• 15 Nov, 2025 *

I’m ethnically Chinese. My parents were born in the 70s, spent their dirt poor childhoods under the communist regime, and went to university just in time to participate in Deng’s opening up in the country. They had me in the late 90s, and soon later decided to head to Canada for the sake of my wellbeing (they were worried about the smog levels) and the ability to have more children. For the first few years of my life, they worked minimum wage factory jobs here while my grandparents raised me in their stead in China.

I joined them at six, and lived with them in various Chinese ethnoburbs in Toronto. If you look through my grade school yearbooks you’ll see that a significant minority of my classmates were also ethnically Chinese, with parents whose stories rhymed with my own.

When social justice warriorism was invented in the early 2010s, there was like, a wave of discourse about what it’s like to grow up in an immigrant family, and those stories resonated with me to an extent that sort of embarrasses me now. Having your white classmates turn up their nose at the strange and pungent items you bring for lunch, feeling a sense of shame about the food and clothing that is part of your culture. People pulling their eyes slanted and talking in a thick chinese accent to make fun of you. And of course the other asian kids won’t back you up; their own social positions were precarious enough.

Feeling trapped between two worlds, knowing that the colour of your skin will mean that you need to work twice as hard, not getting all the pop culture references. Growing painfully into a strange mold and coming out defensive — taking pride in your stellar English grades, trying to like the gross western food such as “ranch” and “cheese” in order to fit in, desperately shedding the you that you are at home in order to acculturate, forgetting the languages and practices of your birthplace.

And still, it would not be enough, and it would be made very clear to you that being here in a developed western country is not your birthright.

And this cramped, defensive posture that you end up developing as a result was deeply unsexy, so of course no one wanted to fuck you. And of course you had crushes on white boys instead — their postures made it clear to anyone watching them that they fully expected to be the masters of the universe when they grew up.

I did, incidentally, date people who weren’t white. One of them was adopted as a baby by white parents. Another grew up in one of the wealthiest and whitest toronto exurbs, ate a steady diet of nutella sandwiches, and went to lego camp every summer. Their postures weren’t like ours.

By the time my cohort got their university degrees, we’re generally pretty naturalized; alienated from our parents, growing pains a faint memory. Now, like you, I listen to New Yorker podcasts, am working my way through the Western canon instead of any Eastern ones, and fully enjoy eating cheese.

Anyways, you’ve all heard narratives like this before, I’m likely not the first one to spell it out for you. But watch out! Narratives change over time!

Being born in China in the 70s (like my parents) is a very different experience from being born in China in the 80s, or the 90s. The new Chinese immigrants who make it over had so much more starting capital than my parents did, and they are arriving into a North America where being asian is so much cooler. Also, increasingly, the younger asians that you meet are not first generation immigrants; their parents are the ones who had the defensive postures it took me two decades to unlearn.

Those parents would have settled into crappy jobs in accounting and public works instead of factories, and scrounged for a house in a nicer suburb, and they would raise their children with things like sleepovers and dogs and science camp every summer. And these kids, who look so much like me but are a decade younger, do not have the defensive posture I did.

They wear confidence well. They’re comfortable in their own skin. They look like little masters of the universe. This will have consequences.

Dating discourse and racial preferences are going to look very different for the upcoming cohorts, as race becomes significantly untied to class and status/connections, and you will seem backwards and out of touch if you do not update.

You will no longer be able to form an inter-generational connection with someone of your own ethnicity by talking about the trauma of having asian parents.

All that “character” we supposedly built from adversity will become more and more self-evidently cope; the new kids with their unearned confidence and their parents’ connections and their casual ownership of space are going to become wildly more successful in much larger numbers than we will. They never had to develop and then unlearn our particular survival mechanisms, the ones built for living in public housing instead of warm, well-maintained homes.

This is good! I am so glad that less children are growing up traumatized, I am so glad nations in Asia and everywhere else are becoming more wealthy and more interconnected. It’s just, a bit of a doozy sometimes, you know? Because this story ends with your narrative becoming a smaller and smaller part of the discourse, and then you will become illegible, unrecognizable, to even many of the other people who look like you.

#diary #longform