Dear Digital Diary,
Identity.
When were little it could be as simple as we share the same toys therefore identify myself with those people who have the same doll as me.
In middle school, I can be that we might share the same love of the popular boy band at the time. In that case we shared the same case of the fan-girl fever.
Then there’s high school, which is the most tangent version of Darwin's ideas come to life, places a very harsh idea of identity in which you were either popular or someone who basically was labeled as, well, not.
Then in college I started to notice something different. I noticed that a lot of people who shared the same ethnicity or nationality hang out with each other a lot. This could be due to the numerous organizations on campus like the Vietnamese association and all that.
In America, we are basically a melting pot of so many different people.
"I think that it’s one of the most beautiful thing!"
From the food we eat to the different features that we have.
Growing up, my friends in school were so confident as to which ethnicity they belong to.
A lot of my friends growing up were Puerto Rican. I remember going to one of my friends houses and their mom always asked me if I had eaten and I would always say no. I loved eating the rice they made and the chicken is OUT OF THIS WORLD!
I also loved that my godfather's family came from a strong Italian heritage and every Christmas we would always have homemade pizzelle cookies or a native pasta dish.
In one of my psychology classes recently we were learning about ethnic identity and it really gave me a somewhat of a revelation and it all starts like this.
When I was growing up I knew that I was different from everybody else from my Asian family. Growing up half African-American and half Filipino really confuses me as a child. Everybody in my family, on my mom side which is who I was raised by, all had straight black hair and all had much lighter skin than me.
"In my mind as a young child, even though I had kinky curly hair and warm dark skin, Identified myself as Filipino."
I ate the food, spoke the languages and I even learned how to count 1 to 10 in my mom’s native language first before English.
Growing up knowing that I knew more than one language really helped me cope with the idea of what I identified myself as.
As I grew older I never wanted it to be the case where I had to “choose”. Although, inside, I always wanted to comfort myself and provide myself with a safe haven idea as to identify who I was. Growing up with African-American features in a Filipino family living in the Western world really confused me as to where I “needed” to belong.
It’s just so eye-opening to reflect upon my unique situation and growing up in a way that I can finally understand and put into words.
It wasn’t until recently that I figured out that I had already answered my question.
I belong nowhere and everywhere.
Let me explain.
There is a recent documentary that I watch called “Sound and Fury”. There is this little girl name Heather and both of her parents are deaf. Heather, at the age of only six years old, is also deaf. In the documentary, series it shows the different opinions about getting the cochlear implant. Her grandmother was so strong about the idea of Heather getting the implant. Her parents, mainly her father, I really didn’t want her to get it because she felt that a little Heather would grow up and lose her culture of being deaf.
"You have to see the documentary it’s honestly so amazing."
In the end, Heather ends up not getting the implant until she turns 10. They end up doing a following documentary about the family six years later and her father talks about how Heather communicates with sign language and also talks.
This documentary was made in the 2000s so Heather is now a college graduate, from HARVARD LAW I might add, and she did a Ted talk about how she is in a world that she lives in called the Heather world. She talks about how she lives in a world where one side of the bridge is the deaf culture and the other side of the bridge is the hearing culture. Heather says she is standing right in the middle, but that’s whole world. She belongs to both and yet lives in her room. She is in a unique place because she can communicate with the deaf world through sign language and yet also communicate with the human world because of help from the cochlear implant enabling her to hear.
My point being is that I never really chose That I am African-American because I share mostly have can African-American features. It’s not that I chose that I’m Filipino because I grew up with the languages. It’s not that I chose that I’m an American because I grew up in America.
I am all of these identities but at the same time I am the Camille Identity.
I am myself.
Love,
Camille
Thank you guys so much for taking the time to read this bog post.
Family means a lot to me and I'm so happy that there was never a second of my childhood in which I felt i did't belong.
I love them so much and the mean the world to me.
Until next time...
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