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Of course Chinatowns represent an important part of AsAm and ChnAm history. How could I not know? How could I not have trekked towards it during childhood, during college, during grad school for the taste of food that satisfied, for the groceries you couldn't get elsewhere, for the familiar faces?
Yet, in the end, it's not really a place for me to call my own. The diaspora experience of those who grew up in Chinatowns is not my experience. The languages spoken there aren't my languages, not figuratively, but literally: Cantonese and Hokkien, topolects that are familiar in sound through exposure, but ultimately are a few words I understand in a sea of incomprehension. Chinatowns were built on waves of immigration that I do not belong to, built by people from places my ancestors were not from.
Still, there's the AsAm history that makes me want to claim some small part of it. Is it odd to build an identity based on how you are excluded together? Here is where the anti-Chinese animosity built towards the Exclusion Act. Here is where the Asian Exclusion Act was born. Here is where I grew up under that unifying label of Asian American, though it encompassed such disparate and wide ranging experience.
Yet, in the end, it's not really a place for me to call my own. The diaspora experience of those who grew up in Chinatowns is not my experience. The languages spoken there aren't my languages, not figuratively, but literally: Cantonese and Hokkien, topolects that are familiar in sound through exposure, but ultimately are a few words I understand in a sea of incomprehension. Chinatowns were built on waves of immigration that I do not belong to, built by people from places my ancestors were not from.
Still, there's the AsAm history that makes me want to claim some small part of it. Is it odd to build an identity based on how you are excluded together? Here is where the anti-Chinese animosity built towards the Exclusion Act. Here is where the Asian Exclusion Act was born. Here is where I grew up under that unifying label of Asian American, though it encompassed such disparate and wide ranging experience.
