all my life, i’ve searched for a tiny little nook in society which i could remain in and stay true to. i’ve wanted to be something pure and uninfluenced. essentially, it boiled down to the clothes i wore and the attitude i fronted and the music i listened to. i could lie and say labels didn’t matter to me or fitting into a single stereotype that i could call my own wasn’t important to me. because i did care about those things long ago, long before i learned how to accept my mixture of cultures.

identities are a funny thing. when you’re a splice of two or three different cultures, it’s so difficult to adhere to just one; you may mix them up until you have nothing purely one or the other to cling to as your true self.

i was born in a predominantly white town in the greater vancouver. growing up, all of my friends, including my best friend, were caucasian. my values shifted from the chinese and filipino traditions in my home to the modern values at school and among friends. sometimes i’d get picked on for being the only kid with “slanted eyes” and i would feel so completely segregated. my best friend, a person with whom i would share deep secrets, never really treated me this way. i spent several years inviting her over to my house and spending time at hers, playing with barbies and my little ponies, talking non-stop like two chatty old women.

as i finally hit grade six and seven, i found that there were more chinese immigrants flooding into my small town. of course, there were already some chinese students among the classes in my school, but they were few and far between. one of my first serious crushes was on a little boy from hong kong. i remembered feeling somewhat comfortable with him, if not only for the fact that we were both oriental and knew that rice with soy sauce wasn’t a meal in itself. but my crush made me feel even more isolated, because he would have his cantonese-speaking friends and i wouldn’t be able to carry on a conversation with them, as my parents never taught me how to speak anything but english and tagalog, a filipino dialect which i later forgot how to speak and now can only fluently understand.

at the beginning of high school, i found myself thrown into a hierarchy of students and peers. all of a sudden, my best friend throughout the last several years of my life didn’t want anything to do with me. an event that inspired this conclusion was a party that my friend threw, inviting all of the cool, and coincidentally all white, kids from our grade, blatantly and purposely excluding me from the list. it was high school politics at its worst. i remembered crying. i remembered grade two and being called a “chink”. i felt that this incident was no different. the feelings of segregation and loneliness flooded back to me like tidal waves of relentless memories.

the main part of high school i spent with great friends who mostly happened to be asian, as well. i felt a bit more at ease with them, knowing how their minds worked and the reasons behind their actions. but still i felt awkward. they would have their hong kong celebrities to gush over and cantonese and/or mandarin songs to sing and chinese colloquialism to speak with. i couldn’t get into it. i had different interests that i had learned to attach myself to throughout my years of a chiefly caucasian unbringing. i never felt entirely accepted as a part of the asian group. to this day, i speak with only a couple of people from that circle of friends.

at home it was the same. my parents were born and raised in the philippines, so their values weren’t as democratic as the ones i had developed among my peers in school. taking a stand against their sometimes irrational dogma translated to them as “defiance” and going out with friends — especially boys — was considered “lakwacha” (going out too much). i couldn’t follow their rules. although i was raised with them as my standard of ethics, i was also simultaneously raised with kids who possessed the freedoms which i did not but always envied.

with my extended family, it got even more obnoxious. to my filipino relatives i was the girl who was indeed filipino by blood, but i was also an outsider because i did not look like a filipino. i was called every derogatory racial slur, from “inchik” to “pale skin”, by my younger cousins who didn’t know any better at the time. to my chinese relatives i was the strange hybrid who could not speak their language for the life of me. at every opportunity, they would say things to me in cantonese, knowing full well i couldn’t understand, and follow with “oh, sorry! you don’t speak chinese!” like it was one big knock-knock joke only they found hilarious. i just didn’t feel like i fit anywhere at this point in my life.

as i grew older, i realized that i wasn’t the only one who felt this way and knew of these horrible aspects of multicultural upbringings. i made friends with people who went through similar trials in their lives. for once, i didn’t feel so segregated from the world. i still have my white friends and my asian friends, and at times i feel like polar opposites to both of them. i’m not sure if i’ve learned to overcome the feeling of awkwardness completely, but it’s gotten to a point where i feel adequately comfortable hanging out with both groups.

much time has passed since i first understood how much race and culture influenced how others look at you. it’s not a nice truth about life and i’m sure my encounters with this truth have not yet come to an end. but at least i can take pride in the fact that i am slightly unique and although i don’t fit into one particular mold, i like the person i am. sometimes i look at things like a westerner; at others, a very traditional asian. i have become more open-minded about other people’s choices, more tolerant of their actions.

there was once a time i wished more than anything to just be completely white or chinese or filipino. but now i wish more than anything that i adhere to all of the values i have learned throughout the years — i think that’s the hardest part. because, really, neither your skin nor culture entirely define your identity. you’re nothing unless you can learn something from them. and if you can’t, then that’s a real bleeding shame.