At A Very Chinese Time

*Editor’s Note: This essay was a runner-up in our 2026 creative non-fiction writing contest. This year’s theme was ‘In Flux’

“You met me at a very Chinese time in my life.”

It’s a phrase that floats easily through TikTok and casual conversations. Someone posts a Hanfu shoot; someone starts drinking hot water every morning and calls it self-care; someone returns from Shanghai with a suitcase of snacks. The caption writes itself: very Chinese era.

The phrase makes me laugh. I use it too. It feels light, ironic, communal. It signals curiosity instead of suspicion.

For someone like me, who learned early that expressing pride in being Chinese could be both a declaration and a risk, this new tone is disorienting. I welcome it. I also tread carefully.

Because instability, for me, has been personal long before it was geopolitical.

Growing up in China, I was 小老外 “the little foreigner” in a small town where international faces were rare. At six, the novelty felt flattering. I glowed under the attention.

But visibility is not belonging.

Every introduction followed a script I never consented to but memorized.

哎呦，这小美女不像是汉族人啊 “Oh! This little girl doesn’t look Han Chinese.”

Then the predictable sequence: Are you an ethnic minority? Are you really your mother’s daughter? Is your father foreign? Which country do you like better? China or America?

That last question carried a subtle expectation.

In years when America felt ascendant—economically triumphant, politically dominant—people asked it as if the answer were obvious. As if I would confess that, of course, America was better. As if coming to China was a downgrade.

But I could no longer describe my American hometown. My Mandarin sharpened; my English lagged behind memory. I didn’t feel American enough to praise America convincingly.

At the same time, I did not feel Chinese enough to defend China without qualification. To say “China is better” would have required a confidence I did not possess. Even when I wanted to answer in ways that might surprise or soften something unspoken between us, I hesitated. I edited. I balanced.

The questions were not cruel so much as relentless. They carved a quiet understanding into me: I would always be slightly outside the frame. Even inside China’s borders, I was conditional.

When I moved back to the U.S. in middle school, I believed in the word melting pot. I imagined dissolving into belonging.

Instead, I crystallized.

Suddenly, I was “very Chinese” in ways that felt sharp. My English, technically my mother tongue, felt rehearsed and fragile. My humor landed a beat too late. Teachers praised my “hard work” with a tone that implied distance. Classmates heard my accent before my ideas.

In China, I had been not-Chinese-enough. In America, I was not-American-enough. The same face that signaled ambiguity in one place became proof in another.

At fifteen, I became hyper-aware of every glance. I learned how to preempt interactions before they could embarrass me. I trimmed parts of myself strategically. I clung to the hyphen — Chinese-American — because it felt safer than either word alone. Ambiguity became armor.

Then COVID-19 ruptured whatever illusion of safety I had constructed.

Anti-Asian rhetoric surged in the U.S. with terrifying familiarity. “Foreign.” “Virus.” “Kung Flu.” Words blurred into threat and violence. Elders were shoved to the ground. Strangers spat suspicion with ease.

In the midst of that fear, I watched some Asians rush to clarify: We’re not Chinese. Instagram bios with different flags. Subtle stress on “actually, I’m Korean” or “I’m Filipino, not Chinese.” It was fear. It was survival.

And it was a reminder that proximity to China had once again become something to disclaim.

The aftershock was not only fear. It was recognition.

To be framed as contagion. As geopolitical proxy. As embodiment of a foreign threat. The sensation pulled me back to my fifteen-year-old self, scanning every room for hostility. I had carried that vigilance across oceans.

In college, I wandered into Chinatown in my new city as if entering a memory I hadn’t consciously stored. Dragon lamps curved over the streets. The language I had only heard from relatives in recent years spilled freely onto sidewalks. I paused outside a restaurant selling a dish I loved as a child, my throat tight.

Belonging, I realized, is sometimes grief wearing a different outfit.

At university, I met others who lived in translation: children of migration, of mixed heritage, of partial claims. We laughed about identical childhood interrogations. We shared the exhaustion of representing entire nations in casual debates.

With them, I began to grow into my skin rather than edit it.

I became comfortable enough to joke about “Asianizing” friends who saw me without performance. I invited them into my world: taking them to hotpot for the first time, teaching them to say Chinese words with the right intonation, explaining that hot water is not superstition but comfort. I watched caricature loosen into curiosity.

Beyond campus, the world churned.

U.S.-China tensions escalated. News cycles swung between trade wars, tech bans, diplomatic standoffs. Online, new slangs emerged: “Chinamaxxing,” “becoming Chinese,” ironic invocations of alternative modernity. Alongside rising far-right movements in parts of the West, there was also a strange fascination with “Chinese aesthetics,” “Chinese discipline,” “Chinese efficiency.”

I noticed something unsettling.

My ease with my Chineseness seemed, at times, to parallel shifting geopolitical winds.

When sentiment in the U.S. soured, some looked toward China with renewed interest. When dissatisfaction at home intensified, China became either villain or fantasy. The pendulum swung wildly, and with it, perceptions of people like me.

The instability lingers: identities attached to headlines.

I know viral trends do not equal deep understanding. Posting Hanfu photos is not the same as examining bias. Claiming a “very Chinese era” may signal experimentation more than solidarity. Often, fascination with China mirrors domestic disillusionment more than genuine curiosity.

And yet.

Even superficial openness can crack space into possibility.

If a six-year-old girl today hears more intrigue than suspicion when she enters a room; if a fifteen-year-old no longer feels she must choose which half of herself to mute; if uncertainty allows someone to admit they do not know enough and want to learn, then something is shifting.

We live in an era of constant flux. Technology compresses distance. Pandemics redraw fear. Nations posture. Languages hybridize. Identities harden and dissolve.

Navigating uncertainty has meant accepting that belonging is not a stamp at a border crossing. It is an ongoing negotiation between how the world names you and how you name yourself.

The aftershocks remain. I still brace when someone asks, “Where are you really from?” I still feel the flicker of calculation when headlines turn countries into caricatures. I still sense how quickly warmth can cool with the next election cycle.

But processing change has also meant refusing to let geopolitics dictate my interior life.

It has meant allowing myself to say, without irony and without apology:

I am at a very Chinese time in my life.

Not because it is fashionable. Not because it is politically expedient. But because I have finally made peace with inhabiting the in-between—not as a temporary phase, but as a home.

Uncertainty, I am learning, is not only instability. It is also possibility.

About the Author

Emily Brignand is currently a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Mongolia. She previously served as the Program Associate at the US-China Education Trust. She holds a BA in International Studies from American University, with a regional focus on China and East Asia and a thematic concentration in identity, race, gender and culture. Her work has centered on fostering cross-cultural understanding and strengthening connections across U.S.–China, East Asia and Asian American communities. You can find her on LinkedIn.