Why I Wanted To Be 100% Asian

[Note: This post was originally posted May 11, 2020 on a previous blog of mine]

I so wanted to be 100% Asian.

I was probably five when I first thought this. And while I probably didn’t know what the word Asian meant, I definitely knew what an Asian was.

It had straight, black hair. It spoke another language. And it was a whole lot cooler and smarter than I was.

Truth be told: I’ve never shied away from ethnicity-talk. This is not surprising, considering I grew up in a bi-racial home. With my mom, a half-Chinese, half-baba nyonya (also known as Peranakan) Malaysian, paired with my dad, a half-Scottish/English, half-Portuguese Californian, the “race” talk was never brushed off. In fact, it was a welcomed conversation-starter in our household.

I suppose life for my brother and I would’ve been very different had my parents not made the decision early on in their marriage to move our family to Malaysia in the late ‘90s. Yep—back when American schools were banning Tamagochis and Clinton was still looking up what perjury meant, my parents decided life away from the United States would be better for us all.

I was five when we moved into my grandparents’ home, which was located in a small but famous-amongst-locals little town called Tangkak (also known as Syurga Kain, because of its abundance of textile shops). The town was still “developing” in the ‘90s, which meant that even though we had indoor plumbing and electricity, most houses lacked air conditioning despite the equatorial weather, and the town only had one stoplight which was rarely obeyed. It also meant, much to my brother Seth and my dismay, that the closest place you could get a slice of pizza was an hour away in another city.

To a skiddish five-year-old kid from Minnesota, the Malaysians were as foreign and frightening as they could be. But my fright didn’t stop me from learning about them. Like a sponge, I soaked in the culture that my mom had grown up in. I learned about the strange-tasting foods, funny-sounding new words, and different colored people. I learned quickly that sizes of ethnic groups here were a testament to what the rest of the country was like—mostly Malays, plenty of Chinese, and few of the rest.

Among all these people, the number that had white skin or even spoke English, I learned, were few and far between.

I suppose this is what began my thirst for change in me. I looked at my neighbors, my aunts, and my cousin, and thought, “Why don’t I look like them? Why don’t I sound like them?” But, of course, I daren’t ask my mother those questions. She’d always been more than pleased with her westernized doll babies.

But those questions hovered over me for most of my childhood. Despite my blended ethnicity, no one there saw me as a local. To them, I was as western as they came.

Within a short amount of time after the move, my questions turned into longings. I so wanted to be like everyone else around me. I began mimicking what other kids around me would say and do. If they laughed, I laughed with them (even if the joke was in another language!) If they ran, I ran with them. If they tied their hair up in a yellow rubber band, I’d do it too, no matter how many Goody elastics my mother had brought from America.

But my attempts to be like them seemed to be in vain. People would still say the same things to me: “You’re so fair!” or, “Look at her nose!” And, much to my embarrassment, some even made fun of the way I said things in their language. Although now I can look back and realize most people meant very well, even with their commentary on my language arts, I still remember often feeling confused about why we stood out so much to them.

I’d been young when we first left Minnesota, but I never remember standing out in a crowd when we lived in there. In fact, the few American memories I had attested to the differences in cultures. The memories I had of Sunday School or Awana when I would get lost in a sea of other children; the time I disappeared at a Wal-Mart and my mother freaked out; or, that memory of my brother’s seventh birthday party when I was the last to get to do everything. I don’t remember my nationality, my words, or my skin color ever being talked about.

So, I suppose the real question I had was this: Am I even special? The thought probed me at times when I was by myself—away from the Malaysians who fawned over me and the Americans who seemed to be indifferent to me. Who was I to believe, if I were to base my beliefs on how people received me?

As I got older, I began letting go of the notion that I wanted to be more Asian. Instead, I embraced my “western” side, because it really felt like that’s what the world wanted me to do. I watched Lizzie McGuire, bought books by American authors, and baked cupcakes even though I knew the humidity would probably melt the frosting before we could eat them.

I began forgetting about my childish desires to be Asian. I wanted to be like my mom—a westernized woman, and my dad—who was—well, American. I wanted to go to college in America, make American friends, and just be like an American.

I must admit that at times in my adolescence, I even began disliking “the Asian way” of doing things. It began with little innocent thoughts like, “Ugh, they have real bathrooms in America”—referring to what they call “wet bathrooms” in Malaysia. Or, “Why can’t I get actual graham crackers here?”—referring to the British Digestive Biscuit which, in hindsight, did actually make for a good substitute in pie crusts.

Years went by and I prepped for college, excited to be finally “going home.”

And then I left.

I quickly became submerged in the American way of life in those years, as just another college student amongst thousands of others. My days of being a starry-eyed freshman were soon gone and I had completely forgotten that I had ever wanted to be either Asian or American. Forget ethnicity! No one really cares here. Some days I even let people think I was Hispanic or Filipino if I didn’t feel like explaining. Ethnicity became a thing of my past as the days, the months, the years blurred by and the work and I became one. Before I knew it, a decade was gone and I was a now full-time working wife and mom, living what I’ve been told is the “quintessential” American life.

And now I think to myself, did I really used to feel that way? Had I really had such an identity crisis? Why had I allowed myself to feel like less than what I was—a human being who’d been gifted with not only one beautiful nationality, but two? A human being who’d been blessed enough to already have experienced two lives?

Today I find myself proud of the person I became, but more than that, grateful. Sometimes as I do day-to-day life here in the United States, I feel as if life in Malaysia had been a dream. But a dream that I can now look back on with a smile, because of the pride I feel for all that that life taught me. That the people there taught me. I can now look at other ethnicities with the understanding that their way of life is just that—it's theirs. And that is not something to be ashamed of. And that, while it’s ambitious and invigorating to dream of better things in life, it is okay to still enjoy what may seem to you to be the lesser things of that former life.

For with the lack of air-conditioning, we learned to save electricity and money. With the lack of pizzerias, we learned to enjoy fried squid and quail eggs. And with the lack of stop lights, we learned to pay attention to the people around us, watch them, and appreciate them for noticing us.