I Am American… I Think. (16)

Posted under: Thoughts

[edit] For all my subscribers, sorry for all the new entry emails. I’m currently converting my files into WP pages and my plugin sends an email anyway. Thanks for understanding! [/edit]

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Are you tied to your heritage? Your culture? Are you prejudiced because of it? Do you feel as if you are placed at a disadvantage for who you are? Does your being of a particular culture define who you are or does it only make up a part of you? Are you proud to be what you are, despite the stereotypes? Do you consciously try to break those stereotypes?

I am an Asian American and although I love being what I am, I know that only in California can I exist in peace. I cannot go to my parents’ home country for in their eyes, I am an American. I cannot go elsewhere in America because in their eyes, I am Asian. Only in California do I feel accepted and appreciated to be this mixture of both, to be looked at as both American and Asian. Am I scared to leave? Yes. I am afraid that if I go elsewhere, I will have to start all over again as a foreigner, never truly accepted and always compared to the stereotype.

But I don’t want people to be blind to my culture or anybody else’s for that matter. We are who we are and we cannot change what is obvious.

Unfortunately though, there are always lost cultures, cultures that no one pays much attention to or no one puts much emphasis on. All the Asians, Blacks, and Latinos are clumped into those three major categories. And only briefly have we started to care about the Middle Easterns. But what about the rest? What about the Europeans, the true Americans, and all the missing people in between? Where do they go and how do we properly acknowledge their existence?

Tags: americanism, culture, ethnicity, heritage, race