BY JENNA WANG
*Editor’s note: The following story won 2nd prize in our first ever annual NüStories personal essay contest. This year’s theme was Chinese identity – read more here.
As Iowan farmland speeds by, longing stirs within me. This always happens whenever I leave my familiar suburban Iowan neighborhood for a road trip. Alongside my family, I hurtle at 80 mph on a lone road, with flat tracts of land stretching endlessly around. A fiery sunset lights up in every direction. The grazing of cows and horses occasionally pepper the landscape. There’s endless time to just think, however scary being alone with my own thoughts is sometimes.
My curiosity hungers with an appetite for family history. So far, I’ve already collected the basics. My parents were born in cities that rhyme (Xi’an in the North and Ji’an in the South), before meeting in Beijing. They eventually moved to the U.S. in Midwest Iowa, giving birth to me. The loose anecdotes in between form pieces to some greater puzzle, fueling my imagination about the distant motherland. Just now, my mom tells me that my great grandparents were the last farmers of my ancestral line. How fitting that I’m also surrounded by farmland halfway across the world decades later.
That’s, of course, where the similarities end. As one of the least diverse U.S. states, Iowa has never been a place where I grew up surrounded by Chinese people. My earliest memories of Chinese-ness always resided with Chinese School on Saturdays, where a smattering of Chinese kids from nearby cities would congregate to pick up the mother tongue. A group of local Chinese mothers taught us, and I swallowed the double-edged sword that is having your own mother as your teacher. So, while I was chided out in front of my classmates, I later appreciated possessing better-than-average Chinese skills. We kids also loved nothing more than our mom’s homecooked Chinese food, the Peking Buffets with their zodiac menus, and those mythological TV show characters.
But growing pains become inevitable, and my glasses-wearing, greasy-haired-self tried to make sense of them. At first, being distinctly Chinese was never at the forefront of my mind. Because there were so few Asians in general, Pan-Asianism made more sense. One of the first things I remember is how my non-Asian peers always had their grandparents around and attended large, family reunions. On the flip side, my family had just been mom, dad, and younger sister, with weekly WeChat grandparent calls. When I developed a passion for activities that hyper-focused on looks, like show choir and acting, it was clear as day how much easier it was for the taller, blonde girl to be front and center. In mainstream media, Asians were more likely to show up in stereotypical roles instead of complex, lead roles. That’s why K-pop became so important for me. Even though I was Chinese, it was a win for people who looked like me, did what I loved, and defied stereotypes.
Yet, it was hard to escape the subconscious pressure to measure our Asian-ness by those very same stereotypes, like the model minority. For instance, I fubbed up 100 * 3 in third grade because “it had two extra zeroes!” I never had a stinky lunch food memory, my dad was the opposite of an aloof parent, and so-on-and-so-forth. I never directly assessed my Chinese identity until my first trip back to China since I was two. Finally, I’d get to visit the cities that rhymed and imagine what it’d be like to grow up in a place where I “fit in” with everyone. But would I really stand out like an ABC sore thumb? Would China be as those in the U.S. portrayed it to be?
Cue forth my China adventures, scrawled over 20 pages of my yellow diary. Spicy food, condensed milk popsicles. Hot, humid nights with bustling traffic that daringly defied rules of the road. Sweating up the Great Wall. Night life that made Iowa pale in comparison. Ji’an dialects that rendered my Putonghua useless. Me throwing up on an amusement park ride. The chickens outside my distant relative’s home. The historical literally embedded into the modern. The sheer diversity between the North and South. So much family. Family I’d never met, never knew I needed. Their signatures that I made them scrawl into my diary. Large reunions set over Lazy Susans of glistening dishes.
I felt like the cliché of a new person afterward. I was more aware of my Chinese identity than ever, and a quiet pride reverberated through me. My family was certain that we’d go again every two years to make up for lost time.
The pandemic then struck. Though the world shut down, my perception of how others viewed Chinese-ness switched on. I can’t forget the tears that poured forth on a walk with my family, frustrated with the anti-Chinese rhetoric I read online. All the richness I’d experienced firsthand was reduced in the eyes of others to a physical and existential threat. The thousands of years of history, the billion people living in China, and one of the largest diasporas—all reduced to one, homogenous entity, never to be disassociated from geopolitics. The Pan-Asianism I’d witnessed also took a turn. It seemed as though other East Asians could lean into their identities with the rise of K-culture and Japanese tourism, while Sinophobia festered. Chinese cultural elements like tanghulu and Douyin makeup were losing their origins through misattribution as well. A defensive impulse began to brew inside me. Was it in defense of China, the country? Of Chinese people? Of Chinese-ness, whatever that meant? I wasn’t sure. The idea of Chinese-ness still felt too large to grasp in my mind, and entering college right then only challenged it further.
For the first time, I’d met other Chinese people who grew up in a variety of settings. In California and New York surrounded by other Asians. As second-generation children to Cantonese parents that grew up in America. As students born in America but attended international American school in Taiwan and Shanghai. Chinese Puerto Ricans who spoke Chinese, Cantonese, English, and Spanish interchangeably. And Chinese Midwesterners like me.
There were no metrics by which Chinese-ness could be defined after all. I had been searching all this time to find something irrefutably agreed upon to compare myself to. But there lives a different version of China and what it means to be Chinese in everyone’s head. Even the country itself is modernizing faster than we’d ever anticipate. There is constant change, and that’s where my Chinese-ness lies—not in some static thing, but always growing from roots that unite us all, stretching thousands of years back. There’s also hope in knowing other minds can be changed. RedNote comments and even those from streamer IShowSpeed’s China trip are already far more open than the ones I’d read five years ago.
Chinese people are everywhere, alongside our rich culture and influence. I’m proud of being a Chinese woman from the Midwest. Yet, as the Iowa farmlands pass by, I sometimes imagine that it’s 2018 again, and I’m on that rumbling sleeper train flying down south from Beijing to Ji’an. I stare past the window to the rolling hills of green rice paddies beyond, tended by Chinese farmers beneath the sizzling summer sun.
About the author
Jenna Wang is a recent BSJ and MSJ graduate from Northwestern University, where she studied journalism, political science, and integrated marketing communications. She enjoys covering stories about the human condition, the changing world of arts and entertainment, the Asian diaspora, and the business of media, power, and technology. Read her writing at publications like PEOPLE Magazine, Chicago Tribune, Wisconsin State Journal, and Little Village Magazine. You can also find this Iowa girl on LinkedIn and YouTube.
Photo: Jenna Wang dresses up as Chinese royalty during a trip to Beijing’s Summer Palace in 2018. Credit: Jenna Wang.