My cultural identity is intimately and inextricably tied to my family life. Central Pinellas County was not and still isn’t a raving hotbed of cultural integration, and what with my parents’ desire that we go to good (that is, affluent, and as a consequence, mostly white) schools and our decade-long membership in a (again, mostly white) Southern Baptist church, I could easily count the number of Asian people I regularly interacted with who weren’t part of my family on the fingers of one hand*. Thus, my cultural identity developed a very “Swiss Family Robinson”-like aspect about it–growing up, we, my family, were the only people I knew like us, and there was little to no chance of meeting people like us anywhere else. It certainly helps explain my childhood fixation with Sci-Fi and my abiding affection for the Silver Age Superman mythos. We were the last survivors of a long-dead race, living amongst strangers. We were cast adrift in space, our escape pod the only remnant of a once-glorious civilization. We were living among strangers, forced to adopt the ways of those who did not truly understand us. Now that I put it that way, we were, I suppose, very much like the Coneheads.
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*Well, I guess that’s sort of an exaggeration:
There was the C family, who despite nominally living the American dream (musically talented sons, Harvard alums, successful postgraduate careers, etc.), forbade the speaking of Chinese in their home. The parents spoke only English to each other and to their children. Nevertheless, Mrs. C used to call my mother frequently to chat in Chinese. As I was a precocious and impolitic child, I once asked her what, exactly, was the deal with thier family. My mother, perhaps revealing exactly where I got my tendencies for blunt speech, sighed and answered (in Taiwanese, of course), “I don’t know, David. They’re just weird.” We didn’t hang out much.
Oh, and then there was also the L family, another successful, affluent group that produced a pair of Ivy League grads. My parents met them through some local Chinese-American pow-wow and did the requisite “you visit my home so I can show off, and I’ll do the same for you” swap one weekend during my early high school days. I had met the younger son at some academic competition of some kind– Academic Team, or Math Team, or something of equally nerdy– and since we both occupied the same social ecological niche, we were naturally competitors, cold and standoffish in that very shy, yet very driven way that nerds naturally fall into. When we visited his house, his mother quite out of the blue asked me in front of the entire group if I was seeing anybody. No, I answered, I’m not, trying to dodge the question. She smiled and rather proudly replied, “My Eric can’t seem to keep the girls off him. He has girls calling all the time, wanting to go out.” I wanted to ask her why didn’t any of these fawning fangirls ever accompany him to the Academic Team competitions, but I was sure even my quick-to-judge mother wouldn’t have approved of that. Later, I found out his bipolar brother once made the 10 hour drive back home to punch him in the face after a perceived insult during an earlier phone conversation, then turned around and immediately drove another 10 hours back to school. We didn’t hang out much, either.
