The first milestone

I'm having a lot of trouble sleeping tonight.

There are many things on my mind that need to be thought.

More specifically, I've been doing a lot of thinking about my Identity, or Who I Am In the Cultural Sense. Coming to college, I've become a lot more aware of my Chinese background, which can be expected given that I was abruptly plucked out of my Asian-dominated high school sphere and deposited into a world where the childhood memory of strictly overseen memorization of multiplication tables is not a reality but merely stereotype. But just as I'm beginning to understand the implications of this part of who I am, at the same time I don't feel that it's altogether legitimate-- I'm recognized as Chinese to the extent that I embody a certain set of cultural assumptions, but I'm not actually expected to follow them. For instance, I can read the language because I was given no choice but to learn it. It's such a subtle part of mine and others' understanding that I'm not the first person anybody would ask for how to read a random character some faux-Chinese restaurant fetishizes on their window. The embarrassment of quasi-literacy aside, am I perceived by others as Chinese? Yes, in the ways it doesn't matter, and no, in the ways it does.

By the way, orange chicken is not, in any incarnation, Chinese food. I like how it tastes, too, but please don't fall for its invented cultural background.

Furthermore-- I can't deny that I'm proud of where I come from. But what is there to be proud of, anyway? A modern political history so misguided that a few decades destroyed two millenia of noble tradition? A terrible international reputation that consists of either fear or demonization? Corruption?

Earlier this year, I believed that there was a way I could overcome the current stereotypes (I don't like the word in this context; "expectations," perhaps, is more appropriate) and redefine my cultural heritage on my own terms as a big fuck-you to Amy Tan and her ilk. I now realize the idea is impossible. As long as I am consciously aware of the Chinese-ness of my identity, any attempts at discussing it necessarily evokes these expectations, and any explanation only serves to flesh out the preexisting perceptions instead of creating new ones. The solution to this that I can see is to define myself without thinking along cultural lines, but does doing so involve denying the Chinese part of who I am?

It's all just a big Catch-22. My cultural duality exists insofar as I am able to describe it according to misleading standards, but defying those standards necessarily denies me the right to be Chinese. I really, truly can't find a way out.