{"id":340,"date":"2007-11-10T15:19:18","date_gmt":"2007-11-10T15:19:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ubuntucat.wordpress.com\/2007\/11\/10\/now-im-not-asian-enough\/"},"modified":"2010-02-03T18:04:19","modified_gmt":"2010-02-03T22:04:19","slug":"now-im-not-asian-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/now-im-not-asian-enough\/","title":{"rendered":"Now I’m not Asian enough?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a recent entry called Am I From China? No, I\u2019m not<\/a>, I talked about attempts by new acquaintances to make me a perpetual foreigner (despite the fact that I was born and raised in the US and hadn’t even visited Asia once until I was eleven). <\/p>\n

Well, yesterday, something weirdly the opposite happened. As part of my job, I answer a lot of phone calls (in addition to some other duties, I’m the receptionist for my office), and I’d spoken to a Chinese woman (not an American of Chinese descent—really from China) several times. I met her in person yesterday and she had this really shocked look on her face when I said we’d spoken on the phone before. Her eyes widened, and her first words to me were, “Oh! I didn’t know it was you. You sound like a white person!” <\/p>\n

You just can’t win, can you? You can’t just be Asian-American, can you? You either have to be “really from” some Asian country (even if you’re really<\/i> from Connecticut) or you have to be too white to be truly Asian. In truth, though Asian-Americans feel it in a unique way in this country, most people with distinctive dual ethnic identities feel this pull (or push—however you look at it). There were a lot of hapa kids at my last teaching job, and I noticed that most of them felt the need to surround themselves with almost all white friends or almost all Asian friends. There’s a lot of pressure to pick a side and not straddle the line. <\/p>\n

What really confuses me about the incident most is… what did she think<\/i> I was supposed to sound like? There isn’t, as far as I know, an Asian-American accent. There are Asian accents if you aren’t born in America. There’s what people call a “Black accent.” There are Southern accents, Boston accents, New Jersey accents. As far as I know, there isn’t a way that an Asian-American can sound Asian without faking a bad Suzie Wong accent. <\/p>\n

Well, the lady was friendly and well-meaning enough, I suppose. Or maybe I do<\/i> sound too white. Again, not sure what that means…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a recent entry called Am I From China? No, I\u2019m not, I talked about attempts by new acquaintances to make me a perpetual foreigner (despite the fact that I was born and raised in the US and hadn’t even visited Asia once until I was eleven). Well, yesterday, something weirdly the opposite happened. As… Continue reading Now I’m not Asian enough?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-race-class-gender-sexuality","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1876,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340\/revisions\/1876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}