Not Chinese, Not American, But “Other”
As I delve deeper into Cathy Park Hong’s (2020) reckoning in her book Minor Feelings, I too have awakened to my own, although brief, experience as an Asian international student in New York City. Coming to NYC, I always thought I was immune to racism. This notion was challenged when I began graduate studies in the United States.
In a graduate course on multicultural education, I understood that the first step in teaching multiculturally is to identify as a cultural being, that is to identify the positions of privilege and oppression I occupy (Souto-Manning, 2013). For the first time in my 26 years of life, I had awakened to how privileged I actually was. Beginning with my childhood, I was born into a financially, mentally and emotionally stable family, a privilege that has allowed me to look back at my childhood with fondness and nostalgia, study and live in different cities and countries abroad, and pursue the career I always wanted. On top of that, I am a light-skinned woman of Filipino-Chinese descent that comes from the Philippines, a predominantly dark-skinned Southeast Asian country where White skin is both a privilege and a standard of beauty— a result of three hundred years of Spanish colonization and brainwashing. At the same time, I feel privileged to have grown up in a country where English is an official language and a medium of instruction in education, a privilege that allowed me to be educated in English-speaking private schools all throughout my academic life. I speak fluent English and Filipino, making me a bilingual speaker.
However, being in New York City alongside students of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds did not make me immune to racism and “otherness”, contrary to my previously held notions. For the first time in my life, I was put in situations that were so foreign and new, I did not have the conscious awareness, nor the language to identify the feelings I was experiencing at that time. As I come to terms with these feelings and experiences, I realize that a lot of my feelings of comfort and discomfort relied heavily on whether there were other Asians in the room— an awakening which I was not consciously aware of then. Every time I walked into a room, I would look around to see whether there were other Asians; and if there were, nine times out of ten, I would gravitate towards them and sit where they were. There have also been times when I was the only Asian in the room and the slightest feeling of discomfort bothered me. I knew I felt insecure whenever I was around Whites. Although I speak fluent English and have developed an accent after spending a year in California, I always felt an imaginary cloud of judgment surrounding me, particularly with the way I spoke in class. As a defense mechanism, I made it a personal goal to speak up more in class to get over my insecurity. The truth is, although I never admitted it to anyone, one reason why I wanted to speak up was that I wanted my voice to be heard. I wanted to deviate from the stereotypical quietness often associated with Asians. Adding on another layer to the already complicated situation is the fact that Filipinos did not necessarily fit most Asian stereotypes. In contrast to the Asian stereotypes of meekness and docility, I think that Filipinos are actually loud and outspoken. The sad reality is, Filipino cultures as well as other Southeast Asian cultures are often underrepresented and left out in discussions surrounding Asian identities. In Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong (2020) couldn’t have painted this picture more clearly, “Most Americans know nothing about Asian Americans. They think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues. They don’t understand that we’re this tenuous alliance of many nationalities. There are so many qualifications weighing the ‘we’ in Asian America” (p. 19).
Things became even more complex when I started to reflect on my status as an outsider. It instantly brought back moments and feelings from my classes when all the Whites sat together and spoke in their heavy American accents, and all the Chinese sat together and spoke their native Chinese language and there I was— not White nor Chinese, just a non-Chinese Asian. Although I was born and raised in the Philippines and identify as a Filipino, my last name is Chinese and my physical appearance embodies the traditional East Asian features of light skin and narrow eyes, features that made me look less like a Filipino. “Being Asian but not Chinese” and “looks Chinese but doesn’t speak Chinese” were identity markers I unconsciously branded myself with, which placed myself on a separate island in the “classroom map” where it was just me. I felt like I didn’t belong to any group and often wondered how less lonely and much more connected I would have felt had there been another Filipino in my program. That was when I realized I was an “other”.
Looking back, I remember being consumed with feelings of guilt, shame and self-doubt, my superego telling me, “You should not be going through this.” Reading Hong’s (2020) Asian American reckoning and moments of feeling “othered” validated my own experiences and made me feel less alone. Her awakening has been instrumental in starting my own journey of awakening and self-excavation. However, this journey is unfinished and far from over; in fact, I was just getting started. As professor of Psychology Andrea Horowitz from Barnard College pointed out, “The self-work is never done. Thinking you are done is being complicit.” And so I ask myself, am I being fully accepting of my identity and most authentic self? As I attempt to answer this question, I am reminded of a small group discussion in one of my classes about our experiences of being “othered”, particularly a time when a classmate spoke uplifting words that empowered me to do the same: “I’ll just be bold about my otherness”. Being “othered” is a work of colonization, something that my country of the Philippines is all too familiar with. “Othering” is the consequence of centering dominant identities while decentering others. In cultivating my own identity, I choose to reclaim “othered” by recentering “the other” in classrooms, in experiences, in stories, and in my own grappling of self.
As an early childhood educator, I believe that my journey of awakening is a step towards becoming an agent of social change and a teacher activist in and beyond the classroom walls. I take up Gert Biesta’s (2012) notion of public pedagogy—to be a teacher who interrupts and creates spaces that “are open to a plurality of being and doing” (p. 694). I hope that in recentering the “other”, I am empowering young children to be open and bold about their “otherness”, and be bold in naming and disrupting the “othering” that exists in schools.
References
Biesta, G. (2012). Becoming public: Public pedagogy, citizenship and the public sphere. Social & Cultural Geography, 13(7), 683-697.
Hong, C. P. (2020). Minor feelings: An Asian American reckoning. New York, NY: One World.
Souto-Manning, M. (2013). Teaching young children from immigrant and diverse families. Young Children, 68(4), 72-80.
Yoon, H. S. & Llerena, C. L. (2019). Transnational friendships and fluid boundaries in early childhood classrooms: The possibilities of (un)productive play in teacher–researcher collaborations for equity. Urban Education, 55(6), 865–891.
Alexa Hao is an early childhood educator, a lifelong learner, and a graduate student at Teachers College, Columbia University. She enjoys working with young children and learning about their multiple ways of being. She believes that education should be for the pursuit of happiness and social justice. She is currently in Manila, Philippines, where she plans to put up a preschool someday.
