First off, I should say that my editing software is broken so I will use my frustration and focus it towards what I think to be an important matter in this article.
My name is Maegan Foisie. In July 1999 I was adopted from China. I do not know the specifics of my ethnicity and so can only say I am Asian and Polynesian. I am currently eighteen years old so that makes this be my seventeenth year living in the United States as an American citizen, raised by a 100% white family. They call me Mae.
I'm not writing this without acknowledging the intention of this comment FYI. But this friend of a family member who I see almost once a year has inappropriately misspelled my name. I found this comment while scrolling through my tagged photos and was immediately angered by the misspelling.
People have spelled my name Megan, Meagan, Meghan – there's a lot of weird variations out there and honestly, I don't care if people misspell it but I care about how this person spelled it. The problem here is is that this person decided to look at my face to judge how to spell my name. To them, my DNA overwrites all seventeen years of waking up in my American household, years of celebrating 4th of July and Thanksgiving, and the fact that my name is actually Irish.
"Meimei" means "little sister" in Chinese. I notice that misconceptions like this mostly come from the older generation. A lot of the older folks in my life struggle to have conversations with me about my background without sounding as if they believe it is in my future to be more culturally involved with my ethnicity. "Don't you ever dream about going back?" No. In fact, interactions like these make me want to further disassociate myself from my ethnic background. Venturing further into my heritage and placing myself physically in that environment is just a louder way for people like them to see me by my looks and not my cultural background.
"Mei" says a lot. It says I come from a Chinese family. It says I'm first generation Chinese-American. It might say I eat with chopsticks. It might say I can speak Chinese.
I could not be further from a "Mei".
