Belonging Nowhere
By: Vichet Ou
Tags: Trauma, Anti Asian Racism, Misogyny, Asian American

CW: Anti-Asian Racism, Misogyny

English is not my first language.

I was born in Philadelphia. Nazareth Hospital? Don’t ask me, I was a baby when I found out and didn’t care enough to ask when my memory started working. Plus, I don’t even know if it’s there anymore. Maybe it was bought and renamed like every other hospital has been in Philly.

1985. Early December. I was born jaundiced, and had to spend a couple days in an incubator. Mei tells me she cried from the time they took me to the pediatric ICU until I was released.

I was yellow, like a bruise that’s had a few days to ripen.

Pa had been in the US for almost ten years at that point. Mei had been for six years.

We spoke Khmer at home.

English is not my first language.

I don’t remember what my first words were in Khmer. I have to ask my parents.

But, I remember we spoke Khmer.

I remember a lot of first words in English. Mei made flashcards for my older brother Thy, when she realized that his not being able to read and write in English — not that we were taught Khmer script — would be a huge obstacle in this new country that she’d barely been in for three years when he was born in late ‘82.

Cat. Dog. House. School. Run. Walk. People. Homework.

I inherited that choice.

English is not my first language.

But it would become the only one I could use to any reliable effect at home.

My parents always used a mix of Khmer and English speaking to Thy and I.

Thy and I only knew enough Khmer to pepper our replies with our parents’ language. If my and my brother’s language was a traditional Khmer meal, English was the rice.

I remember my parents idly wishing we spoke more Khmer; I knew better than to point out that it was never our choice.

I was always a peacekeeper. And a people pleaser. I was trained to be, out of fear of not being accepted.

Plus, when I was a kid, I hadn’t yet grown to resent this choice.

Khmer always felt awkward to me. I was always being corrected on pronunciation. I was never given a roadmap of how to learn it. I was never taught to read and write.

So, English was comparatively easy, even if English was not my first language.

As for how I handled the English language, by the time I was in grade school I developed a speech tick, where every sentence I said, I would immediately mouth to myself, verbatim, after saying it.

“Hi my name is Vichet.”

Then, my lips, with no breath to carry the sound: Hi my name is Vichet.

I remember doing this all the time. There was an irrepressible need for me to do this, and the logic was circular: I did this because I needed to say things better than however I was already saying them.

This was obviously because I wasn’t saying them well enough.

A lot of my anxieties work in cycles.

My brother pointed this habit out to me sometime in third grade and I stopped immediately — at least, the miming part of it. I still repeat a lot of things to myself and try to say them better in my own head.

Maybe that’s what helped me become someone who some consider a talented writer and orator.

Maybe it’s because English is not my first language.

The why behind that why could have been a lot of things. I have a suspicion it was part of my early, almost primal need to feel accepted and fit in.

Remember that fear of not being accepted or loved for who I am? Or whoever I am at the time?

As I look back, this makes some sense. I had never, in my life, encountered a place where I felt I belonged, simply by existing.

If you’ve read my other pieces, you have a picture of what grade school was like for me. I didn’t regularly see more than one or two Asian people who weren’t related to me until I was in high school. And being the only Asian kid was really easy pickings for those white kids who were obsessed with the size of my “tiny Chinese dick.”

While I’m at it, the fact that being “Asian” is considered a unifying factor at all in America is a whole other thing.

Most of what we all have in common is the racism and erasure we’ve gone through.

Korean dude? You’ve been told you had a little dick for years.

Japanese dude? Little dick.

Chinese dude? Little dick.

Vietnamese dude? Little dick AND communist.

Cambodian dude? “I dunno what the fuck that is but you got a little dick, ching chong.”

After I graduated from Shawmont, I couldn’t sort out which friends I’d made to stymy the bullying and which friends were ones I’d have made if I weren’t afraid of everyone. I dropped pretty much everyone — which was awful because there were definitely some kids who I think really did enjoy my company, and made space for me. I remember the ones who invited me to their birthday parties every year even though I turned them down until maybe 7th grade. Always told them “my mom said no.” She probably would, she had a deep mistrust of anyone who wasn’t family until I was maybe 12. Truth is I never bothered asking her, because I didn’t feel safe going to any party with any of these kids if I didn’t know there’d be school administrators who were obligated to put a temporary stop to the racial slurs.

I’ve been making choices based on fear and safety for as long as I’ve had a memory. I think I inherited that from my parents.

I went to Philadelphia’s Central High School. One of the oldest and highest ranked public high schools in the country. A real Philadelphia institution.

On the ground, one of the most diverse spaces I’ve ever spent significant time in.

And this may be a conversation for another time, but even a place like Central still suffered from atmospheres of homophobia and anti-blackness within its roots.

It’s an institution in America — how could it not?

And, if I’m confessing, as a (former) “high-achieving Asian-American” who was taught implicitly and explicitly that I should imitate white culture and white norms, I contributed to that. The possibility of fighting against the dominant culture I was born into was never an option to me. That would require courage that I didn’t have, and a sense of community and safety I never felt.

My life was about learning how to fit in. How to become more popular so that the jokes would stop. How to become good at things so that my skills outweighed my skin color.

I had a dream that I could be good enough for whiteness.

I remember when I got to high school I felt a relief about not being the only fucking Asian person in the school anymore.

But then I found out how much more community my friends had than I ever did.

They grew up with friends who were Asian. Who didn’t hate themselves for being Asian. Whose parents didn’t make an either/or choice for them about their language and culture.

I can recognize, being a child of refugees, that being fluent in English — especially in the specific, highly practiced way that I am — is a real advantage for someone who looks like me.

But I still feel like I was robbed.

I had some friends who grew up in Chinatown. They’d bring me along after school and show me where if I had ten bucks I could eat like a king on a Friday night — Pho Xe Lua Viet Thai, affectionately known as “Choo Choo” for the neon train sign out front — was our spot.

My friends had a real community where not every person in their life who looked like them was related to them.

They had friends who stood up for them. They had protection.

They had roots.

I’m not saying they were all untouched by bullying and racism. I’m not saying that every other Asian kid at Central, probably 200–250 of us per grade, knew their parents’ language and learned about their own cultures.

But a whole hell of a lot of them did know those things, and I felt like a fucking imposter — especially around other Khmer kids who were born in refugee camps and only got to the states in the late ’80s or early ‘90s.

I felt fake to the point that any time I’d speak about my own culture I felt like I was appropriating it, even though the concept of cultural appropriation wasn’t yet formalized in my own mind.

So, I was surrounded and supported by a community of kids who really did accept me for who I was. But I felt shame around them. I didn’t feel “Asian enough” to be part of the Asian culture clubs at my school. The people in those clubs knew things about their own culture, and I imagined that they showed up in the space with a sense of belonging.

The fuck did “Asian enough” even mean? When did that become a concept in my mind?

If I had to guess, grade school.

And whatever it meant, I wasn’t Asian enough. I showed up to these cultural club events like I was taking a class.

I felt at the time like I had more in common with the curious non-Asian kids who would join the clubs to learn something about a culture that didn’t belong to them.

I was on the outside looking in at my own heritage.

And so, I chose, at the time, to lean away from Asianness.

I chose spaces where the ticket to enter was achievement — and in a system whose rules have been encoded by white supremacy, that meant whiteness and white adjacency. I “belonged” in AP classes because I did something of value and earned my spot there. I joined and participated in sports, and made cuts; this meant I “earned” my spot. I told myself that I belonged, in a way, even though these spaces didn’t have any sort of mission to create space for me or someone like me.

I minimized my own Asianness and experiences in an attempt to find a place where I wouldn’t have to fucking do this in the first place.

What kind of backwards shit was that?

Then again, a directionless kid’s ideas aren’t usually the most well thought out.

Plus, white supremacy and white adjacency are a hell of a drug.

These choices and my specific set of skills that made people think I was “smart” led to me getting admissions offers from Penn and Cornell.

I wanted more than anything, at the time, to be away from Philadelphia.

I wanted to find a space that I could create for myself, which, at the time, I had no evidence of existing in my hometown.

The irony is that the choices I was making were almost diametrically opposite of this desire.

Penn would have been more of the same. With something around thirty of my other classmates that I’d spent three years in all the same honors and AP classes with, I felt like it wouldn’t have led to anything I wanted or needed.

I told myself I was choosing Cornell because it had a better engineering program.

The truth is that I didn’t even finish my application until the last minute. A girl I was skipping classes to trade kisses on a stairwell — I still have no idea how I managed that — convinced me to do it, because she knew I was almost done with the app.

The whole college application process, which I mostly had to navigate alone because I was never taught how to seek and ask for effective help — had completely drained me. The Cornell app was sitting on my desk at home, waiting to be sealed up and handed in.

Weeks after applications were supposed to be submitted in for processing by my school counselors so that they could be submitted on time to their destinations — the day before Winter break — I handed the manila envelope with my recycled essays to my counselor Ms. Olmedo to fill in her parts and send out on her day off, which she’d have to do because I didn’t have my shit nearly enough together.

In a school with only four or five counselors serving 2,500 students, this was a big ask.

Ms. Olmedo, a saint, did it for me anyway.

How could I not see or feel the spaces being made for me at that time?

The shortest answer I can think of is because these are the actions of a kid who was just trying to find a way to escape. To be away from everything that had been difficult for so long. Getting into any school “worth going to” — an incredibly shitty, classist, ableist view that I had that is still widely accepted by a lot of people — that wasn’t in Philadelphia was the culmination of 12 years of grinding and I wasn’t going to let all that pain go to waste.

I was going to learn that fitting in at Cornell would be so much more difficult than I could imagine.

Even though I felt like my personality and experiences were shallower and less grounded than my high school classmates’, I still had some connection with them — we were all from Philly. The vast majority of us attended public K-8. We loved water ice, pretzels, and cheap cheesesteaks. South Street and Chinatown and the Gallery and the Roosevelt Mall were prime after school chillin’ spots. We went to school trips together, we went to dances together.

Not exactly deep cuts, but the commonality was there.

At Cornell I met people that I literally had zero shared experiences with.

This is not a bad thing in a vacuum. As an adult who is working out his own personal demons, this prospect can sometimes be exciting and eye-opening.

As an untethered fraud of a “smart kid,” it was terrifying.

The fuck am I going to talk about with people who took actual vacations to other countries, or went to camp as kids, or knew anything about stuff that wasn’t “studying so that we could get into Cornell?”

Remember, this was before I leaned into learning how to be likeable and “cultured.”

Plus, this isn’t the whole picture. There were other kids with whom I shared a lot of experiences. Specifically, the kids who were in my exact situation: first generation college students, full-ride financial aid with work study, children of immigrants. The kinds of people who reminded me how out of place I felt.

Being lonely and desperate to fit in, I wasn’t trying to be around or connect with anyone who held up a mirror to my sense of isolation.

I leaned away from the people who could have made me feel less alone. There were spaces I’d have been propped up, spaces where I could have found belonging, and instead I consistently chose to put myself into white spaces to “prove myself”.

There was one person I didn’t lean away from. One of the only people I really connected with as an undergrad — one of the only people I possibly COULD connect with at all at that time — was my eventual college sweetheart, who I am still close friends with to this day.

She is an immigrant. She was at school on financial aid. She struggled in all the ways I struggled. She also was never taught how to effectively seek or ask for help. She’d been bullied as a child.

At least I enjoyed my high school experience — her high school was the plot of Mean Girls.

Both our sets of parents’ were the type to boast about how independent we were from a young age.

That wasn’t a choice either of us made. We knew better than to bring that up; we were peacekeepers.

English was not our first language.

She was one of the first people who gave me a feeling of belonging. Of being wanted and accepted for me.

Romantically, it didn’t work out. But I learned something very important about what I needed in partnerships and friendships, something I never really considered possible for me until that point.

That my friendships could know everything about me, even the things I hid about myself because I thought they were ugly or worthless or undesirable, and friendship would prop that up all the same.

This is a feeling I’ve chased my whole life. It’s not that it was never there — but it definitely wasn’t everywhere. And I never developed the tools to understand or feel it even if it were dropped into my lap.

The tools I had were all geared for survival and isolation.

Those tools don’t fit in the life of someone who loves and is loved.

I still carry a suspicion that if I didn’t do all the things I did to make myself likeable, that at least some folks in my periphery would fade me.

That’s my mindset as a survivor, as one who belongs nowhere.

How do I unlearn that?

Naming the fear is a start.

Therapy, too. All the fellas reading: get therapy.

I spent my 20s ignoring these feelings. Thinking the solution was to lean into my cultivated social skills and keep getting better at them.

Someday I’d be good enough for community. Someday I’d be good enough for love.

Love, like all the things I treasure in my life, also came at me from a completely unexpected direction.

I started volunteering with community organizers aligned with social justice in Philly in early 2018. It was a year after Trump got elected. When it happened, I realized that I wasn’t fucking surprised at all.

Worse yet, I realized I was that guy who had all sorts of opinions and zero actions associated with my own political leanings.

Yep. I’d been apolitical most of my life, in pursuit of being likeable.

In the life I was living at that point, I was surrounded by surprised, well-meaning white people, who had never seen or really heard of what I’d been through — not from me, anyway.

They read about racism in books, or essays like this.

But if I knew so fucking much about American racism and how Trump had a real chance of being elected, why the fuck wasn’t I out there helping?

So I met up with a friend who helped me find my bearings. Who made space for me.

It was one of the first decisions in my life I made where I felt like it wasn’t about trying to make myself more palatable to white people.

I took part in a Gender Justice Giving Project hosted by the Bread and Roses Community Fund in Philly. Our goal was to raise money for community organizers in Philly fighting for equity for women, femmes, girls, mothers, trans folks, queer folks, and everyone else whose identities put them at the mercy of patriarchal norms and violence.

The eight month commitment had me facing a lot of my anti-blackness, homophobia, and privilege. All these things I was still carrying, and still carry in many ways, even though life had beaten me down all the same.

I learned the practice of naming the harm I’ve caused, of making reparations, and to approach both like brushing my teeth.

That led to me joining the Masculinity Action Project — a group of men and mascs working towards gender justice and eliminating gendered violence in our communities. Violence that I’ve contributed to with my crass and blasé attitude to women’s experiences in their social and romantic lives, while I tried to justify my behaviors with some bullshit about how “women were doing their thing and I was doing mine.”

Perhaps I was partly motivated by guilt to join MAP, but I’ve since found it to be a healing space that I’ve never had before.

One where I belong.

One I’m helping to create space for myself and others.

I spoke with a friend from MAP recently, of our experiences as Asian American men. Of growing up thinking we were ugly. Of the first time we bought shoes that fit. The first thing we ever bought just for us that wasn’t out of some obligation or practical need.

Of feeling disconnected from our parents’ culture. Of trying to craft an identity that was based on minimizing the potential harm coming from strangers. Of making ourselves smaller targets by being a social chameleons.

Of being rootless.

He introduced an idea from Stuart Hall, a black sociologist and cultural theorist, about his focus on people’s routes rather than their roots.

That one’s route, their journey through life, the twists and turns and choices they make, mold them as a whole person, as people who have always been whole.

Maybe I only feel like something is missing from me because that’s what I’d been told my whole life.

Maybe nothing is missing. Maybe all the parts I added, even the parts I’m ashamed of, are still me. I had been places and seen things and done things my whole life and there was value in all of that and its imperfection.

That was powerful shit to hear.

I’m learning how to belong to myself. And if I can belong to myself, perhaps I can finally give myself to others.

English is not my first language. But it belongs to me, just as much as my schoolboy Khmer.

I am all of me at the same time. All the parts.

Now I just have to believe it.