Janet’s Journal: Culture is about care

By Opinion Editor Janet Guan

I’m a huge C-drama fan. I watched way too many last semester, from heartfluttering campus romances to chilling murder mysteries and tearjerking tragedies. Aside from being an occasional guilty dose of escapism, C-dramas are also one of the only ways I connect with my parents, Chinese immigrants who happily share my obsession. On countless afternoons, I’ve accompanied them at the dining table to watch their latest favorite, savoring a bowl of watermelon slices as another world unfolded onscreen.

Despite having grown up in the Bay Area, which is home to some of the largest Chinese communities in the US, I’m not nearly as connected to my cultural roots as I once hoped to be. Even after sitting through more than 10 painstaking years of Saturday morning Chinese school, my spoken Chinese is only enough to have an awkward conversation at a family gathering and is probably actively being surpassed by my three-year-old cousin. Although I’ve eaten Chinese food for almost every day of my life, I’m still hopeless with Chinese menus without English translations and pictures. And despite having visited China more than five times in my lifetime, I wouldn’t be able to point out major cities or monuments even with a map.

When I was younger, my mediocre ability to “be Chinese” was a major insecurity. For too many summers in my grandparents’ rural town, my younger brother and I have trailed behind our Chinese-born cousins in games and smiled politely at family dinners, faces burning as our aunts and uncles teased us for asking for forks alongside chopsticks. For a while, I desperately tried to bridge this gap. I bought the Chinese classics my dad had cherished as a child, braving through only one or two pages before opting for their English versions. I made plans to memorize the words in my Chinese dictionary, making long lists of essential phrases before quitting after a week. I tried to learn to cook my mom’s favorite Chinese dishes, from dumplings to stir-fried tomatoes and eggs, only to give up on needing to translate every other word in her recipes. 

It’s been a long time since I last tried to be more Chinese. Now that I’m in high school, it’s difficult to find the time to memorize dictionaries and decipher recipes. But, even in the subtlest of ways, my Chinese roots continue to permeate every little thing I do. Laughing at C-dramas with my family, sounding out new Chinese idioms with my mom, helping my dad stir fry tofu for dinner — being Chinese is an identity so deeply ingrained within me that I no longer think of it as another skill to train or prove I have.

Culture isn’t about how well you speak a language, how well you read a book, how well you cook a dish — but the care that goes into trying. Appreciation lies in the effort: the effort to speak with your parents in their mother tongue, even if you have to mix English in between; the effort to stay for a show, even if you really only understand half of it; the effort to visit the family you love an ocean away, even if they giggle at your American idiosyncrasies — because culture is about love. And love is worth every journey.