As an international student, how do you answer questions regarding your nationality? Addressing such inquiries, two international students in Beijing offered unique insights into their identity. An additional spin is that their names are quite similar: Helena柯즐 from Dulwich College Beijing (DCB) and Hélène Wang from Beijing City International School (BCIS).
Have you experienced any forms of racism in China?
Helena: During lunch with an intern last week, a Chinese couple moved away from us after muttering the word “English.” My lunch suddenly tasted like sand. After all these years, I thought these judgmental experiences would end. Experiences like this make it seem like speaking English is blasphemous, arousing apprehension, especially as there are numerous videos of violence against Asian Americans online – though, that mainly happens in the US. In China, it’s eye-daggers and avoidance that hurts.
Hélène: Saying I experience racism is stretching, except when I speak English in malls, strangers jerk their heads, roll their eyes, and scrutinize me like a ladybug in a glass jar. It’s understandable since I look Chinese but don’t speak Chinese with my Chinese presenting friends. I am accustomed to strangers’ surprise and sometimes even forget their shock at my English-speaking, Chinese-looking disposition, but my own urge to recoil or flee and the feeling of, “I don’t even know if I am accepted in my hometown” lingers forever.
Were you ever asked to choose one nationality?
Helena: Growing up, I was frequently asked “Where are you really from?” I have a Canadian passport, but I have the word Chinese imprinted on my face. Westerners tell me that I am not fully Canadian as I grew up in China, but Chinese people tell me that I’m not fully Chinese because I have a Canadian passport. So, am I a “fake Canadian” or a “fake Chinese?” Must I be bounded by our nationalities? Do I have to choose?
Society tells me that I must choose, as supposedly only one identity can reside deep down inside. But what is identity? Although leaving me in a quagmire, I, like most international students, am still on the journey of self-exploration. Like the enigmas of color, there lies gray between black and white. I don’t have to only be one thing. I can encompass both. Therefore, to those who ask me to choose a nationality, I will proudly say that I am a Canadian Chinese.
Hélène: My nationality is written on a passport page’s dotted line. I am legally and singularly Chinese. But people still ponder my identity, which grows beyond black ink on a blank page, that I flesh out with non-singularly Chinese things.
My grandparents worked in foreign lands, my parents worked with foreigners, and I attend an international school, speaking English and French. My future university resides an ocean away. My friends scattered around the globe like unshuffled houses of cards. I fill my memory bottle with miscellaneous mistakes made in New York, Toronto, and Tokyo. My identity better fits the label “internationalized Chinese,” because I feel like a world trapped within a person.
How do you choose? How do you feel when choosing?
Helena: My two nationalities are like the forces of yin and yang, pushing against each other, but balancing harmoniously at the same time. I try my best not to conform to societal expectations and abandon either one of my nationalities.
I want everyone to know that it’s okay not to choose. We can be melting pots of cultures, an amalgam of rich histories and cultural traditions. I was once asked if we celebrated Father’s and Mother’s Day in China: I always thought that these festivals are worldwide, not belonging to any specific culture (which they are). Thus, we need to show the world our unique perspectives and identities, that we don’t have to stick any labels on our skins, that we all celebrate international holidays. Reading Gloria Anzaldua’s work on Mestiza consciousness and Borderlands/La Frontera, I realized that like her, I can have multiple identities. According to Anzaldua, there are people who live at the borderlands, meaning the outskirts or in the middle of two different things. Thus, I am both Canadian and Chinese.
Hélène: I feel the question urging me towards, “Where do I belong?”
Not in the East Coast, not at Chinese diners, not in the tongue-tied silence, the languages that won’t belong to me. I am one of those cross-cultured human beings, legitimately educated and internationally fashioned but unable to classify themselves, I don’t know where I belong. I don’t know how to belong.
I used to try fitting in, blending in, like water rolling in rich wine. I could shatter every mirror on my lake, distort every version of myself to match my environment, and I seemed to belong, but it never meant I belonged to anywhere. We all know a friend to all is a friend to none. Similarly, one who belongs to everywhere belongs to nowhere, because to mold is not to belong. It is an illusion to twist between twisted fingers, lacing a little prison to dance around the question, and wait for it… wait for it… because life will answer for me: Where in this fragmentary, passionate world, do I belong?
In the end, who are we really? What are your concluding thoughts?
Helena: Our life is like a narrative, but we are our own writers. We can determine who we are and who we want to be. If you’re unsure of your identity, know that it is okay to feel bewildered. Life is full of enigmas and maybes for us to discover, and this journey won’t be over in the blink of an eye. This is just the beginning.
Hélène: Our story has no ending yet. I have no escape to my own imagination and logic: Where will I go, who I am, and who will I be?
If “home is where the heart lives,” then I have two homes. One is Beijing, the city I was raised in. The other is my city of choice, where I will work, conjecture, and contemplate life. I am like the peanut butter and jam stuck to the bread, for who I am is burning between two layers, intertwined from the neck to spine. The next time you ask, I am the salt and stale sugar, the cynical fur and carmine feather, the forest evergreen and frosted leaves in winter, the blessing and the curse. I am all or nothing. Still, I am me.
This article appeared in the jingkids 2021 July-August issue
