Illustration by Jill Kimura
Written by Celeste Bloom
Edited by Parivash Fahim Goff & Andrea Nevin
Representation is everything. In grade school it was the female characters in children’s stories who helped me visualize existing beyond the stereotype of the sweet and gentle little girl. In high school it was family friends and teachers who, just by living their lives, and loving who they love, helped me envision a future outside heteronormativity. And most recently in college, after feeling alienated by my institution’s predominantly white English department, it was the works of Asian American writers that rekindled my desire to pursue the major with a focus in creative writing.
As I grew older and more aware of my intersecting identities, I worried about how they would interact together. I desperately hunted for representation that accurately reflected my race, gender and sexuality as if the instant I found this perfect mirror image, it would reveal the solution to their coexistence.
But everywhere I looked I was dissatisfied. There was queer representation, but many of the characters or actors were men, and even more of them were white. Most Asians were immigrants, none of them were adoptees. And even within the transracial adoptee community, representation is on a case by case basis. We all contain different stories within us and come from uniquely composed families.
I grew increasingly worried. If I couldn’t visualize how the different identities within me coexist, I would unravel and be unable to defend myself in the face of authenticity, an insecurity that has always trailed behind me. Authenticity drives my impulse to prove that I am just as Asian as the next person, despite not having Asian parents, despite my cultural and language deficiencies, despite not being straight, or hyper feminine, despite not fitting the model minority myth.
Eventually the anxiety became frustration, which grew into rage.
I was tired of sitting at the first Asian Student Association meeting, racking my brain for a cultural food item during an ice breaker, as if my answer will determine my Asianess. I was tired of spilling out apologies and explanations in response to the question: where are you from?
Why do I still question my authority to speak on Asian issues? My own experience? My right to exist in a space? Why do I have to suffer the consequences of not fitting into a stereotypical homogenized single narrative?
I had so much anger and I didn’t even know where to direct it. My parents? Myself? For several months I felt like I was at war with the world. But it was draining. I was helping no one, especially not myself. Eventually, the flow of internal worries started to slow. I opened up, I listened more. I started talking to other Asians from a variety of different backgrounds. And I realized I was not alone in my anxiety. We are all puppets on the strings of racial imposter syndrome. That’s when I truly felt solidarity. That’s when I finally felt authentic in all my complexities.
My rebirth is realizing that in order to be healthy, in body, mind and spirit, I have to learn how to exist in this hybrid state.
And I have to make peace with the fact that not only is complete representation unattainable, but it is not the goal. Representations are not people. We are all hybrid and our lives are too complex to be completely mirrored through the pages of a book or scenes of a film.
I have come to value representations for what they truly are; puzzle pieces of identity that one collects to strengthen their own narrative.
I write because I want to give birth to my own authenticity. I realize that at its core, authenticity isn’t a tool to scrutinize others and sustain a single narrative, authenticity is about the self, and the projection of the self in its truest form regardless of whether it is contradictory or fails to meet expectations.
I write because I want to project the self in all its forms. I believe it is much more fruitful than the diluted digestible self because with complexity there are more parts that people can tuck away into their own narratives.
Celeste Bloom
Celeste is from Washington DC and currently studies at a women’s college called Bryn Mawr (Class of 2024). She is an English Major with a concentration in creative writing and a sociology minor. She chose these areas of study because she wants to write about people and identities through a lens of race, gender, sexuality etc. Outside of class, she is on the badminton team, she works at the dining hall and is a member of the Asian Student Association. She likes video games, women’s soccer, and a book she highly recommends is Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong.
