Acceptance is finding a group of people who validate you.

For me, this was going to live in an Asian dorm in New York City for a month. It was seeing that the comfort foods they made were the same ones that my mom fed me and my brother throughout our childhoods. It was hearing about the bowl cuts all our parents gave us in elementary school. It was all those stories brought into a single collective wholeness that we were all so familiar with. It was as if our identities, in their wholeness, could finally show and be accepted in ways they had not been before.

Exclusion is living amongst people who dismiss you.

I did not have this kind of validation growing up. I spent most of my childhood years wondering what the hell was wrong with my family, why my lunches never looked normal, why my parents insisted on humiliating me with their clunky accents and why our home never had the glamorous aesthetic of every princess or white teen we saw in movies. I never saw any other family that looked like mine in those movies, or any of the books I read or any of the houses I visited. If I did, it was not glamorized, it was something to be ashamed of, a secret world we tried to keep to ourselves.

The silencing of Asian lives means there is a constant struggle of trying to understand the normalcy of the most fundamental part of our family and identity.  There is no way for us to know if the things we have been taught to do since childhood are normal, and most times, we are not afforded the representation to think so. There is no way to find solace when all those who are celebrated, characterized, deepened, given boyfriends, given prom dresses, seen with friends, given complex personalities and allowed humanity on the screen are people who look nothing like you, do none of the things your family does, treat you like none of the other white people, do things you could never do and are things you could never be.

I have never seen an Asian protagonist of anything in my entire life in America. I have never seen an Asian girl go to prom and obsess over her prom dress or dream in her classes or question her sexuality or be moody and awkward and lovesick. I have never realized that there could be a depth to the extent others saw me that reached beyond smart Asian stereotypes, beyond Asian penis jokes, beyond the internalized stereotypes I have been fed for so long. Not because this is what ‘Asianness’ has been founded on, but because there are so few stories where the character arc envisions humanity and emotion, where borders of race and personhood can crumble. I am left choosing and thinking amongst the handful of scripts that have already been written for me- scripts that, based off hundreds of years of racist history, tell me I am no more than an exotic, submissive, robotically-intelligent assumption- and yet, this is all I have known. These are what engulf an entire race in the eyes of our society. I live with the idea that my identity has already been formed and is first and foremost the image society sees of me, and I am forced to theme every facet of my personality with internalized racism and self-hatred.

When I tried to learn how to sing in middle school, I immediately wondered what people would think of this gawky, conventionally unattractive Asian girl trying to pull off Selena Gomez or Taylor Swift and how silly that thought was, how markedly different I was from any of the beautiful stars I saw on VEVO. When it was time to pack a lunch for school, I always hated bringing something so clearly foreign and oriental, a visible testament to just how Asian and exotic and weird and inhuman and non-white I really was. When my pretty white friends talked about how much they loved Chinese food, I quietly recalled all the late nights I stood crying to my mother in the kitchen, scared out of my mind from the thought of all the embarrassment I would feel the next day when I would have to show everyone that I brought dumplings or fried rice. Eventually I gave up on singing, stopped bringing lunches and silently dealt with all the white people who loved the idea of my culture while the entirety of their media and society simultaneously told me to hate every part of myself. And that is basically how everything ‘ended’: with the racism being so ingrained and subliminal. Pointing out a resolution seemed irrelevant and I believed all my self-hatred and dysmorphism and emotional volatility were just blown-up petty annoyances no one else wanted to hear. And so I believed, in willfully ignorant childlike suspense, that, if I never thought about it again, I could somehow transcend these worries. As it turns out, I could not. I still silently cringe at the thought of bringing my lunch to school. I still do not correct people on my name. I still repress everything my parents tell me that is remotely related to China.

This is the society we live in. It is one where some of us will never be validated by a group, one where some of us will have to live in silence and constant shame and secrecy of a visible part of ourselves. I cannot imagine that racism or the media will dramatically change anytime soon. But I am a junior in high school and this is the first time I have ever opened up about my identity. Most of us live without ever seeing how insidious invalidation is. But if the racist social grid we live in cannot be changed, at the very least, we can try to find the group that validates us. Call things out in the media. Recognize the ways in which Asians are ignored and discriminated. Connect with the people who look like you, bond over all the little familial idiosyncrasies you once tried to hide, find the people who can make you feel like you are normal. No one should have to wait 16 years to find respected people who look like them and act like they have a personality beyond their stereotypes.