“Where are you from—no, where are you really from?”
Growing up in the Chinese American community, especially in the Midwest, this was a question my friends and I often laughed over. It felt like a fun game to me, to befuddle the inquirers, answering, “Illinois. Oh, you mean the city—that would be Chicago, but technically I was born in Evanston.” I knew that what they were really trying to say was, “You’re not white. What type of not-white are you?” but I found so much satisfaction in the chase, making them slowly articulate their assumptions until the assumptions no longer made sense, not even to themselves.
And the sentiment behind my chase was to say, “I belong here. Just like you,” but deep down, I didn’t want to belong. I resisted assimilation like it was a plague and clung to what I thought was my true identity, my heritage. I listened to Mandarin songs, watched only Chinese and Taiwanese shows—even my phone’s GPS was in Mandarin. I also shamed myself for not measuring up, for straying away from who I thought I was. As a middle schooler, I remember crying as I studied for my weekend Chinese cram school finals, overwhelmed by the amount of content and the limits of my memory. I didn’t feel American, but it also felt so hard to belong somewhere so far away.
Last fall, on my red-eye, EVA airlines flight to Taipei, I made a list of everything I was looking forward to: sweat soaked hikes, mountain views, inspiring people, and tropical fruits, but deep down, I was also searching for a piece of myself. I wondered if I would no longer, at first glance, be regarded as a foreigner? I wondered if it would feel like home?
The answer is no. My first few months in Taiwan, everything was out of place. My body, unused to the heat, was sweating in places I didn’t know it was possible to sweat. My fingers broke out in mysterious hives. I sneezed constantly for no reason. And it wasn’t just me—within only two weeks, I was sitting with my friend in the NTU emergency room, waiting to be seen for her suspected heat stroke.
And as soon as I opened my mouth, I felt even more conspicuously out of place. I remember giving my first research presentation in Mandarin for a lab meeting; to prepare, I had written the whole thirty minutes worth of content out in English first, translated it word for word into Mandarin, and then all but memorized it. The only problem was, by the time I was presenting, I barely knew what the words I was saying out loud meant. My bilingualism was something I had always been proud of, but now its limits turned into a pink and burning embarrassment that I wore plastered across my cheeks.
As a medical student in the US, my main area of research was mental health and migration, and arriving in Taiwan, my advisor asked if I would be interested in studying mental health at international schools.
