The secret double life of an Asian American teen
On middle school birthday parties, celebrity lookalikes and this mixed-up life.
When I was in middle school, I was invited to a celebrity look-alike birthday party.
This was exciting until I had the lovely realization that there weren’t any celebrities that looked like me.
I was 13 and I didn't even like movies and the only Asian celebrity my mom and I could think of was Lucy Liu and what 13 year old has watched Shanghai Noon?
Everyone in the seventh grade was excited — everyone who was invited, that is, because what is middle school if not exclusive? (And what am I, if not clinging to any instance where I’m included?) There were seemingly infinite options for every other girl, and a Crew Cuts matching set makes a very convincing red carpet outfit when you’re young and the epitome of middle school cool is Uggs and striped leggings or white converse with mid-rise light wash jeans and a flannel from Brandy Melville.
Everyone claimed their celebrity — god forbid we showed up dressed the same — and there was Miley Cyrus and Ashley Tisdale and even Dolly Parton. There were TV characters and movie stars and singers but, lucky for me, I didn’t have to worry about having the same costume as anyone because no one else knew a celebrity that looked like me anyway and I was told I could be Mulan but I didn’t feel like much of a princess.
So I downloaded an app on my iPod touch that was supposed to tell me which celebrity I looked the most similar to and every celebrity with dark hair they had on file was white so the computer couldn’t tell me a single person who looked like me for real so I dressed up in a long navy blue cotton-spandex blend dress from Kohls — the same one I wore to my 5th-grade promotion ceremony because we bought it three sizes too big so that it would fit as long as possible — and a green fedora (no, you can’t see pictures of this) and I called it a Lea Michelle costume because at least she had brown hair but I don’t even watch Glee.
We got ready at my house and mom let me borrow her lip gloss and I look back on those photos and in the space where I am standing, there is no one there. There is no Lea Michelle, and there is certainly no Julia Lin. I just disappear into space. I just don’t exist. I’m just a combination of a couple of colorful pixels and all I see are two eyes shimmering with tears being held in begging mom to take the picture as fast as possible so we can just get this over with because I don’t even like sleepover birthday parties anyway so the odds I call and ask to get picked up early were high, if not certain. I prefer to stay home where I am comfortable — or, at least, predictable — and no one will ask who I am because the only answer I have is “I don’t know, I’m not anyone.”
I live the double life of the Asian American teen.
A middle school birthday party isn’t that big of a deal (no matter how much anxiety it caused in your young little self before you even knew a diagnosis was a thing). But if you try hard enough to not exist, you might just disappear one day too. When nothing you see reminds you you are here, it’s very easy to convince yourself you aren’t. I look more like a ghost than I look like any character on TV.
This is my double life, and it’s either double or it’s nothing at all.
Because once you graduate middle school and hit high school, you can go to house parties and convince yourself you fit in with the cool kids but at the end of the night, I come home and pretend my Asian glow from whatever drink a seventeen-year-old can get her hands on was a flush from the Seattle November cold and then grandma’s asking me how to pronounce words in the junk emails she gets and mom’s asking me to stir the vegetables in the pot on the stove and there was never the luxury of not playing pretend anywhere because I’m a pretender at school and I’m a pretender at home and I know some of you will never speak a different language than your family and what if I resent you forever for that?
And then you’re in college and you shrink yourself before anyone else can so that nothing can surprise you and nothing does surprise you, especially not the white boy who thinks you’re exotic because there aren’t palatable mixed girls like you where he’s from and you just keep walking in silence when he mocks an Asian accent and this is the lesson you learned from living your double life. Be silent, disappear, it’s easier — sometimes — to not exist at all, than to prove to someone else that you do. I’ll teach you to just disappear too because if you’re like me then you know you can be too Asian to feel at home with your white friends and you can be too white to be “real” for the Asian kids and you can be too focused on just hiding to remember you are yourself. And you’re not really ever yourself are you? You’re just a miniature version of your mother with a little less generational trauma but a little more internet anxiety and a little bit of your dad’s calm mixed in and also his nose, apparently, and grandma tells me every time she sees me how lucky I am to have white-person eyebrows.
I can live a double life and I can play pretend so well that maybe I should just become an actress already and I can be the Asian girl that all other Asian girls have to dress up as because they don’t have any other choice.
I can have it so easy as to only have to worry about which famous person I’m going to dress up as if I’m ever invited to another celebrity look alike party, and I can live a double life but this means I can also live half as fast and disappear twice as soon.
Interview time!
This newsletter has been really out of my comfort zone. You can probably tell from the number of “maybes” and parentheticals I use when I write, but I am still very much in the process of learning to use (and even just listen to) my own voice.
Someone whose work has really helped me find the language and context for my experiences is the absolutely incredible artist and creator Nicole Linh Anderson. I first came across Nicole’s work last year when a friend of mine shared a graphic she created about filter bubbles and the impact of sharing information on social media.
Nicole has written and created a whole plethora of interesting and insightful and generous works which you should check out and also writes a newsletter which you should subscribe to!!!
Thank you, Nicole.
You made a post earlier this year about violence against Asian Americans which made many important points, but one part that resonated with me especially was the slide that read “Do I have any Asian American friends … Do I know what their family dynamics are like? Do I know what their lives are like outside of the white American context that I met them in?” This one thousand times. That difference between some of the external versus internal experiences of being Asian American has been at the forefront of my own experience, but is so seldom acknowledged. In further discussing the impact of this lack of understanding, you posed the question “who did I hurt before I learned better?” This too. In avoidance of speaking for anyone else, I’ve said “me” a few more times than I would normally like to, but here I go again. For me, sitting with this hurt but also sitting with the privileges that come with being half white is something I see as defining of my experience as a member of this second generation, and also so defining of the different ways my mother and I operate. Some of the racism she experienced more explicitly now sits within me as generationally passed down, as still thrown at me on the street, as discretely slipped into the stories we read. Have you had conversations about this contrast within your family? How has your biracial experience shaped the way you navigate conversations around race and identity?
Existing as a biracial person has been fundamental to how I understand and interact with the world. So much of my perspective is defined by the family stories I was raised on: my mother's experience as a Vietnamese refugee fleeing Saigon the night it fell, translating her high school homework from English to Vietnamese and back to English. At the same time-- these are not my stories. I did not cross the Pacific in a fishing boat, I grew up in a comfortable upper middle class suburb of Seattle. I think so much of the second gen experience is sitting with that gap between our family legacy and our own lived experiences. Growing up I think that was the most tender point in my relationship with my mother. I know her story, and it has shaped me, but I am also incapable of ever truly understanding her experience. So much of my marginalization happens only on paper. Though I am biracial, gay woman, I publicly experience life as a white- passing, straight-passing woman, with all of the privileges that that entails. To be half-white is to be both oppressed and an oppressor simultaneously. I have to sit with that tension within my own body, my family, and whenever I enter a conversation about race and privilege. It is tempting to latch on or exaggerate the marginalization that comes with my various identity markers as some kind of conversational leverage, but it's crucial to remain accountable about the power attached to the other parts of my identity.
I have a messy, mirrored, mind-twisting love-hate relationship with social media. Last June, you had an infographic on Instagram go viral and then continued to use your growing platform (though I even sometimes hate to describe this in such a leveled way) to engage in other conversations around race, privilege, community and more. First, thank you for the time and labor that you used to create these resources for conversation and education. One point you made (of many pertinent ones, I should add) is the way sometimes our social media feeds are a mix of critical discourse and photos of brunch, in sequence. I’m sure you, myself and many others have a wide variety of thoughts and opinions on the role of social media and the internet in the pursuit of justice. It’s a conversation that will circle almost endlessly, if I had to guess. I think we could each talk for hours on this topic and I’m just grateful you’re here, so I’m curious, alternatively, in this. To have anything in this world seen by 100,000 people is… a lot. Did that change the way you look at social media? In the process of navigating your own space on the internet, how do you approach sharing things personal to you (especially your art) with the knowledge that Instagram can be an unexpected window into your life for any number of strangers exploring the internet like me?
Going viral absolutely changed the way I interact with social media. I went from 400 followers to nearly 20k in only a few weeks and it was terrifying for the ratio of friends to strangers viewing my account to tip so dramatically towards an anonymous mass of people. At the same time, I could have easily switched my account to private at any point, and I didn't. Even when my audience was much smaller and primarily made up of people I had some sort of tangential relationship with, as an artist and writer I have always made and shared things for an outside audience. So continuing to share my art online, as I have always done, didn't feel particularly scary. Occupying the education/social justice space I had side stepped into when I went viral was much more nerve racking, primarily because I never set out to be a voice in that area, and these new followers had expectations for who I was and what my account was about that didn't match what I actually did. We tend to conflate sharing with vulnerability, but I actually think the more you share on the internet, the less space you create for misinterpretation and thus, the less vulnerable you actually are. I'm not scared of being seen, I am scared of being seen in a way that is different than how I see myself. Giving the internet a very clear picture of who I am feels safer than leaving myself open to stranger's interpretations of me. That being said, I am a lot less active on instagram than I used to be– partially due to the exhaustion of how many DMs I get whenever I post, but also because instagram has gotten so boring recently, no? I have no intention of becoming some kind of influencer, so I really only have to engage with social media to the extent it actually excites me, which these days is very little.
Your art, in many ways, explores personal histories in a similar vein to what I hope to do through asking questions of my mother. One of my favorite pieces of yours is this series of self-obituaries called “I Have Already Died.” What was the experience of creating this like for you? Then, what was it like to share with those close to you?
I Have Already Died started as a way for me to make peace with my dreadfully mundane name. There seem to be hundreds of Nicole Andersons in the world, and I fell down a rabbit hole of looking up obituaries of other women that shared my name. Going into the project I thought I would find some sort of special kinship with the other Nicoles, but the more obituaries I read, the less I felt I knew any of them. We all have such individual lives: personal triumphs and tragedies, love stories and dramas, but in death we are reduced to the most formulaic outlines– where we were born and went to school, who we loved and were loved by. In fact, the longer the obituary the more unknowable the person became, fully reduced to an itemized CV, no room for their spirit or personality or ideals to breathe. Honestly, it kind of freaked me out, and spurred me to start another ongoing project where I write my own obituary each year and get it notarized, with the plan being that the final obituary is to be published after my death. I want to maintain control of my personal narrative, up to and past the end. As for sharing the project with people close to me, it was pretty uneventful. It's a piece about mortality but I don't think it is particularly heavy or upsetting. I usually say that my work is about humor and mourning– isn't it funny how sad the world is, isn't it sad how funny life is? My friends are used to me doing this kind of thing, at this point it just sort of makes sense that I would have done this.
Finally, what is a question you wish you could ask your mom, or someone else in your life?
What in your life has felt like a compromise?
Looking forward:
Next week, we’re joined by New York Times bestselling novelist Dolen Perkins-Valdez.
Stay tuned and tell a friend! We’re talking writing, life advice and yes, of course, moms.