Chinese New Year is coming up, so I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship with my culture. This will be the third year where I haven’t celebrated it because I won’t be home with my family to do so. It is especially frustrating when I think back to how I sat around at home on the 25th of December, spending the day doing my very best to become one with the couch because there wasn’t anything worth celebrating on that day for my family, and yet that is the day we all had off.
For the past three years, there has been nothing I could do but FaceTime my mom and watch the festivities from 200 miles away. My roommates and I will at most cook some dumplings we brought from home and eat them together before retreating to our rooms to finish our assignments. This sad attempt at celebration almost feels worse than not doing anything at all, but we still can’t bring ourselves not to try.
It scares me to think of the possibility of never properly celebrating the New Year again, as irrational as it may be. It feels like the older I get, the further I’m slipping from my heritage.
This semester, I am in a fiction class that focuses on immigrant stories. In our most recent class, we discussed an essay by Christopher Castellani where he wrote, “every child of immigrants is born into this sort of loss, that loss itself is encoded in our genes, that every immigrant story is an elegy.” This “loss” is something that I feel acutely every day. There is always a heavy weight lodged in my chest when I have to use a translator to read the texts my mom sends me. Or when she calls me in frustration to have me translate to my younger brother what she’s trying to say, only for me to not understand everything either. Or when I can never remember when any of my older family members’ birthdays are because they go by the lunar calendar, and I don’t know what the conversion is. Or when it is Chinese New Year, and I’m not really celebrating, but relatives call and I can’t remember how to say any of the phrases for prosperity other than the most basic ones.
I don’t know what else to call this feeling other than mourning. When I see videos of my five-year-old self living in China and speaking my native language more easily than I can now, it really feels like I’ve lost something I can’t get back. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to reconcile with that.
As I deal with this eternal struggle of not feeling Chinese enough, I recently found myself facing the annoying fly in my ear that is the internet. All of a sudden, every other reel I see is people talking about being in “a Chinese time” of their lives. At first, it was mostly Chinese-American creators sharing their attempts to connect more deeply with Chinese culture, which I empathized with and even appreciated, especially with the turmoil I’ve been experiencing with my own identity. But now, I rarely see any Chinese creators making these videos; instead, people who aren’t Chinese in the slightest — most who aren’t even Asian — have begun claiming the Chinese identity for themselves and bastardizing our traditions and practices in the name of joining a trend. And while I am aware it is simply a joke that will pass in the blink of an eye, as all things on social media do, I cannot help but be disturbed by the ease with which they call themselves Chinese. Maybe it is because I don’t feel the same ease, because I struggle with this strange impostor syndrome even though I am the one who grew up speaking the language, eating the food and facing the racism that comes with being Chinese.
I can’t help the slight hesitation I always feel when I say I’m Chinese, even though I know and have always known that is what I am. It’s like I’m scared I’ll be put to the test, and I’m not sure if I’ll pass.
This Chinese New Year, I will once again call my mom during dinner time. She will show me the large spread of dishes I have grown up eating, the many bodies in the kitchen, the kids running around in their adorable, red traditional clothing. I will show her the dumplings my roommates and I have compiled together so that we can all try the different flavors that each of our mothers have made. I’ll say the celebratory phrases I know and maybe I’ll ask her to teach me a new one. Maybe it’s a little lackluster and sad, but I am Chinese. I can’t bring myself not to try.
Harmony Liu is a junior from Queens, N.Y. studying English. Her column shares moments in her life that feel significant and profound enough to be written out and cast to sea for any to find. This article was written before the Chinese New Year.
