FINDING COMFORT BEYOND LABELS
Jen shares about her experience being caught between two worlds of never feeling “enough” and how she managed to be at peace with her sense of self.
It’s a weird thing being a race different to the “norm” in the only country you’ve ever known. I think for a lot of immigrant children (or immigrants in general), a sense of and is gained in your host country when you connect with others from your heritage culture, where together you can celebrate your unique ways of being and living.
In my experience, gaining a sense of stability and hasn’t been so straightforward. Having grown up my whole life in Australia, there has always been a tension between simultaneous desires to feel “Australian enough” and “Chinese enough,” when the reality is that my identity is an inextricable combination of both cultures. Despite being culturally disconnected from China – unable to speak the language and disengaged from most traditions from my parents’ respective hometowns – my parents’ dispositions as people are fundamentally informed by their experiences growing up in China, and this has therefore fundamentally informed my own ways of being. This means that as as I feel to Australian and Western culture, there is a perpetual gap between me and the things I consume because of the context of my heritage. There are times where I question whether my consumption of Western media is wholly driven by genuine desire and enjoyment, or if a part of it can be attributed to an underlying, ever-present desire to conform and appease the Western standard. That is to say, a part of me feels that my engagement with Western culture is predicated on a desire to feel more Western, but of course no amount of engagement in a culture can compensate for your lack of heritage in said culture.
As I grow older and meet more people with diverse backgrounds and relationships to their heritage and host cultures, I feel increasingly with this gap. Though labels and boxes can offer comfort and stability, they can also be restrictive and unconducive to developing an independent sense of self – that is, who you are beyond the conventions of labels that you may or may not resonate with. When I consider my life and who I am becoming as a person, I ultimately enjoy the fact that my engagement with the world is through the lens of my particular, somewhat unconventional relationship with culture – a position that doesn’t align me with one box or another. I enjoy it because it enables me to with a diverse array of people without needing the pretence of shared experience.