LANGUAGES OF SHAME
by KIANA WONG
At this point in time, I am twenty-three years old. Ten years ago, my best friend and I took walks around the lake near her house after school. Wearing big sunglasses we bought at the nearby mall, purposefully scuffing up our year-old sneakers we bought with our earned babysitting money so that we had a reason to buy the new ones we saw. I would call my mom from my friend’s sliding keyboard cell phone to ask for permission to sleep over. Then we would spread out on a blanket in the front yard in the middle of the night, dreaming together of one day being in our twenties, married to some prince charming, asking “how many babies?”. We would say, “I can’t wait to have mixed babies.” We loved to ponder who we might be by then, how we were going to be teachers, or actors, musicians, or maybe we’ll just have the luxury of being a stay-at-home mom.
At age twenty years old, my grandmother was three years younger than my current age now, when she was sent off to be married to a man she had never met. Before that, she had lived her entire childhood during a war–beginning with the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, to the Civil War, until the War of Liberation. She spent her days hunched over fields, planting and harvesting rice under a burning sun. In an attempt to escape from the Japanese, my grandmother was taken into sanctuary with nuns who helped her escape and hide in the cathedrals. My grandmother knew by the time she was a teenager that her duty to the family was to be arranged in marriage to help support the family. She was only nineteen years old when she found out her independence would be stripped from her once and for all, and her new life of building a family was to begin. Maybe she was even younger when she first learned this.
Being a teenager is not easy. Those impressionable years when everyone copies each others’ clothes and bags, trying to fit in, to make friends. The cool girls that I want to hang out with call the Asian boys who don’t talk much “nerds”, and I don’t want them to associate me with the girls that stay in the library and read Manga. I laughed if people asked me if I spoke Chinese. I didn’t tell anyone I took pride in my English-only proficiency. Watching other people of color step on those whose skin and eyes looked like mine was the worst part. I watched the tall Latina girls fearlessly shout “Move!” at the boy standing in her way as she and her girlfriends paraded through the hallways. I cringed seeing the class clown get uneasily close to a girl and pressuring her to answer who she has a crush on in class, making her visibly uncomfortable, unbothered by her silence–expecting it. Each predictable event following the next caused another twist in my stomach, adding new layers of numbness and discomfort in my own skin. I only seemed to be surrounded by examples of the stereotype I wanted so badly to prove otherwise. Afraid I would be seen the same way, I eventually gravitated towards making non-Chinese friends. I was embarrassed by the association. I didn’t want to be Chinese.
In 1949, my grandfather was still a teen when he first met my grandmother over tea. They were quickly married just after the Communist Revolution of China, also known as the War of Liberation, and my grandmother became pregnant immediately. She stayed in China while my grandfather moved to the United States to work and send back money until he had enough to bring his wife, his controlling mother, and their first born child to live in the United States. My grandmother was younger than myself when she survived her first years of marriage, parenting alone, in a country completely unfamiliar and uninviting–hiding, afraid, tired. Resilient.
The beginning of your twenties can be fun. I have learned to value the art of exploration, curiosity, love, friendship. I went to my first Women’s March in 2016, alongside powerful friends, families, strangers, allies, who stood for equality, empowerment, freedom and women’s rights. I learned to stand up for people of color, wanting to learn Spanish so that I could support the brown families whose loved ones feared or experienced separation, and to fight for black brothers and sisters who live in fear at the hands of the law who fail to protect them. Meanwhile, I struggle to find my own place as a “person of color”, when many don’t even consider Asians as such. If I am not white, and not a person of color, I am invisible. So, what oppression? It’s not that bad compared to the way others have to suffer. There’s no need to stand up for my own people. We are the model minority after all. I wonder at what age I began to internalize it, to the point of believing it. I wonder at what point I began to believe that us Chinese were not deserving of the same fight and honor.
Did my grandmother anticipate this when she moved to the United States, at the age that I am now? When she birthed her first baby in Canton, China in 1951, with a man she barely knew–fulfilling her duty as a daughter, a wife, a mother. Did she think this far down the line? About what her grandchildren would be like, what their lives would be filled with, what they might accomplish, or what freedom they would live in, after suffering extreme sea sickness for weeks while traveling on a ship to America with a one-year-old infant? Did she have the time to consider what her future had in store after moving thousands of miles from familiarity, living in paralyzing fear that the government might discover her escape, knowing the only way for her to survive was to become invisible, teaching her children to blend in, to assimilate? Did she ever want to cry knowing if she did she would be seen as weak?
My words, thoughts, and questions begin to tumble out, faster than my tongue can even speak, in a rush of desperation, realizing how do I even ask these questions? Will I ever be able to know? Then I hit a wall–our language barrier–with a hesitation to climb it because I know even on the other side of that wall there is still a wide chasm. Our generational gap–that isn’t that wide, but is scary enough to peer down and see only darkness. My shame–from realizing all I know how to wish for is for my grandmother to have experienced the American freedom in her childhood like I was able to, and the shame of realizing the ignorant bliss of my privilege that I never needed to question. The reality hits me that our experiences of growing up will never be shared, but that although my identity is built around my own story, I can’t begin to fully know the depth of who I am, without learning and knowing her. I am frantically racing against time. There is a pain in knowing I may never fully know the depth of her suffering because she may always hide it from the rest of the world, harboring it within her, masking it by showering us in food, clothes, and handing us bags of sale item shampoos and paper towels. When I wrote a paper in middle school about my grandparent’s immigration story, I interviewed them, my mom as our translator. I asked, “How did you feel?” and my grandmother laughed into the phone, asking my mom in her native tongue, “What does she mean ‘How did I feel’? There was no time to feel.”
At the end of May this year, George Floyd was murdered. Everyone took to the streets to protest the injustices of police brutality. We marched through crowds of families, youth, and elderly, holding signs saying “Black Lives Matter”, “No Justice, No Peace”, “Defund the Police”, and I even held a sign that said “Asians Stand With You”. Thinking back I wonder whether I had worn a mask that day. Not just because of the pandemic, but another mask made up of the features and color of my skin that I used to represent my solidarity without really knowing, feeling, or believing the true power of it. I wish I had known what I do now at the time those protests were happening. It wasn’t until after that I had learned about Vincent Chin. I wish I learned about him in my California history classes. I wish my teachers valued the progress and influence of Asian American activists; how the murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, in 1982 ignited the monumental movement for Asian American rights. About how his murder triggered national outrage forcing Asian Americans on all sides to band together to create civil rights organizations– protesting, petitioning, and going to court to demand protection for their people.
And most of all, I wish I learned all through my life how America has actively written our names and voices out of the history books, out of our school curriculums, and shaped us involuntarily into what they called the great “model minority”. Pretending that we had reached the gate to equal opportunity along with the successful White Americans. A strategic ploy that erases the oppression, racism, and degradation of Chinese workers who literally died to help make America the country that it is. I wish I had learned in school how deeply the model minority myth has ingrained the idea that Asians are indebted to America who graced us with the privilege of co-existing here. I wish I had not been blind, so unaware of the decades of “you should be grateful” plastered over our mouths, generations of “if the Chinese pulled up their bootstraps, then so can you”, the lifetimes of expunging shared history of oppression and solidarity among other people of color, used us to deny racial justice, and narratives of success only to be left behind, forgotten, insignificant in the eyes of America’s history of prosperity. So, the truth is, my teachers probably did not know about it either.
I can wish for many things, I can resent my blindness and shame, but there is a peace in choosing now, to begin here. I want to know my grandmother. I don’t know her, not in the way I know how to know people. But I know her by the smell of her home-cooked Chinese food on two dozen platters, fresh-picked oranges from her giant tree in the backyard, her piles of blankets ready for any of her children or grandchildren to stay the night. I know her through the sound of my mother’s, my aunt’s, and uncle’s broken Taishan, and her stubborn insistence on packing our car full with pink boxes of Chinese pastries, cereal, canned food, eggs, and milk, until my siblings and I had to lift our legs up over all of it the whole two-hour drive home. I know her from watching her pray as a child, kneeling with her elbows on the couch, with her old green hardcover bible and its Chinese characters in golden embossing. How she had it open in front of her, hands folded together under her forehead, hearing her sing-songy cries to God rise and fall for over an hour. A faith in God she grew to know and trust because of her rescuers of her childhood. I know her by her beaming smile turned to laughter, or the way her accent changes the pronunciation of my name. I feel her, remembering how she cried through the phone when she found out my mom went to the ICU with a ruptured appendix. I ache when I hear her pained voice of worry, while at the same time, gives me a perplexing sense of relief.
I am reminded to embrace my Imago Dei, Image of God. An expression symbolizing not only the connection between God and man, but the promise in all of who we are. In our culture, background, race, and kind, we reflect the essence of who God is. My shame is not my fault. I did not choose to not know what my grandparents had to bear, what they chose to forget, what they feared speaking about, what they did not ask to suffer. My shame is not my parents’ fault. They did not know how to handle the trauma of my grandparents' buried identities or the depth of confusion that comes with generations of assimilation. It is neither mine, nor my parents’, nor my grandparents’ faults that the dehumanization of our people was never talked about because to survive meant to be silent. Our languages of shame are different, yet they are the same. They share blood and a sorrow that is easier to be ignored. But when stories of shame are brought to light, your shame loses its power. And now the stories I will be able to share with future children and family, stories that I will pass on will be those of my grandparents’ strength, perseverance, and love. How learning about it began my long journey of discovering my Chinese American pride, the evolution of ending shame and complicity, to rejecting emotional suppression and practicing vulnerability. Breaking generational cycles of choosing everything else over ourselves. Bob Fryling wrote, “Our complete identity is made up of not only our spiritual identity in Christ but also our human identity of being created in the image of God, the Imago Dei… All peoples, male and female, of every language and cultural group bear the mark of the Creator in the very essence of who they are…We are image-bearers of our Creator”. For us to even begin to know a particle of God’s mind and how They work, how They see us, and how They will use us to further Their kingdom, is to know ourselves, then love ourselves through our ancestors, and every piece, pain, and improvement in who we are. And to know we matter.
Kiana Wong was born and raised in San Francisco, California.