Going to China was somewhat of an unreachable dream for most of my life. My parents were immigrants from Guangzhou, China, but I was born and remained planted in Colorado for all of my life. When I got the email that said that I was awarded the Tang Scholarship and was headed to China, I shrieked in the middle of a meeting, and immediately texted my friend and roommate, Isabelle, who had also won the scholarship. While I could write a seven-part novel with a prequel about the Great Wall, the university visits, or each of these dynamic cities, I focused my writings on my overall takeaways from this experience.
During this time period, I was surprised at the degree that I questioned my own identity as a Chinese-American. For the entirety of my lived experience, my identity has always been centralized around being one of the only women of color in the room, and that I had to speak up, and loudly for fear that nobody else would. In China, my physical appearance faded into the background, and for the first time, I became anonymized in the sea of the majority. Suddenly, it did not feel like I had to swim against the current to be heard, or face a constant self-awareness of my own differentness in my physical being. I’ve also found that my own values of cultural sensitivity and awareness were tested, stringently, and abundantly. Not only were there language barriers, but there were cultural barriers as thick as the Great Wall itself. In Chinese culture, there is a less of a gap in personal space, and asking about someone’s money, age, or weight is not taboo. But, the cultural gap still existed, and the damage was still done on both sides. I found myself constantly breaking down and reanalyzing my own Euro-American centric ideals and values.Â