AAPI Month: I borrowed this horse and everything else, too

Nothing in this video is originally mine: https://youtube.com/shorts/LvEa4oorIng

Not even the horse theme, carried across both the Chinese Year Of The Horse context and the American horse idioms littered throughout.

It’s AAPI month, so... let’s talk about that.

Growing up in the USA with a Chinese immigrant family felt like this throughout my entire life. My family spoke Chinese at home, and we followed Chinese traditions, even as we began to lose touch with the evolving traditions in the Chinese mainland. We learned American traditions and western customs to replace them, but did them poorly, or wrong, and struggled to piece it together with the Chinese customs we’d known.

Though, when I came to the USA, I was 3. To me, this mixed tradition of change and learning was all I’d ever known. My parents, I think, had the harder side of this, where they’d need to adapt to a brand new language, brand new environment, and try to get by while understanding that they’d always feel like a foreigner, and never be able to speak English like someone who natively grew up in the USA.

I got lucky with that part of things. My English, practically speaking, was not just good, but excelled above my peers through middle school and high school. My Chinese, practically speaking, was not as good-- I’d struggle with reading and writing, something I still can’t do, and my grasp of casual language was decent enough, but I’d have no ability to converse beyond what amounted to probably roughly a 3rd grade level.

But even though I could speak English without an accent, even though I could write well, there were things about the language that I couldn’t grasp. Idioms, hypotheticals, and figures of speech that I would take literally-- not because of my autism, which is a whole other problem to discuss another time, but rather that I’d never grown up with those contexts and never knew what they meant or how they were applied in conversation.

It’s said that you can tell when someone learned through reading, because they have a tendency to mispronounce words. When I mispronounced words, though, it was attributed to my Chineseness. Whenever I’d say “a-ribbit-er” while playing Starcraft, only learning how to pronounce “Arbiter” correctly when hearing it in Halo 2, or when I’d stumble over a sentence that worked in my head but tumbled out before I realized I didn’t know how to pronounce half the words in it-- I could feel, painfully, how my expertise of English felt borrowed.

Borrowed well, and yet, borrowed all the same.

Worse, yet, was that Chinese had even more of these contextual phrasing and subtext. Chinese is famously a “high context” language that uses a ton of implications rather than direct sayings, and there are a staggering amount of poems and proverbs that are used often in daily life. These were so incredibly dense that I’d never even attempted to really understand them, save for the few that my family would use often enough that I never really considered them figures of speech anymore.

Neither language was really my own. I’d make some mistakes here and there like saying “close the light” as well, when the initial action and phrasing I’d learn in Chinese and translate to English, and I still likely make those little mistakes here and there unconsciously, mixing them up in my head.

Food ended up much the same, with language blending through even more languages at home and in the lunchyard.
Instant ramen was called “fang bian mian” at home in Chinese, which translates roughly to “convenient noodles,” but when bartering lunches at school, everyone would always call it “ramen,” and so that’s what it became in my head. Back then, I never really knew what the difference was, or the definition-- or, indeed, that ramen was more than the dehydrated bricks that came in so many varieties and that I’d beg my mom to eat more of but she wouldn’t let us because it wasn’t good for our health.

They were all called ramen-- the Chinese brands, the Thai brands, the Vietnamese brands, everything consolidated into this one word that captured everything under its umbrella. A word that, itself, was borrowed, and expanded upon, from the Chinese word “La Mian”.

Then, when I turned to movies and entertainment, my experience became largely the same. My parents knew my brother and I had a penchant for martial arts films, and so that was something we’d watch the most often as a family. Jackie Chan became a staple of our household, as did Steven Chow and Jet Li, and fueled my personal interest in martial arts.

And yet, despite all of these heroes on the big screen being kung-fu practitioners, I never, ever once considered doing kung fu.

The first thing I enrolled in was Tae Kwon Do, a Korean martial art. Then, later Karate. And when I decided to take it more seriously for once, Muay Thai and MMA.

Never Kung Fu.

Because kung fu was for Chinese people, see, and I didn’t feel Chinese enough to practice Kung Fu. If I did, everyone would see me for the fraud I was, that all of me was borrowed, that I’d shamefully need English translations for everything even though I was born in China, that I’d need to go learn in the section with the white kids, and not all the Chinese kids who would look down on me for how fake I was.

Better, then, to go to the places where I already knew I was foreign.

So, when I went to cut together this video, borrowing and recontextualizing footage felt strangely familiar.

It felt comfortable, like something I’d constantly done all my life. All of these props, things that weren’t quite “right” in the ways that that maybe they should be, and yet still something that I was proud of--

I performed and borrowed being Chinese and asian with the golden emperor’s throne, the hanfu that didn’t come from any particular dynasty’s design, the stances and combinations that I’d made up from studying kung fu movies and rewatching Kung Fu Hustle for the umpteenth time.

And I performed and borrowed being American with all the idioms that I had to look up about horses, with the western story structures I’d grown so accustomed to writing, and the western humor that was still tinged with the wordplay concepts used often in Chinese humor, the kind I only understood conceptually but never found funny when it played in the Spring Festival shows.

And this borrowing and mixing-- isn’t it ironic, then, that ramen is this very thing, a food that doesn’t originate from Japan, but rather from China?

Isn’t it fitting, then, that making this video for Vite ramen, especially using a sound bank of anime sounds, somehow ties this mess all back together?

Everything about me, everything about this video, is borrowed. And this video is too, cut from all the leftover pieces, the things I could figure out and understand, the parts that I borrowed from other places. And, funnily enough, of the kung fu that I never ended up learning.

Maybe it’ll be impossible for me to really feel like I can really own whatever my culture feels like. Maybe I’ll always feel like I’m borrowing a little asian, borrowing a little american.

But if I can borrow the best from everywhere, and put them together into this new, third thing, a new third culture...

Perhaps it might not be such a bad thing after all.

Happy AAPI month. I’ll probably have more rambles to write throughout the month.

But also, it’s Mental Health Month too, which I’ll also be writing about soon too.

Remember to be kind, and savor life’s little victories.

-Tim, Founder Vite