Social Identity (GH)

While different aspects of my identity align with the dominant narrative, the aspects that have shaped my lived experiences the most are the ones that deviate most visibly from that narrative. Throughout my childhood, my most apparent identities were my race and ethnicity. Most of my peers viewed me as an Asian, closer acquaintances might have acknowledged me as an Asian-American, and only my closest friends knew me as a Taiwanese-American. Growing up in a white-dominant community, my interactions were often defined by being an “other.” I became accustomed to justifying and qualifying many of my actions—careful about how I represented them as products of my upbringing in an Asian family, paranoid of coming across as “too Asian or too other.” Stereotypes of Asians are largely driven by stereotypes about the Chinese and in defense to the negative stereotypes, I defined myself as another type of “other.” I would clarify that I was Taiwanese, preferring the complete lack of knowledge about Taiwan to some of the outrageous judgements passed on the Chinese. Running from my Asian identity and only using my Taiwanese identity as a superficial defense to uncomfortable situations, I ended up obscuring my identity only to myself as my peers continued to see me within their stereotypes of Asians. At Cornell, where the Asian population and especially Taiwanese population is much more present, my racial and ethnic identity are evolving. I struggle with feeling unauthentic identifying as Asian or Taiwanese after spending so many years running from the negative attention those identities drew. A lot of this confusion is a product of not meeting people halfway—I had been expecting people to identify something that was important to me rather than meeting them halfway and helping them understand why this part of my identity is so embedded in my values and privileges.

I’m not sure how this part of my identity will play out in Zambia. There is an increasing number of Chinese living in Zambia as Chinese investments increase there. I expect that how people view me will be partially a product of the state of Chinese investments at the time. Another aspect of my identity that I generally don’t think about as much is my religion. While the majority of people in Zambia identify as Christian, I am not part of an organized religion or spiritual practice. I am both nervous and excited to learn more about their experiences with Christianity.

Just as I must check my privilege as part of the able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender, and middle-class communities in the US, I must recognize these same privileges in Zambia. Both in the US and Zambia, I feel my greatest privilege is my education. This privilege manifests in many ways, lending me credibility even in situations I am unfamiliar with and creating personal and career opportunities unique to the university. This privilege is even clear just in my ability to take a pre-departure seminar and to have an organized structure to think about my positionality in a different culture before traveling. Finally, as a US citizen, I have privilege and power in my ability to make choices about my travel. While we may be living in a community for two months and sometimes researching marginalizing structures, it is important to recognize that at the end of the program I can leave these behind while others do not always have this same ability.