what people don’t tell you as an asian american expat —
and how, once again, I was furthered from my identity.
Mid-afternoon in Jardins de la Fontaine, Nimes I suddenly realized that my American-ness was not showing. At face value, I was not American. My body and ethnicity-equipped was lost in the visible translation of how I navigated the world. I went white and muted, flung far from any gravitational or geographical point.
It’s incredibly strenuous to be an American abroad, especially if you’re not the blue-eyed-blond-hair Hollywood carbon copy everyone expects you to be when you tell them, “I’m American.” Especially if you come from a family of migrants who fled war in order to pursue that fantasy sitcom house with the impossibly large living room, big enough to search far and wide for an enigma, a doppleganger, of the American dream.
I was an American studying abroad in the south of France. A boy’s search for dopamine. A chance to reinvent myself after spending my first few college years with toxic people. An opportunity, point blank. I took it.
A group of friends and I escaped to Nimes for the weekend to catch a Future Islands concert. While there, we stopped by the Jardins de la Fontaine, the largest park there with neo-classical statues. We stumbled over preserved history with our tired feet. The site itself was to be one of Europe’s first public gardens with construction dating back to the 1740’s. But when construction began, the planners discovered Roman ruins that dated back to the second century.
Now, I was born in newness. America is only a few hundred years old, an infant to the old European world. Trying to find my footing over the ruins made me a contradiction. It made me unsure of timelines, past meeting present, and where along the flow of time I belonged, if I belonged anywhere at all.
One of our friends had trailed off as we climbed the ruins, history beyond us. From up above we saw the city under a perfect spring sun, bright and airy. We found our friend in the middle of the park smoking hashish with a bum. We joined him. The bum bounced around us, uncomfortably curious and close. He asked us where we were from, thirsty to critique our birthplaces. We had a German among us. Naturally, he brought up the Nazis. As for the rest of us, American, he listed all the ways the U.S. was broken:
- Intrusive
- Capitalistic
- Sensitive
And when his lazy, dark eyes glossed over me, I waited for him to list another terrible thing I already knew about the U.S., but he turned to me, and asked if I was Chinese. A question mark lit my face, as I didn’t think much of who I was in my group of friends. But I told him. Vietnamese-American. He shook his head. He said I could not be both. He said that Asia was all the same, referencing it, still, in his ancient fog, as Indochine, an old colonial word that made me fume.
It is uncommon in France to consider your ethnicity before your nationality. Before you use your mother tongue, you are French. This is how the French pride themselves in their nationalism. I saw this when the French public marched after two Al Qaeda men shot and killed eight people from Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine that is the symbol of free speech.
The hashish-induced man had every right to free speech, but did he have the right to define me?
I looked at my friends who stared back at me. In all their eyes, I saw attentive idleness, waiting for me to defend myself. I could only say, “I’m not Chinese.” My words tumbled and trembled from my mouth in a stutter. I talked the way an insecure teen expressed himself, with all the frightened defeat he didn’t know he had, all the defeat I hadn’t known I carried with me to another country.
What people don’t tell you about living abroad as an Asian American is that people assume your identity before you can even begin to place your voice upon your body. They expect an accent, broken English, immediate communism.
The rest of the bum’s bumbling faded to a hum as I thought about how to be both American and Vietnamese. I thought, have I never been both at the same time? Have I always been one or the other?
I never thought about it because America is beautiful. It’s beautiful when you can walk down a San Francisco street and hear different languages. Having lived in Chinatown, working downtown, I heard Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), Spanish, Hindi, flocks of German, French, and Farsi down on Market Street, oceans of languages. Los Angeles, where I’m from, you could find any cuisine you wanted. Indian. Thai. Mexican. Moroccan. All corners.
In Arcadia alone, you could find different provincial Chinese cuisines, even Hong Kongnese and Taiwanese food, mini mnemonic memoirs of home if home ever felt too far away. Everyone was here. America, in essence, was to belong. Everyone from every part of the world belonged. No matter what you may know from the headlines, violence doesn’t happen as often as advertised. The wild wild west was, after all, just a genre of many in the heart of Hollywood.
“Sometimes you just have to accept people at the limits of how they understand you..”
This was not the earliest moment I realized I was Asian American, but it was a defining moment in deciphering how I appeared to others. Sometimes you just have to accept people at the limits of how they understand you, and carry on with how you understand yourself in a world of questions as we inch closer to the possibility of answers. Answers to a world less prejudice, answers that speak to our own identities, so that when we do speak, we speak up. And when we speak up, we are no longer the terrified teen speaking from shallow pools of insecurities.
