The short version:

I’m a writer who has been both vexed and fascinated by identity politics. After having a bit of an “identity-awakening” in high school, the height of my involvement in issues of race, I have now been in a situation for quite a while where I rarely discuss how being Chinese factors into my daily life. Perhaps it’s that I don’t have those same friends around and have not done enough to build a network of like-minded people with whom to share such things. But I’ve realized that the questions and difficulties I have with my background are not going to go away, and to not have an outlet to express them makes me feel lonely in a new way. I want to be able to talk about my experience as a Chinese American, and discuss the things that matter to me, and feel connected in a way that I miss.

Some identity/race-related miscellany regarding me:
-My full name is an anagram of UGLY ETHNICITY MENU.
-Marjane Satrapi is my hero.
-The movie Crash made me want to punch someone in the face.

The long version:

I am 26 years old, born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. My father and mother were born in Hong Kong and Shanghai respectively, which makes me, according to who you talk to, zero or first-generation Chinese-American. Perhaps even second-generation by some accounts. These distinctions will forever confuse me.

I currently live in Brooklyn, NY, and work as a freelance writer (mostly ad copywriting at this point, but hopefully soon to change).

From the moment I collected my bags at JFK to begin my life as a student at Barnard College, I began to experience strangers asking me about my background. This had never happened to me in San Francisco, where I know many Asian families who have been there for generations, and where people assume I speak English and I’m quite boringly nothing special.

Now in my ninth year here, I’ve learned that I’m someone who strangers like to talk to. And I still have very mixed feelings about being asked “what I am” on a regular basis. From a yell of “Konichiwa!” from a car window to being asked by yet another guy at a bodega where I’m from to the increasingly rare, “You speak English very well,” there is simply no end to the creative ways people remind me that my race is something that is visible, that I cannot “escape”. Sometimes it’s hilarious and I brush it off, but other times I get so frustrated I want to bludgeon someone with a bottle of Lee Kum Kee. As if no matter how American I am, I will always be asked where I’m from, like a perpetual outsider.

I first thought of this blog as a place to literally record what strangers say to me. And once I came up with this idea, I remembered that I have quite a lot of other things to say in regards to Asian American identity. Thus, dis0riented was born.

I want to meet people who are like me, and people who disagree with me (no matter how hard it is to take), and try to understand what it is about New York that makes it so different from the Bay Area, and learn more about myself along the way. Perhaps this blog will quickly stop being about me and my process of self-realization, and become a forum to relay a shared experience.