How much does it take to prove that you belong?
I wondered this when I shopped with my grandparents and translated their requests to the sales representative. When our exchange ended, she told me, “Wow, you speak English so well! How long have you been here?”
“I live here."
I wondered how long I would have to field such questions; already I’ve spent seven-ninths of my life in the United States, a proportion that would only grow over time. By now, shouldn’t it be evident that multilingualism is fairly common skill rather than an indication of otherness?
But fourteen years is not long enough.
Perhaps, then, twenty.
Perhaps then, generations. A recent article in the New York Times describes the experience of an Asian man who received a scream of “Go back to China!” The author had been born in the United States.
I wondered if the woman understood that her words were far more than offensive. I wondered if she knew how even tiny acts of racism seep into cracks of doubt, how they bury themselves into memory, only to resurface at the most untimely of moments.
Apparently she did not.
The woman who screamed “Go back to China” did not, while growing up, learn of the specific little shops where her parents were racially profiled twenty years ago. Her parents were not thought to be poor, turned away, and humiliated before the other patrons.
Her high school classmate did not approach her at lunch and ask, in a complete deadpan, “Is ‘ching chang chong’ a word in Chinese?”
Her middle school classmates did not tease her for bringing rice to lunch, and she did not eat sandwiches every day for three years in an effort to fit in. She didn't understand the tongue-tied shame of being asked, “Why do you eat sandwiches every single day? Why don’t you bring something else?”
She never wondered how much it took to prove she belonged—she never wondered if, like the author of the New York Times article, every future generation of her family would still be foreign. That perhaps all the time in the world could not be enough.
She did not understand the experience of being Asian in America—the “model minority,” and thus forever a foreign minority.
But it is my hope that, someday, she will try to understand. I hope the same for the department store, the store owners who profiled my parents, my high school classmates, my middle school classmates.
I hope they come to realize that words have a far more profound impact than they might expect, and that this is not censorship but rather validation of the diverse experiences in our country. And I encourage them to have conversations—conversations like, “What is usually the most difficult part of Chinese to pick up?” and not “Wow, you speak English well! How long have you been here?” Conversations like “What is this type of food called?” and not “Ew, what is that?”
Don’t profile us; understand us. And perhaps there will be a world where belonging will require no further proof.
