Labels, words, identity.

One of the main topics we discuss in my "Asian American Experience" class is words of identification. How do people identify themselves? Are we Asian? Asian-American? Just American? Are we confined to only one term; can we simultaneously be all of them at once? On Tuesday, we were in yet another discussion on the issue of labeling. In the pursuit to find ourselves and find the words truest to who we are, we've come up with even more words. White-washed. Black-washed. Mixed-racial. Bi-racial. Twinkie. Banana. Coconut. The list goes on. There are words we give ourselves. There are words people and society give us.

I got really frustrated with the discussion because it finally dawned on me how ridiculous and ultimately trapping it is to constantly try to find ourselves in the right words. We say we are fighting for the truth of our spirits, so that we can settle in ourselves. So we can relax, breathe easy and say, "This. This is me." I am ________. I think the thing with living as human beings is that each person, whatever social location or ethnicity they are marked by, is dynamic. We are never just any one term.

Why is it so important for us to have words of identification? I think sometimes there has to be a deep shaking sense of fear. Fear of living in the abstract. Of identifying to a higher truth that society cannot have power over us. Words are so arbitrary and mean different things to different people. So if context for these words are never the same, how can we trust them? Perhaps the paradox is in the validity of the words we use and the lack of power it ultimately has. And it only has power if you let it. What I mean by this is that it is completely valid for me to say I am Chinese but does that identification hold me back from anything? Does it put me above someone else? Or believe that it makes me somehow inferior?

I have felt my own personal exhaustion with words, and it is a tension that has left me conflicted throughout my entire college experience. I have felt lost, cheated and played by the system. I have been torn by the complexities of adaptation and assimilation. Of compromise and loss.

Spiritual identification is the only thing that I have discovered that can be true. National identities are arbitrary because there are not really such things as borders. They're man drawn. And unless you put up walls that reach to the heavens, you cannot really keep people out. (The problem of using force to do this anyways is a different conversation entirely.) We know now that race is socially constructed. We were never categorized by our differences and set up a system of privilege because of it until well, we started to. Whatever box I have to check on an application doesn't make me any less anything. I still need food, shelter, safety. I still walk and breathe just like you.

It's so strange and wonderful to find myself in God and in God alone. This has completely changed my own self-perception and view of others. This has both all at once given me such a sense of security and liberation. It is like I have found my freedom while I have finally come to live in the only safe place that exists.