All of Me

It's been a week since I started work here in New Jersey, and I can say that it's definitely not what I expected coming in. On my first day of work I met my coworkers, who turned out to be almost all middle aged Chinese men and women. I had lunch with them, and it was different because they all spoke in Mandarin. There I was, sitting in silence, listening to their conversation while trying to blend quietly into the background. All that I could think about at that moment was just how uncomfortable, awkward, and excluded I felt. At home I don't typically speak in Mandarin to anyone besides my parents, and I had never been accustomed to speaking or hearing it outside of my home. Ironically, I felt out of place in a group that spoke in my parents' native tongue, and I couldn't help but feel baffled. Thinking about it some more, it was weird because New Jersey isn't known for its Asian population. Somehow, though, I was placed in a research group that was about 90% Asian. I originally was looking forward to the east coast because I'd have a chance to escape the enormous Asian population of California and get to know an entirely different demographic - to improve and work on interacting with people who were different than me. Why would God lead me to the wilderness just to have me come across a splitting image of my home?

While I was eavesdropping in on their conversation and pretending to read a newspaper, my supervisor asked me if I spoke Mandarin because I had laughed at a joke that one of them had made. I responded with a reluctant "yes" and assured him that my Mandarin was horrible. Regardless, he encouraged me to speak with them in order to practice, and it was tough. But once I began conversing with them, I felt that I was being reunited with a part of me that I had lost coming to college. And then it hit me.

The conversations that I have with these people in Mandarin show me how much I am losing touch with my culture. They make me realize how indifferent I am to being Chinese (and Taiwanese), about how I dislike talking about Chinese traditions and have next to no cultural pride. These conversations open my eyes to how much I tend to distance myself from my own culture out of apathy and shame. 

As I wander through the wilderness, perhaps God is challenging me with visions of my home to show me how I haven't really regarded it as one. He is telling me how ironic it is that I seek to learn about and celebrate other cultures and ethnicities while I rarely identify with my own. I have always labeled myself as everything but my ethnicity, and I have always appreciated everything around me but my culture. But that's slowly changing now. God has shown me how I am a citizen of Heaven, but He is also reminding me that I am a Berkeley student, a chemical engineer, a nerd, a son, a brother, American and Chinese as well. He's made me to be all of these things and intended for me to be this way. God has purposefully created me to be who I am - I trust that He's made me Chinese for a reason too.

Speaking in Mandarin with my coworkers brings me so much healing because it reminds me of that fact. These various aspects of my life are all equally important, and I believe God is calling me to embrace not just one part of my identity, but all of it.