danger! bananas

Part Two of my guest post for Fascinasians.

One of the few places where I felt that I really belong, where it didn’t matter if my skin had a hint of yellow and my hair was pitch black, was church. My parents have always been very Catholic and passed it on to their children. At the age of eight I started serving as an altar girl – belonging was simple: You just follow the rules, make the right steps at the altar and everything will be fine. You will be a respected part of the group. Outside church services and Sunday masses it was more complicated. Even if I followed the social rules religiously (no pun intended), I was not entirely part of the play.

“Those outlanders!”

Connecting with other Vietnamese, let alone other Asian people (who my parents found acceptable), didn’t happen. One reason was that the next larger community was an hour car drive away. My siblings and I found it also weird to hang out with Vietnamese people just because they were Vietnamese. “I don’t want to contribute to the ghettoization of Asians,” my older brother used to say. Those gatherings would never last long enough to make friends. Besides, what was the point? I knew the judgmental looks that my siblings and I got from our German environment too damn well. We were a group of four and people stared at us when we walked around, sometimes with curiosity, sometimes with disgust. “Those outlanders get way too many offspring!” their eyes seemed to say, scrutinizing us. Their disdain was almost palpable. Why enforcing those resentments by grouping up with other Asians?

My perception of my identity gradually shifted to the better once I went to university and spent more time on the internet. The German media is even worse in diversity than Hollywood, but the internet offered so many Asian faces and voices that it became almost hard to choose. I learned that in the United States, Canada and Australia, there are many more people like me: Stuck between their Asian heritage and the western culture they grew up in, facing unfair judgment, racial slurs and bullying. Finally – I found people I could relate to. The more I watched their videos on YouTube and the more I read their articles, the more I felt ok being me. I learned to accept this very existence that the universe had given to me and to embrace it.

For Part One click here.

This is a guest post that I wrote for Juliet Shen's tumblr blog Fasciasians. She asked me if I could describe how it was to grow up as an Asian in Germany.

“Do some Kung Fu moves, like Jackie Chan! “

It happened when I went to elementary school; I must have been about seven or eight years old. While I was standing on the playground in recess, some kids from my class started to gather around me. “Can you do some cool moves, like Jackie Chan?” I was intimidated by their request – I notoriously sucked in PE, and I had never tried any martial arts. But I knew why the other kids asked: because I was Asian. I was the only Asian kid in my year. I felt all kinds of awkward and alone.

Growing up with Vietnamese parents in a German town with a population of 17,000 was not always easy. The feeling I recall from those times was loneliness. Given that I was a weird child who was not too good at socializing (I still am not) but being one of the few Asians in the whole town made things even worse. Of course, there were a handful of other Asian families: Chinese, Korean, Philippino, some even Vietnamese. But the difference between them and us couldn't have been greater. “Don’t play with those children”, my mom used to say, “They’re not refugees like us – they came as communist contract workers.” To my parents the Cold War had never ended, and there was a strong divide between the “good” Vietnamese and the “bad” ones. So I only had white middle-class friends.

“You speak such a fine German!”

The feeling of alienation stayed consistent during my whole school career: I was frequently questioned by teachers and other students how I could speak such good German. How I could ace in German because I was, you know, not German. The nationalistic view that you can only be German if your ancestors were German is still alive and kicking. Hence I was not German. In order to prepare me for the hardships of being a foreigner, my mom taught me: “We are outlanders, the Germans look down on us. So you have to prove them wrong, you need to do everything perfectly.”

I resented being different: Why couldn't I just be like all the others? My skin and my hair color felt like a constant source of embarrassment. The fact that my parents don’t speak German very well was even more painful. “I have a hard time getting everything your parents say,” one of my best friends once confessed. So as a way of compensating I did everything to perfect my German. I read canonical German literature, from Goethe to Heine to Jelinek. My sentences were filled with the rarest German words imaginable – words that the average German would have to look up in a dictionary.

Please click here for Part Two.

Growing Up as an Asian German, Part Two

“Those outlanders!”

Growing Up as an Asian German, Part One

“Do some Kung Fu moves, like Jackie Chan! “

“You speak such a fine German!”