Identity twist

Serena Wang dresses well in a light green Polo shirt and jeans. Even though she has the flu, she still carries herself with an unspoken confidence, pausing in Alpine Atrium to greet her fellow Tri-Delt before meeting me for lunch. She wears just enough makeup to show that she cares about her appearance but isn’t trying too hard.

Serena describes herself during her first year at Duke as “the poster child for sell-out Asian banana”—a term that means yellow on the outside, white on the inside. She says it with a laugh.

So naturally, she rushed Delta Delta Delta sorority her sophomore year. She pledged and became the only banana in the bunch. She questioned why she was rushing. “I’m not your prototype Tri-Delt,” she says. But her sisters said that she was making it too much of a racial issue, that she wasn’t looking outside the scope, that in the end, it doesn’t really matter. “There’s obviously something about you other than your race which fit into the Tri-Delt mode, which is why you’re in it,” she remembers them assuring her.

Multiple cultures uniting in the common bond of sisterhood—multiculturalism at its finest. Recognizing and respecting the existence of different cultures apart from the mainstream. So what actually constitutes culture? And what the hell constitutes the “mainstream”?

“The liberal version of multiculturalism is this sort of boundary between different ethnic groups. The idea that within that boundary the group of people is homogeneous—they share the same culture, they have the same history. Then there’s this radical irreconcilability across the different cultures,” says Leo Ching, chair of the Asian and African Languages and Literature department.

Then multiculturalism—the grand idea that America is the melting pot of the world—might just be a load of crap.

It’s been ingrained in our minds as one of the pillars of our country, ever since the pilgrims stumbled across the Native Americans and peacefully shared turkey and cranberry sauce in our fourth-grade classrooms. Generations later, those white Christian immigrants won the power to define the mainstream. Multiculturalism, established by the mainstream, developed as a solution for minority cultures to be recognized as valid—compared to the mainstream. Catch my drift?

“The problem with multiculturalism is that it promotes the idea that ‘everybody is different from me,’” Ching says. “That’s the problem. Everybody is different except me or my group. So once multiculturalism becomes a dominant ideology in university campuses, especially, it becomes this uncanny marker of difference, a difference that cannot be crossed unless one accepts one’s own difference…. [I]t doesn’t serve the minorities’ benefit.”

Serena cannot identify herself by her ethnicity, her sorority or even her ideology. Her identity, like everyone’s, is personal and multi-dimensional. Born in bilingual Taipei, she was exposed to English at a young age and later moved to south Florida. There, she looked up to her older cousin, the “un-stereotypically Asian male.” He was popular, had friends and girlfriends outside his race and played football. Back then, she believed that that was what it meant to be “made.”

“I think he did tell me at one point, ‘You’re young, and you think that race doesn’t matter, but as you get older, it will. But never let it stop you. If that’s what people want to see you as, force them to see other parts of you. Overwhelm them with your strengths, with your personality, your character. Race doesn’t have to be the only thing,’” she recounts.

But our races still matter to us—we still have our house courses, our race relations courses, our multicultural groups that try to teach us who we are, or maybe who we should be. At about the same time that she joined Tri-Delta, Serena also helped organize the Chinese American Intercollegiate Conference—waiting until her sophomore year to branch into Asian circles.

“I didn’t want to come into college already with somebody stereotyping me as ‘an Asian.’ So I thought I would just hang out with people I got along with and not necessarily try to find that comfort based on the fact that they should accept me because we’re all Asian,” she explains.

And that mentality is pervasive. It’s the same reason that I didn’t sign up for the Asian Students Association’s e-mail list initially. At first glance, groups based on culture or ethnicity look like social cliques based on physical attributes. It would be like having a Tall People’s Association and justifying it because tall people have shared common experiences of being mocked because of their gargantuan size.

I still can’t deny the importance of culture, of heritage. I can’t believe in a society where these things become a non-factor. Neither can Kevin Fang, senior publicity chair on the ASA executive board, who takes pride in that facet of his identity.

“I fear, I know, my culture, my life and my history will become diluted away if I don’t,” says Fang, who attended a Chinese school in Maryland until he was 15. Having been immersed in Chinese culture, customs and heritage, he’s still enthusiastic about studying these things.

“Americanness to me means basically throwing away your history, kind of. Break-dancing and the dragon have nothing to do with each other. To me, being American was being white-washed, was having no sense of culture,” Fang says.

And although we may not have lived under the same circumstances as Fang, I think we still share his fear of losing our own heritage.

Still, groups can force us to question our authenticity. Fang is pre-med, a biology major who plays piano and took kung fu as a kid. And his family did own a Chinese restaurant.

“Sometimes,” he says, “I feel like I am a walking stereotype.” Maybe he’s falling into the trap that multiculturalism dictates.

Taking pride and understanding our identities should not be overlooked. Part of the reason multicultural groups are important is that they offer common ground, a comfortable place where certain questions don’t have to be asked, like “What kind of Asian are you?” But, one must also question, at what expense?

We claim to be the most “multicultural” generation in America to date. We throw around these terms as if we know what they mean. Take the term “Asian,” for example. As the largest continent in the world, Asia covers a massive scope. We have an Asian Students Association, but we also have a Korean Students Association, Chinese Students and Scholars Association, Taiwanese Students Association, DukAnime, Singapore Students Association, Diya and Association for India’s Development. This doesn’t even count Arab groups, which might technically fall under the umbrella of Asian, too. That’s a lot of groups. So it doesn’t suffice simply to say Asian anymore.

“Multiculturalism… attempts to ‘manage’ the highly contested, intermixing and fluid categories of peoples and their histories into manageable and too easily definable ‘cultural’ differences. In short, cultures replace racism as a structural delimitation that avoids the more difficult questions of new and old forms of discrimination and inequality between and within class, race and gender. What I am trying to suggest is that whenever we are emphasizing one form of difference—culture or race—we are always ignoring some other categories such as gender and class,” Ching says.

Identity, whether cultural or personal, cannot be defined in a word. It cannot be explained in terms of anything—maybe just a feeling.

“When I did hang out with [Asians], I felt I could be more at ease, but it was almost like taking them for granted, like they should accept me regardless, as opposed to when I hung out with my greek team,” Serena says. “There was always a sort of unsaid tension where I’m expected to be carried a certain way because I am the novelty, the token.”

Once upon a time, then, we must have been “unicultural.” Our “multicultures” evolved from the norm. Don’t believe me? If there weren’t a norm, multicultural gropus would not exist—their opinions wouldn’t be considered novel. If there weren’t a norm, Serena’s father wouldn’t encourage her to marry “that white guy,” to make it easier for her kids to assimilate—into the mainstream. If there weren’t a norm, I wouldn’t have to write this piece at all.

“When they describe me, my friends, they’ll say, ‘You know, the put-together Asian girl, the one that’s in Polo.’ It’s like they’re basically taking white attributes and adding ‘Asian’ to the end of it,” Serena says.

As if that’s a compliment. Whether defining the walking stereotype or the exception to the rule, multiculturalism threatens to perpetuate the mainstream and vice versa.

Our generation loves to use terms. We love to organize and distinguish one from the other. We use words like “different” and “normal” to describe people and groups, suggesting that those, in fact, exist. We find those things that make us “different” when that’s convenient and “normal” when we see fit. But we’re also acknowledging that, in a world where we’re more interconnected every day, those boundaries are becoming more fluid.

No more terms, Generation Y. Say goodbye to divisions, definitions and designations. Multiculturalism just doesn’t cut it anymore.