course, one topic of conversation to get to know each other was our professions. I explained that I was a special education teacher, but in school at night to become an attorney. I also said “my parents were going to disown me when I decided I didn’t want to be a doctor,” which was a joke (although my dad was very mad when I didn’t become a doctor, so there was some truth to it). They all laughed because they had been there too, not in the exact same capacity, probably, but as an emotional truth of having traditional Asian parents with sky-high expectations that they couldn’t meet.

It wasn’t even something I was trying to do — I naturally just gravitated towards this group of guys, probably because they were Asian guys, too.

It’s a year later, but we all still keep in touch. Two of them live nearby and we have linked up on runs. When I run other marathons in other parts of the country, we often link up again, and we’re all avid supporters of each others’ running accomplishments and life updates on social media. It sometimes seems like we’re each other’s biggest supporters even though we all just met a year ago.

It probably shocks no one that I would naturally gravitate towards hanging out with a bunch of strangers who were the same race as me, looked like me, shared similar experiences to me, and probably grew up in a similar culture to me. It’s basic psychology after all — according to Dr. Gwendolyn Seidman at Psychology Today, having similarities with strangers greatly boosts liking upon first impressions with others. It should also be noted that we were all obviously in Minnesota to run a marathon, so not only did we have the Asian connection, but we had the connection of all being marathon runners.

But this did surprise me. I have always had a complex and nuanced relationship with my Asian identity, and this is reflected in who I hang out with and choose to associate myself with.

. . .

Growing up, I never really appreciated all Asian spaces much. I was in them all the time, and the only time I didn’t surround myself with Asian people all the time was in school. There, I could encounter people of different races and cultures. In elementary school in Queens, I found myself surrounded by a lot of Jewish classmates, and in middle school, I found myself in an apartment complex surrounded by other immigrants. At the time, my dad was doing his residency to become a doctor.

I really appreciated these friends, although my family moved around too often for me to stay friends for years. I was stuck, more often than not, with my parents and their circle of friends.

As such, there was a toxicity I felt at the time, which almost felt like a prison I couldn’t get out of. These spaces often had our parents and elders, and there was incessant, nonstop comparison over who had the best grades or who was going to the best school. With that comparison often came judgment — the ones who messed up, didn’t have high test scores, or were caught smoking weed were complete outcasts subject to the harshest of judgment often from the whole community, but most often from their own parents, who blamed them for being a blemish on their reputation within the community and making them have a perceived lower standing within the community. In that culture, it often felt like we were trophies rather than people.

These days, I still feel the toxicity of saving face and comparison in spaces with a lot of Asians. But there is a particular kind of Asian I feel like is always judging me or sizing me up. It’s not everyone, but more often than not, it is people like my parents and who are more ingrained in that culture — people who had just immigrated from an East Asian country, people who were my parents’ age, people whose mother tongue was the native language. Sometimes, I even felt this way with my cousins, even though I am older than them, although there is more of a kinship bond. It’s certainly not everyone, but it is an element of the culture where some people are more traditional than others.

I often felt like a stranger in my own home or among my own people because my values were different from them. I didn’t like to define or judge people by their success, educational attainments, and achievements. I liked to judge people by whether they were kind and how they treated the people around them. It just felt so rigid and limiting, and since, like the child of many immigrant families, I felt stuck between two cultures, Asian and American, I chose the latter because I saw the extent to which the former was limiting or suffocating. I saw my brother try to become a doctor, fail, and suffer, feeling pigeonholed into only one way, whereas I felt like I had the whole world of options before me, and would just have to face my parents’ disappointment and live with my own choices if they did not approve.

As such, I am not here to re-litigate the divides between myself and my parents’ culture and generation, as I have written extensively about those divides. I am here, however, because of the other side of the coin. There were people I could always turn to in times where I had this feeling of a stranger in my own home: my Asian friends, who grew up like me, who understood my angst.

. . .

I would label my generation of first-generation Asian-Americans as, well, usually not great at Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Tagalog, Hindi, or whatever language our parents speak. There are plenty of exceptions, though. I can speak and understand Chinese and speak it to family, family friends, and restaurant staff, but I cannot read and write well at all. I also have first-generation Chinese friends who are quite good at reading and writing Chinese, but none of us are obviously as good as our parents.

I never really knew how to regard this group of Asian Americans who had the most in common with me. Of course, I had friends who were similarly first generation, who also struggled with Chinese, Hindi, or other Asian languages, and who also struggled to figure out where they fit in in schools where we were the minority.

A lot of the time, I opted for choosing friends that were anything but Asian. Sometimes I did this consciously, and sometimes unconsciously. At a really young age, I didn’t have quite the language for it. Being around people of different races (but mostly White people by the time I was in middle school), particularly when I started running cross country and track, was a sort of escape that I didn’t have to be pigeonholed into this nerd whose only redeeming quality was good grades and being smart in school.

I could be something different — an athlete, runner, and have friends outside the circles I grew up in. When I joined the school newspaper, I could be a writer. Of course, many of these friends initially saw me the same way as someone who worked really hard academically and aimed to be the smartest person in the school. However, when I first started to run, I could be seen as something other than the path set out for me at a young age.

But I also had a circle of Asian friends in middle school and beyond. They were also boys who shared a lot of similar interests that were not always academic or athletic. Most of us watched a lot of anime and talked about it in our free time. A lot of us also played video games — often very related to that anime. Popular collaborative video games we could play as a group were the combat ones, Naruto and Dragon Ball Z. We would get so sucked into these video games that we would play them for up to eight or more hours, to the point where our parents worried that we had video game addictions, and thought the only reason we were friends was that we liked to play video games together.

There was also one thing my Asian friends in middle school did that I got dragged into as well — Science Olympiad. In middle school, one of my Asian friends and I were in a competition where we made bridges out of wood, and the bridge that could withstand the most weight won the competition.

They’re still friends now and we still talk and have group chats, which, to me, is an incredible feat because it is so easy to lose touch with people in your 20s. I have to admit it — sometimes I was ashamed to be around them, especially when we were associated with Science Olympiad, since it just felt so Asian. In fact, it was one of the most Asian things I felt like I could do in middle school, and I did not want to be seen that way — hell, I didn’t want to see myself that way, and I often pushed these friends away or rejected them.

It took me a very long time to truly appreciate these friends. Through times when I rejected them and times when I went through trials with my parents, trials in other areas of my personal life, my friends who were like me as first-generation Asian-Americans were there. We quipped and hurled insults at each other, like children and teenagers often do, and we competed a lot at everything we did. But they never truly judged me and always accepted me with open arms, even as I explored other areas of my life and other spaces. I felt disillusioned and disengaged with cross country, eventually, during my senior year of high school. Suddenly my values diverged from the people I was friends with for years, and I didn’t really fit in like I used to. I could always, however, choose to hang out with my Asian friends if I ever didn’t feel like going to a party or an event with my other friends.

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I think that’s why I appreciate these spaces so much — the fact that my Asian-American friends never judged me and always accepted me. I think there is something behind that — we all shared experiences and lived realities that resonated with each other. These experiences weren’t necessarily racism from non-Asians, but we all knew what it felt like to kind of be accepted, but kind of be on the outside looking in.

We knew that feeling around people like our parents or Asians who had just come from a foreign country. And we knew that feeling around our non-Asian friends who were well-intentioned and inviting, but perhaps just didn’t understand why it always felt like a personal blow to get a B, B+, or A-, or to struggle in a math or science class.

Some didn’t understand why we liked anime so much, or why we often felt like we had to do it all — at one point, I was in five or six advanced placement classes, running track and cross country, and in some scientific research program. The year before, I decided to quit playing the violin because I thought research would look more impressive on my college applications. The answer for why we often felt like that was this shared feeling that getting into colleges as an Asian was harder, that especially us Asian guys were seen the same way —invisible, robotic, math prodigies, kids who were great at rote memorization but lacked creativity. I think that was also how we felt society as a whole saw us, too.

Through that stage of our lives, we often bonded with our shared stories of disappointment. We talked about our friend, an Asian guy, who had the perfect resume and perfect SAT and ACT scores who didn’t get into any Ivy League schools. I had gotten rejected from Cornell early decision despite scores well above the median and, what I felt like, was a pretty well-rounded resume, while one of our classmates who wasn’t in nearly as many advanced classes or as many extracurricular activities got in. The talk and gossip around school was that she had a leg up because one of her parents also went there, so there was a sense of indignity and injustice that was often expressed to me by my Asian friends at the legacy admissions system.

There was also our parents. It seemed like a lot of us had parents stuck in loveless marriages who couldn’t get along and fought all the time. I thought I was the only one who had divorced parents, and this was completely not normal. One day, another Asian guy was like “yeah, Asian parents don’t actually love each other,” he said. This was a vast generalization, but it was just validation that for a lot of us, the relationship between our parents was often not what it looked like it was supposed to be in Hollywood.

In college, these were spaces I also actively tried to avoid, including the Asian fraternity that tried to recruit me or the all-Asian Bible studies I occasionally would have trouble connecting with. Over time, however, I did realize that these groups would also understand and get me in a way others didn’t, whether it was shared experiences with an older generation or feeling like America as a whole would never accept us.

But, like everything identity-related, I went from an all-out rejection over the last several years to a more nuanced appreciation amidst that conflict.

. . .

It wasn’t until this experience with four other Asian guys that I truly started appreciating this all-Asian space. It wasn’t necessarily us talking about Asian food, culture, or television. It was just the inherent joy I had seeing other Asian guys succeed at something I cared so deeply about, where I didn’t see a lot of Asian exposure. Over the last year, I have rooted for them in their various running-related endeavors, and they have rooted for me.

My complicated feelings about Asian identity and culture could easily be pushed to the side by, well, seeing myself in the success of other Asians and seeing barriers broken in places where I did not see Asians generally in successful places or positions of influence. Just today, I got an interview at the law firm, and I was checking out their website of associates and partners. For the very first time, I saw an Asian guy as a partner. I had never seen an Asian law firm partner before. I knew they were out there, of course, but it just felt like a fairy tale until I actually saw it — I emailed him and asked if he had a moment to chat because it inspired just as much, if not more, than seeing my friends in positions of success and influence in law firms.

This has made me appreciate Asian spaces and affinity groups more. I might still have hesitance and reluctance around groups of international students or not be completely myself around elders, but I am seeing the value of being around people who look like me a bit more and celebrating the shared success of every Asian person out there, as well as the shared uplifting and support of those who are struggling. It’s not like all my Asian friends who grew up in America don’t struggle with these feelings and being torn between worlds either, and I started to realize that I wasn’t alone in my feelings of conflict.

I won’t lie and say I have completely gotten rid of my internal conflict over identity, but my experience with my four friends in Minnesota was a step in the right direction to not only celebrate Asian success, but start to embrace my Asian-American identity.

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This post was previously published on Ryan Fan’s blog.

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