Please welcome today’s guest writer, Joyce Chew. Joyce graduated in 2020 with a BS in mathematics and an accidental BA in chemistry. She is now a PhD student in applied mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles. When she isn’t thinking about math, you can find her attempting to learn classical guitar and dreaming about cats. 

There is a nearly universal love language in Asian immigrant families: a plate of cut-up fruit. I remember being four years old and running up and down the staircase, bearing plates of plums sliced by my grandparents and dad for my pregnant mom. I can always understand my grandfather’s offerings of pears and mangoes, even when his halting English is difficult to parse. My parents rarely say they love me, but there is a container of fruit waiting whenever I come home.

To me, a plate of fruit is much more straightforward than introducing myself, which is an exercise in anticipating follow-up questions. I study applied mathematics, but I also have an undergraduate degree in chemistry. I play piano, but I also play drums. I’m from Southern California, but my mom is from Hong Kong and my dad’s parents are from mainland China.

If I stretch out my arms, I can gather in pieces from my dual identities. I’ve presented my work on data analysis for chemistry at a national mathematics conference. In every music group I’ve joined, I’ve played multiple instruments. My mom’s siblings, all immigrants, gather our families together for Thanksgiving. The meal is one hundred percent Chinese, and my uncle offers a prayer of thanksgiving for our family’s health and prosperity in Cantonese.

Living in so many worlds makes it that much easier to feel like an imposter. I’m not a real chemist because I never took inorganic or analytical chemistry. I can’t actually call myself a drummer because I’ve never had a drum set at home to practice on. I’m really just a whitewashed Chinese American because I can’t understand my uncle’s Cantonese prayer.

When I moved two thousand miles for college, I felt the weight of my Chinese American identity more than ever. I worried incessantly about fulfilling too many stereotypes; I loved math, I was classically trained on the piano, and I was shy, quiet, and immensely deferential to authority. In my first month of undergrad, a floormate jokingly referred to me as “the token Asian friend”, and I laughed awkwardly and said nothing. I wanted to scream that my identity is so much more than these reductive assumptions. But what could I say, especially since even I can’t fully explain what it really means to be Chinese American?

In my last few years of undergrad, I started calling my grandmother the night before every flight back to Grand Rapids. The conversation, limited by the English she knows, always went something like this: I’m a good girl, and she loves me. After the last such phone call, my mom observed that it was akin to a chicken trying to talk to a duck.

I’m well-practiced in narrating my multidisciplinary academic history. I love talking about the instruments I play and the distinct ways they facilitate self-expression. But some days, the burden of not being Chinese enough threatens to crush my half-formed conception of my heritage. Do my friends even see me as Chinese American, or am I just like them, but with darker hair and different food? Does this even matter? Maybe this exemplifies the Asian American experience – “thinking about everyone else, but nobody else is thinking about [me].” Am I sinking too much energy into figuring out an identity that is invisible to those around me?

My college friends might know that I am Chinese American, but I don’t think they know what that entails. After all, how do I explain the grief of losing languages I never knew, along with the ability to carry on a conversation with my grandparents? How do I explain a complex relationship with my parents that is so much more than the “tiger parent” stereotype? How do I explain my storm of emotions when I watched the Shang Chi trailer—joy in seeing Simu Liu as a mainstream superhero and shame in the cinematic reminder of the yawning chasm between my Chinese heritage and myself?

I hesitate to talk about this because I don’t want to presume to speak for any other Asian American. Asian Americans are not a monolith, and Americans of Chinese descent are not a monolith, either. But I think that to be Asian American is to carve out a life between worlds. In every sphere of my existence— cultural, academic, musical—I don’t fit neatly into any box. And while I can add together “mathematician” and “chemist,” “pianist” and “drummer,” it is painfully clear to me that “Chinese” plus “American” doesn’t equal “Chinese American”.

I may never be able to articulate what it means to be Chinese American. But maybe it starts with cutting some fruit for the people I love and explaining what that really means.

Joyce Chew