Never did I question the validity of these statements that cut me off from my mother, from Chineseness, nor did I feel much at home in my blackness alone. |
..It was always a longstanding, almost obsessive concern with me to attempt to build an existence outside of the world of racism, animosity, and rejection that I felt, separated from other Chinese people. I was told I was not Chinese by both relatives and unrelated people alike and believed that I wasn’t because of it. Never did I question the validity of these statements that cut me off from my mother, from Chineseness, nor did I feel much at home in my blackness alone. And so I lived with this sense of tension inside me, a tension built on popular belief that blackness as a race, as a color was capable of canceling out anything lighter than itself, erasing all other parts of culture, enveloping a person in darkness. But I refused to see the eclipse, to believe my experience, my identity inherited maternally through blood and culture was false…
Wendy Marie Thompson, “Black Chinese: Hybridity, History and Home,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives. (January 2007).
Tags: Chinese America: History and Perspectives, Wendy M. Thompson, Wendy Marie Thompson, Wendy Thompson Taiwo