Becoming Asian American: A Reflection By Julia Chang Wang Julia Wang is the co-founder of the Immigrant History Initiative (@immigranthistoryinitiative), a nonprofit that works through narrative storytelling and education to address anti-Asian violence and xenophobia broadly. She is a lawyer and a writer and has published in The Atlantic and Huffington Post. Julia is a graduate of Yale Law School and Harvard College, where she studied history.
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hen I came to the U.S. at 9 years old, I had little sense of what America would look like, save for the occasional dubbed classics my mother took me to see, like Titanic (which was about Irish immigrants on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic) or The Bridges of Madison County (though I would learn later that was not quite the quintessential American flick that I had imagined). We arrived in the U.S. on February 11, 2001, a date that we used to mark time for most of my American childhood. By the time of my high school graduation, I had spent half of my life in America, give or take a few months. The development of my identity was tethered to assimilation. For their first few years in America, my parents fretted over
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whether my English would ever be fluent. This worry was not unfounded, as I refused to speak for an entire semester in the elementary school in Rogers Park where I first experienced the public school system in the U.S. The school didn’t have an ELL, or ESL as it was called back then, program, so I sat in a classroom full of kids who peered at me with curiosity. My mother taught me English through the public library. She borrowed stacks of children’s books and dozens of audio tapes and agonized over them with me (because she too was new to the language). She insisted that I pronounce every word exactly as the narrator of Paul Danziger’s Amber Brown book series on tape had, and I practiced until my voice morphed into that of a native Chicagoan. My parents
forbade me from reading Chinese books and watching my beloved Chinese dramas until I became fluent in English three years later. Through the deliberate process of forgetting, I slipped into an American childhood that seemed, by all intents and purposes, to mirror that of my white classmates. I beamed when adults told me that my English was good, even when they didn’t know that I was an immigrant. Some things were harder to ignore: the racial epithets, shouts of “ching chong” on the playground, the “go back to China,” the microand macro-aggressions that served as a frequent reminder that to some, I did not belong. In high school, a group of my friends, most of whom were Asian American, were walking to the movies when three guys
