Two Places To Me Research Paper

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Standing on the border between ocean and shore, I stared, transfixed at the oncoming waves. As the water slowly swept the sand beneath my feet away, the land, my grounding slipped between my toes. My mother held my hand, my rainbow tie-dye swimsuit from Costco glistening. “Uh-oh, a big one’s coming!” She shrieked, pulling my hand. I giggled as we ran away from the encroaching shore, water splashing at my ankles, reaching to pull me in. We ran into the safety of the sandy beaches, escaping the pull of the welcoming ocean. I spent my childhood not chasing waves, but letting waves chase me. Growing up in Southern California a twenty-minute drive from the beach, the Pacific Ocean was not an unfamiliar sight to me. But as much as I was fascinated …show more content…
If displaced is meant as an adjective, meaning having no home or place, I relate to an extent. Literature and pop culture have defined feeling “neither-here-nor-there” as a central struggle for second-generation immigrants and I can’t say that this doesn’t line up with my experiences. Marked as perpetually foreign, but also having much more knowledge of anything American than of anything Chinese, my identity doesn’t feel grounded-- I feel the sand slipping between my toes. More than that, I feel displaced from my own body. If the body is how a person relates to others and navigates the social world, I feel alienated from my own body and consequently from the world around me. I’ve been taught my whole life that my body doesn’t belong to me and as a result, I feel like I don’t belong to my body. All of the ways my body has been marked, controlled, violated, defined, and stretched feel out of my control. I feel unable to interpret my body through my own eyes, always seeing it through someone else’s. My body has never felt like …show more content…
My clumsy grammar and tones in Chinese have marked me a banana, a twinkie-- yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Everything about me that aberrates from my family’s vision for me is to them, a marker of Americanness. My interest in the humanities, my political beliefs, my queerness-- all signs that I’ve been whitewashed. The worst part of being called white on the inside is that to some extent, it’s true-- although not in the way that my parents mean it. As much as I am so so so painfully marked as Other to whiteness, and as much as I so so so desperately try to embrace that position and want to be separate from whiteness, whiteness has invaded my body, my psyche, every part of my existence. I cannot exist apart from whiteness and I feel it not only surrounding me but inside of me. I don’t know how to view myself except for as Other. When I look at China, at myself, I see the Orient-- I cannot escape a Western position and I don’t know how to understand myself apart from
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