What belonging means for Asian Americans

[Randy W]

'I've walked between two worlds': What belonging means for Asian Americans
Asian American families across generations reflect on the ways they hold on to their cultures while finding a place in America.

from the NatGeo on Facebook 
"Many of us who call America home—even those like me who were born and raised here—find that we want to belong more than we actually do."
https://www.facebook.com/23497828950/posts/10158437852668951/

 

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DD LEE AND DAUGHTER ISABELLE

DD Lee, who moved to the U.S. from China at age 12, sits with her daughter, Isabelle, at their home in Woodstock, Georgia. DD teaches Isabelle, who is biracial, to be proud of both parts of her heritage. “I tell her: who you are is not where you came from. Sure, you’re half Chinese, half American, but that doesn’t make up who you are. Who you are is how you treat people, how you behave, are you kind.”

 

For most of my life, I hated my name. Before I was born, my parents, who had come to the United States from China a few years before, had chosen to call me Elaine, but my mom’s sole white friend at the time told her that it was an old-lady name. She suggested Alyssa instead.

My dad didn’t know how to spell that, so when the time came to register me, he sounded it out, figured “Alyssa” sounded like “eleven,” threw in a couple of S’s for good measure, and there I was, hours old and legally bound to this strange portmanteau, Elessa.

I still ended up going by Elaine, perhaps because my parents wanted me to use my Chinese name, Yilan. When I arrived in school, no one could say it and Yilan gradually became Elaine.

It didn’t matter much to my parents, who never use either of these English names for me. But it mattered to me. I hated Elessa, hated the question mark in the teacher’s voice on the first day of school, hated never finding it on a keychain or magnet, hated that it wasn’t “real.” I wasn’t even like the other kids who went by their Chinese or Korean names. My immigrant parents had done the most embarrassing thing possible as far as I was concerned: make something up. Elessa was proof of assimilation gone wrong, evidence that we didn’t belong.

 

 

[Randy W]

 

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What’s in a name?

On a recent spring afternoon, DD Lee, a 39-year-old woman who moved from China as a child, is laughing over Zoom, remembering her 12-year-old self. Living in Kentucky and in need of a new name, she picked “Annette” out of a book. She tried it on for a couple months, then went with Dina in high school before a friend suggested DD, the initials of her Chinese name, Dan Dan.

“There was literally an identity crisis when it came to the name part of things,” she says.

Lee was one of many Atlantans who shared a story about their name, and how it represented a fundamental question of who they were in this country. They remembered childhoods spent figuring out how to fit in, of striking the right balance between Asian and American, of holding onto their families’ cultures without feeling like an outsider.

 

A quote from one of the comments on Facebook
 

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As a parent of "Asian" children and a long time subscriber to National Geographic I am saddened by the "woke" direction that the magazine has taken. I have lived and traveled all over the United States and World. There is no better place to be any race or ethnicity than the United States of America.

 

[Randy W]

The beloved surplus store saved by New Yorkers

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Henry Yao thought he would have to give up and shutter Army & Navy Bags, his tiny surplus store in New York City that he has run for about a decade. But little did Yao know that he was beloved by many New Yorkers who stepped up to help him out.

from the SCMP on Facebook 
https://www.facebook.com/scmp/videos/265640828784807/