same old story.

Ugh, I've been dying to rant about this for two days now. It's nothing new. I've gotten worked up over it a thousand times. I still hate it. And it's stupid, because I shouldn't. It shouldn't bother me. But I really, really hate when classes put me in a position where I'm forced to consider my "cultural identity."

At this point it's like, okay, you know what, I get it. I get that I'm the exception. I get that I am 100% Korean with an English-French-German-etc. mother and an Irish-Norwegian father who has an Italian stepmother. I get that I grew up in a predominantly white suburban New Jersey town from the age of 4 months on. I graduated high school with a total of maybe half a dozen other Asian kids (out of 450), except they were all from traditional Asian families. And nearly every other one of my friends was Irish or Italian American, or both. I had no idea that Catholicism wasn't the predominant religion in the United States until I was 17 or so, purely because most of my friends were Irish or Italian American.

It's just frustrating. I've been living against a stereotype, against an image, since day one. I've never, ever been that skinny, quiet little Asian kid who's freakishly good at math, amazing at piano and the violin, good at tennis, whose parents insist that I be a doctor/nurse/accountant when I grow up. That's never who I was. If you tried cheating off me in math class any time after seventh grade, you were shit out of luck. I never liked science. I quit cello when I was 12 and piano by the time I was 16 because I was tone-deaf and had no rhythm. I can swing a golf club but I'm awfully unathletic in every possible way. And frankly, my parents don't care what I do with my life as long as I'm passionate about it. I was that kid who sat at a corner of the lunch table and read through recess. I liked art, history, and English class and watching movies. I was serious about school but I liked having a social life too. I wanted to be a writer.

None of this bothers me, really. It's part of who I am, and that's cool. Whatever. What bothers me is that society's constructed image of Asian Americans forces me to constantly challenge what other people expect of me. I confuse people, and that's fun and all, but it gets exhausting, having to always explain what, to other people, is the conundrum of your existence. "Your name is Irish! But. . . but. . . you're Asian!?" And you know, having the physical characteristics of an Asian means I must know every other Asian in the tri-state area and eat cats. I hate going to nail salons purely because I hate dealing with the Korean employees who inevitably will make small talk with me about how I am Korean, and do I speak the language, and how long have I been in the United States? But I've ranted about this before...

I don't remember ever not being in the United States. I do remember being in Intro to American Studies in college (bear with me please), discussing an essay by a young woman born in Iran or Iraq - I can't remember the specifics - but she was raised, from age 15 or so on, in Ohio or somewhere else in Middle America. Though she retained some of her traditional culture through her family, she was fairly assimilated, and she considered herself to be a "daughter of America." And I was furious because most of the students in class - at least, the ones who were talking - didn't think that she had the right to refer to herself as such, because she wasn't born in America. Because where does that place me? Do you not consider me to be a "daughter of America" just because I wasn't born in the United States? And the worst part was, I had to admit that I understood if they didn't consider me as such, given that the federal government doesn't consider me to be enough of an American to be president. Thanks, Founding Fathers. I hated that, when I was little - "You can be anything you want when you grow up. You could be President of the United States!" Well no, no I can't. Because for the first four months of my life, I lived in a foster home in South Korea before someone wanted to raise me. This makes me un-American, apparently.

And because of those four months, people want me to identify myself as Korean, not American. When people - especially creepy gas station attendants - ask me, "So what are you?" or, "Where are you from?" I always want to say, "I'm human" or, "I'm American," and, "I'm from New Jersey." I had to mark on college and grad school applications that I am Asian/Pacific Islander so they could recognize that I'm not an underrepresented minority and hold me to higher standards. Cool, right. For UK applications, I usually defaulted to "I prefer not to answer," purely from confusion - I'm not British Asian, I'm not Indian, I'm not another Asian national, so what am I? "Other"? Awesome.

And now here I am. I spent the summer working at the Seaside Heights boardwalk where international workers would ask me how I knew English so well and was this my first time in the States? I'm at an internationally renowned university in a masters program of 20 Highly Educated People who are mostly white, listening to casual conversations about how they didn't want to take a module over at one of the other University of London campuses because the high Asian population makes them uncomfortable. I'm listening to seminar discussions about the way Western and Eastern cultures are both represented in overtly Westernized ways in Bride and Prejudice, and how these students think the film is weaker for not committing to engaging in a legitimate discourse on the role of ethnicity and race in modern transcultural relationships, even though the source narrative's thematic focus is class structure. One guy is bitterly fuming about the way every Indian woman cast in the film is pale-skinned, about the way the protagonist complains about how the West doesn't want to see the "real India" only when it's convenient for the plot. And part of me wants to scream, WHY DOES IT MATTER.

I get why it matters, I do. I wouldn't be in the program if I wasn't interested in representation and identity. But on a certain level, I fail to understand how a discussion can take place over a filmic representation of cultural identity, when none of these Highly Educated People are willing to discuss the nature and role of cultural identity in real life, because no one thinks of it outside of the confines of artistic structures. You know, we can talk about Western depictions of Eastern culture all day long, but we all just get that no one wants to go to university with a bunch of overzealous Asian students in London, because we don't identify with them. But here's the humdinger: on another level, I identify with that, because at the end of the day, I culturally identify as white. And I hate these discussions, and all these aspects of my life that make me feel like I don't add up. Because really, why does it matter? It doesn't. No one cares. My friends seem like me well enough, my family loves me, and I'm just me. Why do I need to have a cultural identity? Why can't I just be me, and let that be enough?

I'm tired of being angry about this.