For Spacious Skies

(This essay was submitted to the 2014 Norman Mailer Writing Awards in the Four-Year College Creative Nonfiction division, for which I was selected as a semifinalist.)

When my father let go of my hand, I could barely remember my name. Four years old, I stumbled into the dimly lit classroom at the Medical College of Ohio’s childcare center and saw a kid crying in the corner, cradled by one of the teachers—was it Tina or Karen?—on the rocking chair. The night before, my father had told me there was nothing to be afraid of. I knew hardly two words of English (“cat” and “tree”) but, according to Ba Ba, the teachers had enough experience with Chinese students to recognize basic words like niao niao (to pee). But I didn’t believe him, so when the other teacher came over to greet me, I started crying, too.

My father told her I was very smart. I can imagine the conversation: Shu is a smart young girl but she is shy and does not talk much. She does not know English but will learn soon. My father bowed his head at Tina and Karen in a Chinese gesture of respect. Then he went back to his lab and left me to my adult caretakers, who smiled at me but could not pronounce my name.

I didn’t learn much about race in preschool, except that my grandmother told me to stay away from the black kids in the apartment next door who sagged their pants and liked loud music. I knew that people came in colors and the only person who looked like me was Alice, but she made friends with the white kids and I didn’t, because she was born here and spoke English and knew all the cartoon characters by heart. Alice had an older sister named Angela, because in America you can have more than one child, but none of my friends in China had any brothers or sisters, and I wondered what it was like.

In the year 2000, four years after I arrived in America, the city of Toledo, Ohio had a population of 313,619 people, 1.0% of whom identified as Asian. My apartment complex housed a disproportionate number of Chinese families because it was so close to the Medical College of Ohio, where my parents were doing research, and the University of Toledo, where Alice’s father was a math professor. At school, I befriended the two other Chinese girls in my grade—one was Alice and the other was Ming, whose mother babysat me afterschool when I was in the first grade. Our parents instantly bonded over a shared culture, clinging to each other’s company during dinner parties in which they celebrated the holidays of the lunar calendar. I can’t remember who became friends first: the immigrants or their children.

I must have arrived in America at just the right age, because it didn’t take long until I was chatting with the other kids in preschool and running around the playground screaming “Tag!” But there were many words I didn’t know. For years, I confused the phrase “trick or treat” with the name of my favorite place, Chuck E. Cheese. I couldn’t distinguish between sprinkles and glitter—which one was supposed to go on a cupcake and which one on construction paper? When the other kids rehearsed a new song they’d heard, I chanted along without truly understanding the words:

Me Chinese, me play joke! Me go pee-pee in your Coke!

The song didn’t bother me at the time. I thought it was something we sang just because it rhymed; I had no idea the words were directed at me.

My parents learned English by memorizing dictionaries in Chinese secondary school; I learned by singing “America the Beautiful” with my classmates and watching The Magic School Bus on Saturday mornings. During my first year in America, I owned three books: two Winnie-the-Pooh picture books and one illustrated children’s Bible. At home in the evenings, I practiced reading Winnie-the-Pooh to my mother, who corrected my pronunciation and delivery. She never joined me in reading the Bible. Although she didn’t have any public speaking experience, Ma Ma taught me my first lessons in oratory. Interrogative sentences need to end in an upward tone, declarative sentences downward. Exclamation points must be loud and emphatic. Over and over, I narrated Pooh’s and Eeyore’s adventures, until my mother told me I passed. Then she took me to the library, and I checked out picture books by the dozen, turning the pages at lightning speed and returning them a few days later so I could check out another batch. These early books, whose pictures and titles have escaped me, soon gave way to Junie B. Jones, The Sweet Valley Twins, and The Babysitters Club, which later gave way to Redwall and Harry Potter.

Although I quickly mastered the English language, my family lived in fear of misunderstandings. From my father, I learned to always say “stuffed” after a meal—never “full” because someone might confuse it for “fool” and think that I was calling myself stupid. He was self-conscious about other things, too, such as the color of the car he drove or how wide he smiled when he said “Hello.” Even my parents’ names caused confusion. When Mrs. Ocker, my first grade teacher, sent home my report card in a manila envelope labeled Mr. and Mrs. Lee, I didn’t understand why she had spelled my name wrong, since it was printed correctly on the report card itself. In the fifth grade, Mrs. Kollmorgen taught the class how to write addresses onto envelopes: I was supposed to print “Mr. and Mrs.” followed by my parents’ last name, unless my parents were divorced, in which case I should put both their names.

“But what if my parents have different last names?” I raised my hand and asked.

Mrs. Kollmorgen frowned. “I already said, if your parents are divorced, you should write both their names.”

“But they’re not divorced,” I explained. “They have different last names because they got married in China.”

Mrs. Kollmorgen stared at me and furrowed her eyebrows. I wished I hadn’t raised my hand.

Once every few months, I went to Alice’s and Angela’s house for a sleepover. Their mother worked night shifts at the local hospital, so we were constantly reminded to be quiet during the day because she was sleeping. Their house was exciting and exotic, full of limited edition Beanie Babies and the sweet aroma of powdered cappuccino. They were born in America. They could recite all the Spice Girls by name.

On Valentine’s Day, Alice, Angela, and I opened a box of conversation hearts and poured them out onto the living room table. At school, we had exchanged store-bought cards—the kind that came in boxes of 24—but since there weren’t enough kids in our class, we gifted the extras to each other. The box of hearts was a gift from Alice. On it, she had printed my Chinese name, Shu, marking each letter in pen. She and Angela debated for an hour what to call me. After moving to the United States, I had adopted an English name, but my Chinese name was the one stamped on all of my documents. After I came back from visiting relatives in China, it seemed as if Alice and Angela had suddenly forgotten my name, even though they had played hide-and-seek with me hundreds of times, poking into closets and calling out “Sue!”

I wondered if there was some fundamental difference between Alice, Angela, and me, because I was born in China and they had glossy blue American passports. I wanted there to be a difference, refusing to be lumped together with American-born kids whose only memories of China were sightseeing with their parents and eating street food in Beijing. They had never woken up in the morning to the staccato beats of Chinese students reciting English words at the primary school down the street (where I learned my token “cat” and “tree”), nor could they recognize the plump feeling of plastic milk bags bursting at the seams, the sweet smell of mantou from the corner vendor whose bamboo steamers were stacked ten feet high. During a water shortage, they never had to walk to the well with their grandfathers to pump water by hand and carry it in a bucket, sloshing home and up four flights of stairs, nor had they ever sat in a room with all their preschool classmates while dentists clad in surgical masks examined our smiles and squeezed warm plastic retainers into our mouths to “boil” our teeth.

We’re not the same, I reminded myself, playing Barbie with Alice and Angela under the living room table day after day. But my memories of China were fading fast, replaced with metal-wired shopping carts and plastic yellow playground slides that made your hair stand up and your shorts stick to your thighs. The one hundred Chinese characters my grandmother taught me at age three were erased from my mind one by one, dwindling down to a meager handful of words that slipped through my fingers at every grasp. Once, when calling my grandparents long-distance, I accidentally slipped in an “Okay,” forgetting that they could not understand. When my parents spoke to me in Chinese, I talked back in English. My father eventually stopped talking to me in Chinese and started calling me by my English name.

Having an English name was, to me, the biggest advantage of being born in America. On the first day of school, Alice and Angela never had to deal with the embarrassment of teachers who couldn’t pronounce their names, whereas the first day of school always filled me with dread. I would arrive to the classroom early and pull the teacher aside, hoping I could explain the situation before she had a chance to proceed with the roll call. I did not always succeed, and most years my name during the morning attendance was preceded by a beat of hesitation and followed by a whisper: “My English name is Sue.” Then I would breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that the hardest part of the day was done. The ritual was repeated a few times each year—whenever there was a substitute teacher—but for the rest of the time, my Chinese name was suppressed, crushed beneath the weight of a few pencil scratches, replaced by the five letters I chose to identify with instead.

Growing up in Ohio, I was the token Chinese kid in every class, always called upon to explain the origins of Chinese New Year and the twelve zodiac animals. In my seventh grade geography class, Miss McClintock let me lead our thirty-minute lesson on Chinese history: a sweeping overview of two thousand years beginning with the Shang dynasty and ending with Tiananmen Square, a name I was unable to pronounce, never having seen the syllables strung together before. When I moved to Seattle the following year, I was shocked that my public school was 30% Asian. As an Asian student, I was no longer teased about the relative scarcity of my ethnic group but rather our overabundance, the “Asian invasion” I was a part of, the other students’ inability to distinguish me from the sea of yellow faces. Although we joked about everyone’s parents working at either Boeing or Microsoft, I was secretly glad that there were other people like me, whose parents immigrated to the United States for graduate school or to jump-start their careers—the very tiger parents made infamous years later by Amy Chua. For now, they were simply mine with no trendy labels attached. Finally, I found myself surrounded by people who knew me inside out.

Apart from my parents, all of my relatives live in China, and for this reason, I am obligated to visit them every two to three years. Most years, I travel with my parents; some years I board the flight alone. Two summers ago, I spent three weeks in Shandong province, a few hours south of Beijing. I stayed with my maternal grandmother in my birthplace of Jinan and spent time with my paternal grandparents in the coastal city of Qingdao. My grandparents, like most Chinese retirees, take a two-hour nap after lunch every day. My grandparents’ house had no internet, and I couldn’t watch TV without disturbing their sleep, so I sat on the porch and wrote in my journal every day, comforted by the sight of English words.

A decade ago, foreigners in China were considered exotic. When my cousin went to Shanghai for the World Expo, she eagerly recounted all the foreigners she had seen, especially two tall blonde German boys. (“You wouldn’t believe how beautiful they were! Everyone was lining up to take pictures.”) But in recent years, the expatriate population has exploded in China’s largest cities. According to the 2010 census, there were 91,000 foreigners living in Beijing, a number that is still on the rise. In tourist hotspots like Qingdao, laowai are a common occurrence. “They’re taking over the city,” my aunt complained. “Left and right, you see them everywhere.” Despite being prone to exaggeration, my aunt did have a point—I, too, noticed the increase in foreigners when I visited two years ago. The biggest shock: the locals no longer stopped to take photos.

Walking down the street in Qingdao, I wondered if I was a laowai. To the naked eye, I am fully and unremarkably Chinese. Whenever I visit China, my relatives escort me from place to place; I have never traveled on my own, except for the twelve-hour flight. Although I speak Mandarin fluently, I am illiterate. The hours my mother and I spent reading Winnie-the-Pooh were never re-enacted in our native tongue. Left alone at a busy intersection and incapable of deciphering a map, my relatives fear for my safety just as much now that I am twenty-two as they did when I was four. Whisked through a parade of blue-collared shirts and parasols, I spend my days in China trailing in the wake of my aunt, handcuffed by her iron grip as she barrels through crowds on our way to the market, the shopping mall, the beach. We speak to no one, the chilling anonymity of New York City funneled into the tiny cosmos of Qingdao, without the colors of diversity. Lost amidst the black hair and brown eyes, I am faceless. I want desperately to cry out, Look at me! I’m a foreigner, I’m exotic! Take pictures of me. Ask me about my life.

But as much as I longed to stand out, it was my parents’ greatest fear. Growing up during the Cultural Revolution, the only way to stay out of trouble was to keep your head down and your mouth shut. My parents didn’t realize that in America, they didn’t need to be afraid. Before I left for college, my father gave me a lecture, unsurprisingly, about drugs and alcohol. Do not drink alcohol or do drugs or anything illegal. You are not a U.S. citizen, and if you get in trouble they will deport you at any time. They do not even need a reason. You are a second class citizen; we are not welcome in this country. My father told me that he had decided not to teach me Chinese or send me to Chinese school on the weekends because he wanted me to be fully American. When I told my father during winter break that I had joined a martial arts team, I did not anticipate his response. Do not spend so much time doing Chinese things or hanging around Chinese kids, especially the ones straight from China, or else people will look at you differently. You do not want people to think that you are too Chinese.

What ever happened to celebrating my culture? Why did it matter who I made friends with? When I first came to the United States, I felt out of place, unable to identify or communicate with my American peers. Fifteen years later, China was where I was truly lost, clinging to a heritage I could no longer claim as my own. My parents’ fear of mistaken identity only made me feel more disconnected and confused. During my sophomore year of college, I decided to apply for American citizenship, hoping to end the conflict once and for all.

—

On the night of December 29, 2011, I sat at my bedroom desk and filled out the four-page citizenship application in black ballpoint pen and capital letters. My parents looked over the form when I finished, reminding me of the days when they checked over my elementary school math homework.

“Are you sure you do not want a middle name?” my father asked. I was applying for a name change simultaneously, and the name I had selected was the one I grew up with: Sue Li. My parents never gave me a middle name (in Chinese, there are none), and I didn’t want to use my Chinese name as my middle name. “Perhaps you could choose something. Like Samantha,” my father suggested. “Whenever you publish a paper, you might get confused for someone else. So many people have your name. You must have at least a middle initial to separate you from the others, maybe Sue S. Li. Imagine getting a background check and so many Sue Li, it will take them years to check them all. Having a middle name is necessary and convenient.”

But the idea of choosing a new name seemed arbitrary and uncomfortable, an act far too decisive in the midst of my already wavering identity. Even if I took my time and tried on a few, I wouldn’t know how to make it mine, how the fabric of my being could possibly be contained in a sequence of letters that had been plucked out of the blue. If I were four years old, perhaps this would have been okay, but after living under Sue Li for sixteen years, I couldn’t imagine putting anything in between. To my embarrassment, tears began trickling down my face as I tried to translate for my parents the rant inside my head.

A few months earlier, my father had called me while I was at school to tell me that he had Googled my name (his excuse was that he had forgotten my email address, which seemed implausible given that all Yale email addresses follow the format of first.last@yale.edu). The top result in his search was an essay I wrote during freshman year about my name. Titled “Hello, My Name is _______,” the piece was published in Revelasians, an undergraduate journal produced by the Asian American Cultural Center at Yale. I had written about identity, as best as I could, in a thousand words. I recounted the story of my first day of kindergarten when my teacher, Miss Tiller, didn’t want to pronounce my Chinese name and decided to give me an English name instead.

“I’m going to call you ‘Sue from now on, okay?” I wrote in my essay. I rarely show my writing to my parents, so I was mortified to discover that they had, unbeknownst to me, accessed some of my most revealing thoughts:

I can hardly imagine Ma and Ba phoning my teacher the next morning demanding that my original name be restored—their Chinese submissiveness simply would not have permitted it. And so I stood back as my new name took root, curled its tendrils around the right-hand corners of my school assignments, left cursive blossoms on my birthday cards… Had I been born with a name that didn’t induce giggles from my first grade class, there would have been a possibility of keeping my identity. But after the initial shock of “Sue” wore off, I decided that “Shu Li” had no place in my new American life. I abandoned the name in the first grade, around the time I learned to be ashamed of my homemade dumplings and my parents’ English.

Over the phone, my father told me his reaction to my essay: “It is good writing. But you should not write about yourself. It is not interesting to anyone. Imagine one day you become a doctor, and someone finds this essay. Maybe they will think about you differently, maybe they will think you are less American.” When my parents demanded that I select a middle name, I thought back to my kindergarten Christening and the passivity with which I accepted my new name. Wiping my eyes with a Kleenex, I told them that I refused to pick a middle name. I vowed that I would never again let another person name me or coerce me into naming myself. At last, my father relented, and we mailed the forms the next day.

One month later, a notice in the mail informed me that my citizenship application had been received. A date was scheduled for the interview and examination. I obtained a study guide from the immigration office and brushed up on all the details of United States history and government I had forgotten. On April 23rd, I left New Haven at eight in the morning and took an Amtrak train to Hartford. At the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office, I waited for my appointment, sat down in front of an immigration officer, correctly answered eight questions and demonstrated my English language proficiency, at which point the test ended and I passed. I was instructed to return to Hartford for the oath ceremony two weeks later.

On the morning of May 3rd, I ate a chocolate croissant at Blue State coffee shop while waiting for my friend Sherwin to meet me. On a whim, I had asked him to attend my naturalization ceremony, and he unexpectedly accepted the invitation. He showed up twenty minutes past our agreed-upon meeting time, and we ran to the train station. I paid for his ticket, and an hour later, we walked through the grey streets of downtown Hartford. It started to rain, and Sherwin remarked that he never carries an umbrella because he always loses it. I lost my umbrella that day; I left it at the station before boarding the train.

We walked to the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut, a wide tan building located next to the Hartford Public Library and down the street from a friendly Indian restaurant where we later ate lunch. We entered the building and went through security; the security guard hand-searched Sherwin’s Google backpack because his headphones showed up on the x-ray machine. He led us to the door of the courthouse, and we walked in, picking a seat in the third row. It was smaller than I expected, with pews only six rows deep. Other naturalization candidates and their families were seated nearby. The judge reported the total number of people who would be granted United States citizenship in that day’s ceremony (almost forty) and the total number of name changes requested (about twenty). After a brief speech and an unmemorable video message from President Obama, each newly minted citizen was called to the floor and presented with a certificate of naturalization and a miniature American flag stapled to a wooden stick. Halfway through the list, the judge called my name: Sue Li. I released the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding: I would never have to hear my Chinese name again.

Most of the new citizens took photos—Sherwin, an amateur photographer, had brought his camera. We stood on either side of the judge and handed Sherwin’s DSLR to someone in the audience. The judge told us to scoot closer (“Come on, I don’t bite!”). Sherwin uploaded the photo to Facebook two weeks later. When I saw it, I was embarrassed. I had never intentionally concealed my nationality, but now everybody knew about my naturalization. I wondered what my father would say. I thought about removing the photo or un-tagging myself, but then I decided that it didn’t matter.

—

Two years after my naturalization ceremony, it’s hard to pinpoint how my identity has changed. I am grateful that the embarrassment of correcting my Chinese name has ended, that I no longer hurry to class on the first day of the semester attempting to inform my professors of my English name before they have a chance to confirm the course enrollment. I smile with satisfaction that the name on my official documents now reflects the person I am on the inside. I cast my ballot in the 2012 Presidential election, exercising my political voice for the first time.

But my friend Grace has made me wonder whether there is still much work to be done in my quest for cultural identity. In a blog post, she wrote about her aversion to Chinese-American literature, her inability to relate to writers such as Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston because their stories are from a different era, and her frustration that her own story of growing up as an Asian-American has not been canonized:

I have grown up in communities where “Chinese-American” has come to ostensibly mean books, piano, family dinners, Asian potlucks, the engineering and medical sciences, and the Ivy League… Those who immigrated to America before my parents’ generation have different cultural values and perspectives, their occupations and cuisine and motives for immigration distinct from my own. The Chinese-American diaspora is constantly in flux, with each generation building up to a sort of social paradigm shift.

Reading Grace’s words, I realized I felt the same way. When I was a child, the first Chinese-American book I read was Laurence Yep’s Thief of Hearts. I remember feeling excited to see Asian faces on the cover. I thought Yep was an odd last name, certainly not one I’d ever heard before in China, but I started reading nonetheless. By the time the protagonist, Stacy, ventures into San Francisco’s Chinatown in search of her friend Hong Ch’un, I was on the edge of my seat, eager to explore this new world of Chinese-America I could only fantasize about from my little bedroom in Toledo. But when Stacy and her grandmother comb the streets of Chinatown, I discovered that Chinese-America was not what I had imagined it to be. The language Stacy encounters is Cantonese, not Mandarin, and the apartments she visits smell of foods I had never heard of. Where was the China I had known? Stacy wasn’t even fully Chinese; she was half-Chinese, half-white. I had checked out the book expecting to read about someone just like me. I returned it as soon as I finished.

In elementary school, at the same time that I was learning about American culture, I also learned about the diversity of Chinese culture. When the staff at Crossgates Elementary put up stenciled letters that spelled out Gung hay fat choy! for Chinese New Year, I squinted at the words in confusion because they were not the ones I knew. When my friend asked me to pronounce them, I refused, too embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know how. I didn’t realize that the teachers had written the Cantonese pronunciation; I had been expecting Gong xi fa cai or Xin nian kuai le. My conception of China was limited to my own province. I had no idea how vast and diverse the country was, that there were fifty-four ethnic groups I had never seen and dozens of dialects I could not understand. Not only was I confused about being Chinese-American—I barely had any idea what it meant to be Chinese.

The Joy Luck Club and The Woman Warrior tell the stories of a generation of Chinese-Americans to whom I cannot relate. I didn’t grow up in the sixties; my parents didn’t own a laundromat or play mahjong in the afternoons. Where was the story of the young Chinese couples who uprooted themselves for graduate school and research positions, whose children learned violin or piano and enrolled in SAT classes in middle school and were pressured into competing for a spot in the Ivy League? Those were the books I wanted to check out from the library, so that I could read about people who share my set of experiences and know that I am not alone. But even so, my identity is not reducible to a hyphenated nationality. I am more than simply Chinese-American, and between the tiger mothers and violin lessons are gaps in the narrative that must be filled.

It occurs to me that instead of searching for these books, I need to write my own. Thinking back to my father’s reaction to my freshman essay, it’s no wonder I can’t find literature about myself. In my family, creative writing was encouraged as merely a hobby, something that should never get in the way of real pursuits. At sixteen, I wrote my first book: a seventy-page collection of vignettes. I couldn’t stick to simply one story or an extended essay; there were so many parts of me I wanted to tell. In the end, I split myself up into multiple characters and wrote about race, Chinese habits, language, names, my relationship with God, and other things I can’t recall. I told my father I wanted to publish my writing. When he asked what it was about, I replied that it was a bunch of stories about myself. He ordered me not to send them to anyone before showing it to him first. I refused. Secretly, I drafted query letters and sent my manuscript to agents, magazines, and publishing houses over the summer, to little success. Among my multiple rejection letters was a bookmark I still keep inside the right-hand drawer of my desk.

A few weeks ago, I discovered that I lost the manuscript of that book; I must have accidentally deleted it while transferring files to my new laptop before college. I thought I would panic, but to my surprise, I simply clicked back to the essay I was working on and continued typing. I have more stories to write.