There's a Facebook page that's been booming recently. If you haven't heard of it from your friends, Facebook mentions, or the news, then you're going to hear it from here.
It's called Subtle Asian Traits (also abbreviated as SAT) and it's really taking over on Facebook.
At first, one of my friends introduced me to it and said that it was a cool page. I didn't think too much of it at first, I just chose to join for the sake of joining. Like the other pages I followed, I thought it would just be a bunch of memes. However, day after days, the memes about being Asian and the struggles that Asian Americans being depicted in humorous and amusing ways caught onto my attention.
Whether it was about the types of food that I thought I would be the only one eating or the types of activities that I'd think I was the only one to do such as routine piano classes, I suddenly felt a certain connection with a bunch of strangers I had never met.
I began to visit the page more and more often, looking forward to seeing what my fellow Asian peers had posted. They really make me laugh hard sometimes. For example, one of them was about how Chinese people say "turn on the light" in Chinese.
All throughout my life, I got weird looks for saying "open the lights," but I always ignored it because I never thought it was wrong or anything. Plus, that's how I'd say it in Chinese. It took me about 16 years to realize that in Chinese, your literal meaning of turn on the lights was "open the lights."
The fact that most humor I encounter is usually not catered to Asians specifically makes me feel like a lot of the struggles I face seem isolating and strange. However, seeing a huge community of people come together to just joke or get real with our identity can be very empowering and relieving at the same time.