Victoria Lai
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Victoria Lai
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"There were a couple East Asians dotted all throughout media when I was growing up (Trini the Yellow Power Ranger, Mulan, etc.), but everyone felt very trope-y, or they were clearly just a side piece with no conflict of their own. Then in 5th grade, I stumbled across a book at the school book fair with a young Asian girl on the cover, dressed in a baggy purple sweatshirt, hair pretty plain and pulled back into a simple ponytail - cheesy at it might sound, she looked the exact same way I did that day. The book was entitled, "Child of the Owl," and it changed the way I felt about myself as an Asian American. The protagonist, Casey, is ethnically Chinese, but is raised completely outside her Chinese heritage. This changes when her father is sent to the hospital for long term care, and she is forced to move to San Francisco's Chinatown and experiences extreme culture shock, and is constantly rejected by the society as a whole for behaving like a good Chinese girl. The author describes her as being "too American to fit into Chinatown, and too Chinese to fit in anywhere else," and it resonated with me in a way not even my family (Chinese immigrants) could understand. Being the first on both sides of my family to be born in the US, it constantly felt like I was deep in the middle of a huge gulf between American culture and Chinese culture, and no one was willing to help me out of it. It was the first time I'd seen another Asian girl as not some exotic doll to be trussed up in stereotypes and marched about as the token minority, but a human with conflicting feelings about expectation, family dynamics, and culture. The book doesn't have a "happy" ending; she's still caught between two worlds, but she ultimately finds a sense of serenity in knowing the beauty of her lineage, which is more than any of us find, sometimes"
- Victoria Lai
Victoria Lai