The Piedmont Highlander

The Student News Site of Piedmont High School

The Piedmont Highlander

The Piedmont Highlander

Started out in China, now we’re here

Started+out+in+China%2C+now+were+here

If you are one of my ancestors reading this, please forgive me as I confess: sometimes, amidst all the Shakespeare and integrals and laws of thermodynamics I’m processing, I forget that I’m Chinese and Taiwanese.

Losing connection with the part of my culture my parents brought to me and the world I live in is a problem for me and for the people around me. And if your parents are immigrants, you can relate because this estrangement is a problem for all of us.

First of all, culture is fun. It makes you feel like you belong. I always thought Christmas was the bee’s knees, but when I had Chinese New Year in Taiwan for the first time, I was blown away.

With Christmas, we buy the tree and exchange the presents, but there’s barely any family history. When it came to Chinese New Year, my uncle knew the best place to go to for our nine-course meal, and my mom could tell us stories about when my other uncle popped one of his toes off with a firecracker.

This unity that culture provides carried over to my Mandarin class at PHS. Even without knowing a single person in my class as a freshman, I instantly had something in common with everyone: almost all of our parents were immigrants.

But besides enjoying the similarities we shared, we also got to examine what we didn’t share.COURTNEY HEADSHOT

For example, I had never realized before Mandarin class how different my family was from most other Piedmont families for its Taiwanese and Northern Chinese roots (in terms of cuisine, I live in a house divided against itself).

With more than 250 students of color on our campus, not including those at MHS, we children of immigrants bring 250 unique cultures and worldviews to our school. By embracing and sharing our cultures, we have the ability to mitigate how dominantly white our community can feel.

So, whether you choose to listen to your dad’s lame jokes about the mooncakes he had as a kid, coordinate a dragon dance flash mob on the quad, or express a different culture with which  you identify, showing people the values and customs of your cultures really helps reduce stereotypes and biases, which can make PHS a lot less homogeneous.

I attended Chinese class in Fremont, where I used to live, with other children of mostly Taiwanese-American immigrants like me from kindergarten to ninth grade. Fremont is more than 80 percent Asian. When I first came to Piedmont, I remember looking around the playground and thinking: How am I ever going to make friends if everyone is so white? Everyone was amazing at sports and seemed to have Mrs. Meyer’s Lemon Verbena Soap.

I remember feeling a sort of relief as I went to Fremont each week, because everyone would understand the glory of pineapple pastries and the Monkey King.

But over the years, I adapted to Piedmont and became an alien among the people with whom I used to identify so much.

My point is, we are in a junction of our lives in which we are malleable. Unless we make a point to retain our cultures, we can change quickly without realizing it.

This isn’t to bash on multi-generational Piedmonters out there, for you are the torchbearers of Piedmont’s cultural identity, which has just as much as value as any other city’s. In fact, it’s worth adding that I don’t regret becoming more Piedmontian. This community has made me a braver, smarter woman.

What I do regret is how I compromised my language skills and my correspondence with my relatives for the culture that became more and more convenient to exist within each day.

Ke$ha, who wisely sang “We R Who We R,” was right in that the values and experiences we grew up with as children won’t escape us even if we try to escape them.

But considering how valuable and satisfying it is to express our cultures, following Ke$ha’s advice and becoming more of who we R doesn’t seem so bad.

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