Chameleon

I was born in Chicago. When I was three years old, my family moved to Okinawa. Two years later, we would move to Tokyo. I spent two years in Tokyo before moving to South Korea, where I lived for a year. For the summers, I lived in China with my mother’s side of the family. It wasn’t until right before I turned nine that I found myself in the United States again, though I never returned to Chicago. The Pacific Northwest has been home base for several years now. At one point, I also lived in the American South (which is a rather long story of its own). I will never forget my formative years in East Asia.  I was always slightly confused about where I was and who I was. Was I an immigrant? An emigrant?  An international traveler being dragged from country to country by my parents?   What I did know and remember was having to cross linguistic barriers on a day-to-day basis. Translation was something I couldn’t live without; it was a natural part of my every day need to communicate. It wasn’t until I came to Smith that I was finally able to see the artistry in translation and how it brought together different cultures and languages.  Before, I had perceived it first and foremost as a tool for survival.

In Okinawa, I was homeschooled. In Tokyo, I attended three different schools–a Japanese kindergarten, a Catholic Montessori school, and a school on an American military base. In the first space, I had to communicate in Japanese, in the second and third spaces I communicated in English. However, I spoke more Chinese at home than either English or Japanese. During the summers in China, I went to a Chinese school, where I spoke only Chinese. I knew a smattering of Korean, but it never quite reached the same level as the other languages, because I only spent a year there and was homeschooled. Only after I came to the United States, did English become my language of highest proficiency, simply because I was now required to use it the most in everyday conversation.

Being half-Caucasian and half-Chinese, moving to Japan, and then to South Korea, required me to be constantly aware of the customs, culture, and languages around me.

I remember strangers staring at me as I walked down the street. They cast curious glances at me and my parents as mixed race couples still weren’t a very common sight in the various places where I lived back then. It seemed that everyone assigned me to a different category based on my features. When I spoke Chinese in China, I didn’t have an accent, and this startled many people. Still, I passed as a Caucasian person, despite being half-Chinese. And in mostly Caucasian spaces, I was simply Chinese, despite being half-Caucasian. The latter was most evident when I was living in the American South where I was the only student with Chinese heritage in the entire school. Looking back on it all, I was constantly considered someone who did not fit in any of the pre-determined categories, someone who was something of a question mark in almost all spaces. I had to learn how to blend in linguistically- speaking Japanese, Chinese, and English, all with varying levels of proficiency. I was a jack of all trades, adapting as needed to constantly changing environments. Like a chameleon that changes color, my appearance never seemed to be truly static in other people’s eyes. Yet this mobility–immigration, migration, emigration, each move across a cultural or linguistic border–shaped my identity.  I now have a passion for language, travel, and bringing communities together. Most importantly, growing up among various customs, cultures, and languages, I’ve learned the value of being a global citizen.  

 

Kela is a junior with a major in East Asian Languages and Literature. She also has a concentration in Translation Studies and a minor in Neuroscience. She is interested in doing research on how the brain processes linguistic information.

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