Hello! I've been taking a lot of creative writing classes here in the U.S., and I thought I would share some of them with you. Here is my nonfiction writing essay about my cultural identity of being a first generation Chinese person born in New Zealand. I hope you like it!
Bananas
My Granddad loved bananas. Whether they
were pale yellow just blossomed from green, or a golden yellow with black and
brown freckles didn’t matter. He said it was because he had a full set of false
teeth, and that bananas were easy to chew.
So he would ride on his Frankenstein bicycle made up from parts of different
bicycles that he had salvaged to the nearest fruit shop, and buy bananas.
My Granddad, or Gong Gong as I called
him, was my everything for the first 5 years of my life. My parents were
typical immigrants, who had come over to New Zealand with barely any money.
They had met in English class, and had gotten married in a register’s office
with no wedding because they were saving for the future and couldn’t afford it.
They both had to work full time to pay for the mortgage, support a growing
family and fulfil the dreams of living in comfort that had kept them warm on
the plane to New Zealand on a one way ticket. So Gong Gong would be the one who
was left to entertain me and my little brother, taking us to playgrounds and being
the pusher for swings. He couldn’t speak a lick of English and as a result, I
couldn’t either, even though I was born in an English speaking country.
When I was 3, I had to go to preschool.
For most kids, this is the first time they’re left by themselves without a
parental figure for half a day. That wasn’t the case for me, because my
Granddad stayed with me everyday those two years of preschool. I would throw a
fit if I thought he was leaving. Because I knew I was different, and I didn’t
want to be alone. Everyone else was white, and could speak English. I was 100%
Chinese and too shy to try out English in case they laughed at me. I looked
different, sounded different, acted different. I knew it, but I didn’t know
what to do about it- so I didn’t do anything about it.
In the early days of elementary, I only
had two friends. And guess what? They were the only other two Chinese, or even
Asian, people in my year. Their names were Hilda and Cindy. Hilda really liked
the fact that I could speak Cantonese, and she would make us ditch Cindy
because children are mean, to sit in a quiet place away from the other kids to
speak Cantonese to each other. I didn’t really like it that much.
“But we have to so we don’t forget the
language, and that’s important,” 7 year old Hilda would reason, and she was
more fun than Cindy.
Hilda moved away when I was 7, and for
the remainder of my elementary years my friends were the Asians, who would
constantly switch as they moved into the area, and then out for a better
elementary. We were so stereotypical even back then. We were smart and got good
grades in everything but P.E. We had glasses. We were total wallflowers. We
would never talk in class. Even when the teacher was gone and the other kids
were all loudly screaming, we would be the ones sitting quietly on our desks
reading a book or drawing. For me, it was because I was shy. That nagging knowledge
that I was different that had accompanied me at preschool never left. I never
watched the shows everyone else was talking about because my parents were
making me memorise the times table instead. I didn’t wear cool shoes because my
parents made good use of hand me downs from older relatives and friends. I
didn’t have a cool lunchbox, or have cool toys since my parents couldn’t afford
it after they bought a second house and had a mortgage, and had another baby,
my youngest brother. I felt like I was so different and had nothing in common
with everyone else. The only ones I felt
safe with were the other Chinese kids, who wouldn’t judge me if I ran away from
the ball in soccer, and didn’t have Barbies either.
And like most stories, mine changed
after I met a boy.
Not really. I just got assigned to sit
with the naughty boys in class. They were amazing! They were so funny! They
swore and knew about sex! And the best thing about having parents who don’t really
speak English is that you can watch whatever you want on TV- so I was watching
South Park and The Simpsons before I could even do long division. I soon learnt
that swearing and dirty jokes got you laughs. And I loved it.
The Asians were just so boring and sad. I didn’t want to be part of them anymore, just wallflowers
that no one knew the names of, that were always called last in P.E, that always
collected up the certificates in assemblies. I wanted everyone to know my name
and not get it mixed up with another Asian girl in the class. I thought they
had no confidence, no sense of wanting attention. I found their lack of
confidence embarrassing and pathetic, because it was a trait I loathed in
myself. I, on the other hand, craved
attention and was pretty starved for it. When I was shy, no one had given a
flying fuck about me. Well, that was going to change.
So I ditched Cindy again, and armed with
gross jokes, I found a group of white girls that appreciated my humor and were,
in my eyes, so much cooler. We made nicknames for each other and always had
fun, and I saw it as a sign that moving away from the Chinese people was the
right choice. I didn’t want to be Asian, and all the things it meant I had to
be. Most people think a kiwi is a brown furry fruit. A Kiwi in New Zealand is a
native brown furry bird that has no wings and is nearly blind. It’s no surprise
that it’s endangered, and New Zealanders call themselves Kiwi, to identify with
the native animal that was special. I didn’t think I was Asian, since I was
born in New Zealand and that meant I was a Kiwi.
But what made me really, really not want
to be Asian was at the ripe old age of 13, when I had a newspaper run. As I was
slotting the paper in a mailbox, a stocky man with a brown beard and messy hair
walked out of house and shook his head.
“Don’t you want the paper?” I asked
nicely.
He shook his head again, and this time used
his hand to gesture me away.
“Okay,” I said confused, and put a
newspaper in the next letterbox.
The next time I came around, an old lady
was waiting for me instead.
“He doesn’t want you to deliver his
paper because he doesn’t like Chinese people,” she said. “But I still want it.”
Was it a coincidence that one of my
least favourite colours was the colour yellow?
I think one of the most common
stereotypes of Asians is that they’re really good at Math. I was really good at
math when I was in elementary and the first two years of junior high. The paper
run incident happened at the end of Year 8, the equivalent of eighth grade.
My math slowly started sucking after
eighth grade while my grades for English only got better and better. I was
convinced that the more articulate I was the more people would be convinced I
was New Zealand born and an outlier from the other Asians, that I was practically
one of them. After leaving elementary, I had no Asian friends and had no
intention of making any. Because of this, I felt even more unique and special
because I would be the only Asian in my English classes and with my friends. I
became even more gleeful when I would get prizes or acknowledgement for
achievements in English, because for me it represented successfully
assimilating into the white English culture even better than the white people. In
fourth grade I had been the first person in the class to memorise my times tables
up to 12. By 11th grade, I was failing half of my math midterms and
every topic test.
“I don’t think of you as an Asian
sometimes,” my friends would remark. “You’re so whitewashed.”
And I was so proud of myself for being so.
I called myself a banana- yellow on the outside, white on the inside.
I
thought I was the only banana amongst the turnips. And I liked it that way, and
occasionally wished I was a turnip. I would have rather starved than have brought
rice to school for lunch like the other Asians and what my mother sometimes
suggested. I refused to tell anyone I had a Chinese name, and hated my last
name. I alienated myself from anything that I thought was remotely embarrassing
or weird about the Chinese culture.
Like most settler countries, New Zealand
had also had a gold rush, and as a result, a lot of people had come to New
Zealand in the 1920s. We had to study it for history in high school, and for
me, it was eye opening. A lot of Chinese settlers had come to New Zealand for
the gold rush too, and the textbooks and my history teacher would talk about
how the Chinese got less money for their gold, and how the other settlers would
get jealous and angry at the Chinese settlers for working together, and inventing
machines for good panning. Staring at a picture of a poster in the textbook of
a caricature of a Chinese person and warning of the ‘yellow plague’, I asked
myself why I wanted to assimilate so badly into a culture that was so
derogatory to mine. I felt that
discrimination against the Chinese was enduring and portrayed as common place.
All my white friends did the “flied lice” joke, and old white people on
talkback radio always went on about how the Asians were stealing their jobs. One
of the political party’s called New Zealand First’s campaigns was to monitor
immigration specifically from Asian countries.
I felt angry. I knew that however Kiwi I
was, I would always be classed as Asian. I stopped seeing white culture as the
‘normal’ life, and made an effort to talk to the Asians more. I was glad that I
was the only Asian who took history and saw those things, while the rest of
them took sciences and maths and were unaware of what New Zealand society used
to, and how some people still did, think about them.
However, I realised that because I grew up in
a Western country, I was the outlier in Asian culture as well. I spoke my
Mandarin and Cantonese with an accent; I dressed differently and had different
mannerisms and values to Asians. I expected to be excluded. Even though I
looked like them, my brain was a little bit different.
But I forgot- bananas come in bunches.
And that’s the best thing about them.
Asians are known for being collectivist,
and I grew up with an Asian background. I always wanted to have friends around
me, and do things as a group. I hated being alone, and didn’t like how in high
school people had cliques and were so guarded in forming relationships, because
most Western societies are individualist.
I’m currently on exchange in a college
in New York, America and the only person from New Zealand. On the first full
day, no one talked to me, and it became clear just how important race was. The
Brazilians talked only to the Brazilians. The Germans talked only to the
Germans. They didn’t make an effort to talk to me, even if I was sitting right
next to them.
The first person who reached out to me was
Japanese and we went to Walmart together. Later on in the day, the Koreans
asked me if I wanted to look in the library with them. In the night at the
first social gathering of the international students, the Chinese girls finally
noticed me and kept pointing at me. When the time came to socialise, they
crowded to me.
“Nihon desu ka?”
They had asked me in bad Japanese if I
was Japanese. After face-palming, I told them I was Chinese and they literally
pounced, introducing themselves and wanting to know about me. It felt like I
had automatically gotten friends because I was Chinese, and I knew I wouldn’t
be alone.
The color yellow isn’t so bad now. I
even like it, and have yellow shirts. My
birthstone is a topaz, which is yellow. The color reminds me of sunflowers,
dandelions and the sunshine feeling of always being warm because someone is
there for you. Bananas aren’t even white on the inside, just very, very pale
yellow. I really like eating them because they don’t get your fingers dirty and
they’re soft to chew. My Gong Gong had the right idea about bananas, and I
guess it took me nearly 20 years to realise.
Labels: Asian American, AsianEsther, Chinese, Estherant, PoC, writing