On Otherness and Being Lost in Translation

I’m fumbling with my Chinese on the phone with my grandparents. My Chinese is hesitant and I speak like I’m asking a question, embarrassed by my American accent as I try to compensate with a big smile through the pixelated screen. Despite the shame I feel, my grandparents cheer happily at the surface level words I’m able to sputter out.

Every year, they send emails on our family’s birthdays and during holidays, translating any Chinese they write so my sister and I can understand.

Hi Jennifer,

祝你生日快乐! (Wish you have a happy birthday.)

Wish you have a pleasurable or satisfactory time at the University of Texas at Austin.

我们爱你! (We love you!)

爷爷奶奶 (Yeye and Nainai)

I asked my dad one day at the dinner table why my sister and I weren’t brought up bilingual. While I did go to daycare after school during my elementary years where they taught Chinese, it was largely informal and I spent most class periods doodling on scrap paper with friends. My dad told me he tried with my sister but had given up when he realized she was already progressing much faster in English. As someone who has long communicated through storytelling and asking questions, I’ve lived with longing and guilt towards my inability to speak with my relatives. I’ve held this identity as a “bad asian” to this day.

But I don’t just feel a sense of “otherness” with my Chinese background. I also navigate this yearning to belong as an Asian-American in the United States.

This feeling has its roots long before I was born with the 19th century “Yellow Peril,” which refers to Western fears that Asians posed a threat to the Western world. The Yellow Peril was heightened with the influx of Chinese laborers in California, who were seen as competition to the working-class, leading to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Japanese were aggressively depicted as treacherous and subhuman, fueling racism that placed Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II.

Despite the leaps that Asian-Americans have seemingly made these past years in media representation with films such as Parasite and in crafting a name for themselves, the COVID-19 outbreak has shown us that not much has changed. 23-year-old Jonathan Mok was walking in central London when he was attacked by four men and told, “we don’t want your coronavirus in our country.” Due to the virus’ origin in Wuhan, China, people have associated Asians as responsible for its emergence and spread, leading to fears among Asian-Americans of increased micro-aggressions, hate crimes and discrimination. 

When I go grocery shopping, fit with a black mask over my nose and mouth, I flinch when I catch an uneasy gaze glance my way. I remember sighing in relief when a stranger exchanged a smile with me as we passed each other in the aisle, as if kindness is something I should feel lucky to receive.

But long before this pandemic, this feeling of otherness permeated the way I viewed and presented myself to the world. I use fashion as a way to “elevate” myself in hopes of pushing myself to the same playing field as White people. My flat chest echoes that I am undesirable. I do my work quietly and well and am accustomed to frustratingly doing most of the work in group projects and receiving polite “gratitude” once the project is done. This is how I see it. If I am more presentable, acceptable, pretty or easier to digest, I can get further in life and make my parents proud. It is a means of survival. Yet Asian-Americans are still the least likely racial group to be promoted into management. The “model minority” stereotype, while seemingly positive in its portrayal of Asian-Americans as hard-working, intelligent and successful, has reduced Asian-Americans to one-dimensional, largely invisible characters. It has also been divisive in the battle against White supremacy as minorities are pitted against one another in the comparison of tragedy and injustice. But we forget that we are all losers to the existence of bigotry.

As an Asian-American studying journalism in college, I don’t see many faces like mine and few leaders to look up to. Everyone I know from high school is physically on the opposite side of campus and feel much further. My mom still tries to convince me to get some kind of background in science. As a writer, words have always stuck with me. Words of affirmation is my second love language after quality time. I take screenshots of messages and save them in folders on my desktop. While I grew up acknowledging the beauty of math and science, I spoke a different language. In high school, I remember one night sitting on the carpet stairs of my house with my mom and hearing her laugh and say, “You’re going to be a starving artist.” It was dark at the time, but those words shadowed over me more than anything. I know she was saying “I am worried for you,” but I desperately wanted to hear the words “I know you can do it.”

I tried to find joy in high school science fair, telling myself if I just worked hard enough, maybe I would grow to love it. After crying in a Petco holding a box of maggots, I knew this was called delusion (haha). Next, I thought I wanted to go to medical school to be a physical therapist after watching the documentary The Extraordinary Case of Alex Lewis about a father who lost his limbs after developing sepsis and learned to take his first steps again. Once I realized how much physics I would have to learn, I knew this was called being touched and acting on emotion. Finally, after reflecting on childhood endeavors of making my own newspaper out of construction paper and pen, I allowed myself to choose journalism as where I wanted to make a name for myself.

But to make a name means largely doing it on my own. According to 2016 data from the American Society of News Editors, Asians make up only 3.06% of newsroom leaders, with newsrooms remaining largely white. But in the same way this has made me feel alone, I am emboldened by the power I have to be a face for others. To navigate this duality of “otherness” as an Asian-American of not being Asian enough nor American enough has given me the perspective to understand what it means to be heard and seen in this life.

I still wish I could say more than 你好 (Hello) and 我爱你 (I love you) with confidence to my grandparents to bring us closer than 6,968 miles away. I sometimes still wish I was born White because life would probably be easier in many ways. But I wouldn’t trade who I am for a thing and I have no one I need to prove that to.