It was a swelteringly hot day in 2009, and I was visiting Hotan, my mother’s hometown where I spent a great deal of my childhood. I had recently watched a movie where the girls would tuck their shirts into themselves to make them look like makeshift bras. I thought it was genius.
I walked out of my room with my shirt styled like theirs. A relative looked at me and scoffed. He told me to “stop being silly” and wear my shirt normally — girls were not supposed to show off their bodies. I was irritated; I was only eight years old and wasn’t sure what body I was supposedly “showing off.”
I definitely did not feel “comfortable in my own skin” — a sentiment marketed towards young girls like me by Canadian brands who only had smiling white girls on their ads. I didn’t look like those girls. Unlike “normal” Canadian girls, I felt foreign to my own body.
I read books about pretty British girls who had complicated relationships with their mothers and fell asleep wishing I looked like them. I wrote stories about girls with blonde hair and blue eyes named “Sophie” — girls who I felt so connected to but whose material reality couldn’t have been more different than my own.
I spent most of my childhood in Surrey, where many newly-immigrated families lived at the time. Living there helped alleviate my feelings of alienness. Things changed when I moved to Kitsilano, the Land of White People and Pilates. Suddenly, I was surrounded by girls that looked like the ones I read about in books and watched on TV. Girls with massive houses, hobbies like horseback riding and family vacations to Hawaii. Girls who had blonde hair and blue eyes and were sometimes even called “Sophie.”
Not long after the move, I received an anonymous comment on Ask.fm (a horrible yet popular platform) calling me an “ugly Asian” and telling me to “go back to China.” I was 14.
Once again, I was abruptly confronted with the fact that there was something irrefutably strange about me in this place — so evident that even others felt compelled to comment on it.
Then, there’s the exoticism. I am no stranger to the fetishization of Asian women. Recently, a guy I met at a bar told me he would love to take me out because he’s “never been with a Uyghur girl before” and it was his “dream to try it.” This kind of fetishization has manifested globally in some truly ugly ways, such as the tragedy of the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings.
For years, I consumed media that portrayed Asian women as boring, passive and subservient to others. Never the protagonist, but always the nerdy best friend (Gilmore Girls comes to mind). I couldn’t help but internalize these messages; I internalized that I existed to serve others and their stories. Even now, I still struggle with forming my own sense of identity separate from other people and their expectations.
Thankfully, both the media and my self-perception are slowly starting to change. Movies like Everything Everywhere All At Once have brought me to tears because of their authentic portrayal of the immigrant experience, the Queer grief of children of immigrants and all of the other complicated emotions that accompany it.
Artists like Mitski make hauntingly beautiful songs about the experience of wanting to be a “normal” American girl seeking validation and comfort from “normal” American boys.
Media representation and consumption is not everything — the recent shooting on Lunar New Year in California stands as a reminder of that fact — but I personally feel seen in a way I have never been seen before.
UBC has given me friends who have similar circumstances, people who I’ve found solace and community in. And, maybe most importantly, I’m lucky enough to be receiving an education that has enabled me to understand and articulate these experiences.
I’m starting to feel less alien in this body, less alienated in my experiences and less alienated in this place. I’m starting to believe that I belong in my body and I belong here.
I belong here.
This article is from Reclamation, The Ubyssey's 2023 sex and relationships issue. Read more personal essays and student stories from Reclamation here, and sexual health and education articles here.