In class, when we were discussing Diamond Grill, the topics we looked at were something that I felt I could personally relate to, being Chinese-Canadian myself. I was born in America, and spent most of my life in Canada, where I was immersed in a Western culture from a very young age. I went to a public school, made all non-Chinese friends and never spoke Chinese outside of the doors of my house. I was, essentially, as white as you could get. Except I wasn’t.
Like Fred Wah, I lived in between two different cultures. It was split between the outside “White” world and the inside “Chinese” world, which was separated by the wooden frame of my front door. When I was inside, I was Chinese; I ate Chinese food, spoke Chinese, and did Chinese things. This would changed the moment I stepped outside, where I spoke perfect, accent-less English, which quickly overtook Chinese as my language of preference. I played with the non-Chinese kids and felt alien to any other Chinese people aside from my immediate family. Like Wah, I was stuck between the different worlds of the people around me, white, and the people I came from, Chinese.
My mother calls me a banana (yellow on the outside, white on the inside). The fact was that I felt more White than I did Chinese. I had no Chinese friends. I was not interested when my mother told me stories of Sun Wukong, or the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Despite the fact that Chinese was my first language, I became much better in English and my native language fell into rusty disuse. I speak Chinese to a grand total of two people out of everyone I know: my parents. I use English when speaking to everyone else, even my sister (who also studied English and is as banana-ish as I am). Unlike Wah though, who passes as White, I look completely Chinese, despite a strange sense of foreignness when I am surrounded by Asians.
Where does the identity come from? In Diamond Grill, it is crossed between what a person feels they are, and what is attached to them from their outward appearance and name. But despite how a person acts, they are what their name and appearance is. Despite the fact that Wah is Chinese, he is judged to be non-Chinese by those who see him, because he does not look Chinese (169). But at the same time, despite his appearance, Wah is tied to the inescapable bond of his name, such as when he is in grade four, is blond, and is called a Chink because his name ties him to the identity of Chinese (39). I saw these examples as saying, despite how a person feels, no matter who they are “inside”, the outside (appearance and name) always has a pull on a person’s identity.
I find it hard to say exactly what it is that weighs more on the side of identity. Like myself, I feel completely non-Chinese, but my outward appearance says that I am not anything except Chinese, despite the fact that I feel a strange awkwardness around “people like me,” and comfort in those that are “not like me.” How much should the outward projection of a person, their name and their appearance, weigh in on who a person is? Is a person forever tied to what their name and face say, or is it the words that a person says who they are?