maia

With college applications and essay prompts aplenty, I’ve been thinking a lot about my experience as an individual. Specifically, what has defined me in my experience as I’ve grown up. And though I'm still growing, I’ve been pondering what parts of my identity have played the largest role in the way I look at myself today.

There’s no real easy way to sum up everything I think I am. The nuances of a person are nearly infinite, but I can say with confidence that my ethnicity has by far played the biggest part in how I view my identity now.

As you can probably tell from the title, I’m mixed-race. Half and half like ice tea lemonade, my face showcases my Chinese side and Scottish/German ancestry. But it’s been tough to find a term or label that I feel comfortable sticking on myself because nothing seemed to fit. I grew up with an emphasis on my Chinese culture, and I don’t really know what it means to be Scottish or German because I never really had a connection to those identities. Even still, I couldn’t leave a whole half of myself behind just because I didn’t resonate with it. And even though I couldn’t exactly relate to the experience of being Scottish or German, those two quarters define my experience as a human whether or not I like it. I may know what I feel like on the inside but coming to terms with the way people view me as I walk through the world is an entirely different thing. While internally I feel Chinese, I don’t appear the same way. My face looks very much mixed but my external appearance tilts more towards white-passing. And to be honest, I’ve struggled with this. The disconnect between my view of myself and the version of myself that is presented to the world seemed too far apart for me to ever find a way to bridge them. It took me years. 16 year to be exact. I only came to grips with it all when I went to the 2016 Student Diversity Leadership Conference in Atlanta. 

In the winter of 2016, myself and five other students (including some faculty and staff) from my school took a six-hour flight to the city of Atlanta. Our reason for our travels was to attend SDLC or POCC (the Student Diversity Leadership Conference or the People of Color Conference), to discuss the current racial tensions and issues facing minorities in the United States and the world at large. One of the various activities that followed in the next three days was affinity groups. Students were told to make their way to various rooms divided by racial identity (Black, Asian, Latinx, White, Multiracial, etc.) or go to an LGBTQ+ affinity space if they so desired. On the first day, I went to the Asian affinity space, and let me tell you... it felt wrong. My thought process behind going was that I felt culturally Chinese even if I didn’t look it, my experience hardly had anything to do with my white side (I naively thought) so it would make sense to go to the Asian affinity. Yet, when I arrived, I immediately felt out of place. I sat there for a while twidling my thumbs and avoiding eye contact with these people who didn’t look like me, but then again, what was I expecting? Of course I didn’t look like them, I was half white. Now, I’m not saying you can’t identify as Asian if you’re mixed, you totally have the right to do that, but for me, it didn’t quite work. So the next day I went to the Multiracial group. 

You would think this wouldn’t make the situation much better, right? If you’re going to a multiracial group, NO ONE is going to look like you. I should feel just as uncomfy as I did when I was sitting in the Asian affinity! Right...? To my surprise there was something oddly comforting about being in a room where everyone looked completely different, it made me feel like it was okay for me to exist with my dark straight hair, oddly light hazel eyes, freckles, and big nose. It felt like I could breathe. So I realized then that I didn’t need to choose one side over the other, that I could just be myself. There was no need for labels unless I wanted to or unless I felt that it was easier in certain situations to have a concrete name for the odd concoction that I am. But I didn’t need to, and after that realization, that was the most powerful I had ever felt. It’s odd to go to a space where it’s just multiracial people though, you’d think there’d almost be nothing to talk about, and to some degree that’s true. Everyone’s experience is their own unique story but there are throughlines to every multiracial experience that I found out once in discussion with these various people. There’s the language barrier between branches of your family, there’s the potential for not REALLY knowing what you are or the feeling of needing to choose. Which I then found out that most, if not all of them, in that room had gone through, or were going through it.