I had been begging my mom to let me quit for years. I hated the nauseating Sunday-afternoon carpools to Newton, hated the stuffy brick walls entombing me in a place that reeked of sweaty gym clothes, hated the three-hour classes where I learned nothing but the extent of my own linguistic incompetence.

​

Back when Jamie and I were waddling in diapers, our mother had kowtowed to Uncle Sam: she decided to speak exclusively English to us at home, a stratagem intended to accelerate our American assimilation. But all my Chinese School peers spoke Mandarin with their parents, so they were basically fluent, while I perpetually floundered far behind. Even the handful of Wasians – their wispy chocolate hair and big almond eyes spiced with a dollop of ambiguous exoticism – were far superior in their speaking and reading and writing and comprehending. (Unfortunately these are each distinct skills. The wonders of the Mandarin language.) Google Translate was my only lifeline.

​

Not only was I humiliated in front of the Chinese kids at Chinese School, but I was also humiliated in front of the white kids at Normal School. I was so painfully aware of my otherness, my ethnicity like a scarlet letter branded upon my skin.

​

I was embarrassed that my family ate chicken gizzards and fish eyeballs and pig intestines that had to be cleansed of excrement in the kitchen sink. I was embarrassed that my dad pronounced “three” like “sree” and “usually” like “urally.” I was even embarrassed of my middle name. When people asked, crimson shame would sear my cheeks. I would study my shoes intensely, clumsily mumbling, it’s weird...it’s Chinese. I longed desperately for a Grace or Rose or Anne to replace my Shànlíng.

​

I once made an effort to correctly pronounce my last name, carefully configuring my lips, stretching the vowels taut, arching my eyebrows in harmony with intonation. But the lilting arias merely ricocheted off furrowed brows. Eventually I surrendered to the authority of the attendance roll call, cleaving the syllables, muting the inflection, packaging curt parcels of sound. The flat familiarity no longer grated in exoticism, rolling comfortably off the tongues of others. Liú became “Loo” – like a toilet, full of shit.

​

Growing up in a census tract paler than fresh-fallen snow, my entire self-conception was forged in relation to whiteness. In Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong writes, “I’ve been raised and educated to please white people and this desire to please has become ingrained into my consciousness. Even to declare that I’m writing for myself would still mean I’m writing to a part of me that wants to please white people.” It was method acting gone too far: staring out into the white audience casting judgment upon me, I played my part so well that outer performance and inner identity melded into one.​​​

​

Throughout childhood, I wielded Prismacolor pencils and Copic markers like magic wands to bring invented characters to life in the pages of my Strathmore sketchbooks. Enthralled by the style of Japanese cartoons, I conjured a pantheon of invented manga and chibi girls. Almost all of them were angelic blondes or freckled brunettes with rosy cheeks and eyes of sparkling sapphire or emerald. Portraits not of myself, but of my aspirations.​

 

In fifth grade, a boy in my class would frequently parade around while squinting his eyes and calling out in a singsong voice, “Ching-chong, I like rice!” Once, he asked me if I could even see out of those slits in my face, since they were just so small. Yes, Ronald. I can see. Really, yes. I swear. Four fingers. Five. Two.

​

At tennis camp the summer I turned ten, there was a freckled blonde boy who had recently learned about the Yulin Dog Meat Festival. After numerous days of cordial relations, he discovered my Chineseness with betrayed horror. He had been bullying a Chinese boy in our cohort with racist jeers, and as an expression of solidarity and attempt at intervention, I asserted our shared ethnicity. As punishment for my unforgivable complicity, he addressed me solely as “puppy murderer” every day of the following three weeks. Whenever he saw me, he would histrionically place a hand over his heart, direct a mournful gazes skyward, shake his head, fake a sniffle, and lament, “Those poor puppies. You killed them.”

​

One day in sixth grade, I was biking along Pine Street on my way home, fuchsia helmet secured on my head, aqua backpack slung on my back. A white SUV pulled up beside me and rolled down its passenger-side window. “Ni hao Kai-Lan!” called the pubescent voice of a high school boy with Bieber bangs sprouting from beneath a baseball cap. Snickering emanated from the car as it sped off. What did they call this breed of catcalling, where the offending man remarked on your physical appearance not for its ostensible beauty, but for its racial resemblance to an animated six-year-old Nickelodeon character?

​

On school Picture Day that year, I sat on a plastic step stool in front of the garish greenscreen, surrounded by a legion of reflectors and softbox lights, giggling because my friend Lily, right behind me in line, had just made a dumb joke.

         "Can you like, open your eyes?” White Man Photographer asked impatiently, even though my eyes were very much open.

My laughter contorted into humiliation. The picture came out terrible. 

         On Picture Retake Day, after the shutter clicked, I asked to inspect the camera’s LCD display instead of waiting weeks for the printed result, seeing as there would be no retakes for the retake day.

         “I’m so sorry, but I don’t really like how this came out,” I said. Smile too forced, eyes still too squinty. “Would you mind quickly redoing it?”

         White Man Retake Photographer snorted in frustration. “That’s just the way you look.”

​

When I played middle school soccer, my middle-aged-white-man coach referred to me as the soul-sister of, the partner-in-crime of, the name of, a girl who I was not friends with, who did not share my ethnicity, who was the only other Asian on the team. Coach refused to let us play at the same time because he “couldn’t tell us apart,” despite the fact that she loomed inches above me, despite the fact that I played midfield and she played defense, despite the fact that we had huge white numbers emblazoned on our maroon jerseys to differentiate us. One day, I gathered my courage. With heat searing behind my eyes, the dam threatening to collapse, I asked him to please stop saying “Jackie-Michelle-Jackie-Michelle-Jackie-Michelle” whenever he was trying to get my attention. Or hers. He laughed incredulously and told me to take a joke. He was a grown man; I was a child. I quit soccer after that.​

​

* * *

 

My connection to heritage has always been tenuous. What typically fortifies such bonds – family, community, and tradition – remained largely inaccessible. On family: my abusive mother and absentee father did not make me feel particularly invested in our lineage. Relatives were also out of the picture. My parents had each ventured overseas in young adulthood, leaving siblings and parents and everything they knew behind in the motherland. I know my cousins, aunts, and grandparents as “jiě jie” or “gū gu” or “nǎi nai” – but I don’t actually know their real names. I speak the Mandarin of a toddler; they speak the English of an infant. We cannot know each other.

​

Community was hard to come by in a sea of white neighbors. There was, of course, the WeChat group of local Chinese moms who fought daily to one-up each other with boasts of their kids’ achievements, and gossiped about who got rejected from what school – Seriously? With such a high SAT score? – but my mom never really engaged. She was never one to be social. 

​

Without family or community, traditions fell by the wayside, cheapened to pitiful approximations of their intended resplendence. Mid-Autumn Festival might be acknowledged by the three of us splitting a mooncake, Jamie and I gagging theatrically on its crumbly yolk center ensconced in lotus paste. Chinese New Year might warrant an exchange of embossed scarlet envelopes containing stacks of worn, low-denomination bills, and sometimes a sweeping of the kitchen the night before with the yellow plastic broom. There were no big family gatherings to share plates teeming with dumplings and rice cakes atop hardworking Lazy Susans. There was no visiting of ancestral tombs, no racing of dragon boats, no releasing of glowing lanterns up into the black of night. And even the small gestures lasted only for about the first decade of my childhood. All remnants of celebration fled our lives when depression invaded my mother's.

​

I now lament my stunted, amateur Chineseness. I still have the Mandarin keyboard downloaded on my phone, just in case I’ll maybe use it one day. It’s a vexing impediment when I try to depart from the English alphabet to send a cat emoji to a friend, reprimanding me for being more fluent in the language of yellow cartoon icons than my own mother tongue.

​

I felt my linguistic deficiencies most acutely upon entering college. Chinese tourists visiting Stanford's campus would somehow identify me as one of them by phenotype alone, and then ask in Mandarin for directions that I would be unable to provide. One November morning in sophomore year, I was sitting on a bench outside the Cantor Arts Center doing readings for an art history class, when two middle-aged Asian men approached me. In thickly-accented English, one of them asked if there was an entrance that wasn’t locked – the front door had failed them. I told them the museum wasn’t open for a few more hours. Then he looked me up and down and asked, “Nǐ shuō zhōng wén ma?” Do you speak Chinese? 

         “Uhhh...” I conceded sheepishly, “Not very well. Sorry.”

         “Āi yá.” The man sighed plaintively and waved a dismissive hand. “Your generation. So sad.”

         As he walked away, I offered a stilted “duì bù qǐ” as a plea for forgiveness. He shook his head and kept walking.

​

Writing in the context of postcolonial Kenya, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o asserts in Decolonising the Mind that language functions both as both a means of communication and a carrier of culture, making it “inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world.” With my bumbling infantile Mandarin, I feel myself cut off from a whole vast universe – music, idioms, slang, folklore, philosophy, ways of knowing and being. I mourn my linguistic exile. I mourn the sense of being amorphous, rootless, out of place, suspended in a limbo between East and West. I mourn the way it feels like my only inheritance is intergenerational trauma.

​

But none of this was on the mind of the insecure thirteen-year-old who thought culture was a marker of deviance.

 

I had been begging my mom to let me quit for years. But Chinese School, along with swim team and math team and piano, was one of her non-negotiables. But then Jamie fell ill, and so he stopped going, and so her iron grip grew malleable. And so I kept begging. Finally, at the end of eighth grade, she relented.