One of the most significant shades that has colored my experience as an individual from an immigrant family is the presence of absence.
I suspect this might be true for many of us who belong outside a cultural majority—among our peers we are constantly in a state of comparison both internally in the way we view ourselves and externally in the way we ourselves are viewed, and our positioning as a minority means that we are always painfully conscious of what we are lacking so much more so than what we possess.
For me, it has never been a constant focus on the obvious details the way many portrayals of people of color in the media are narrativized. The immediate differences, like my lack of double-lidded eyes, speaking Mandarin at home, the skewed perception of my masculinity as an Asian man, while they do factor into my daily life, it is not on an overwhelmingly obsessive level. (To be fair, I am lucky to have had significantly less exposure to direct racism and microaggressions than the vast majority of my PoC friends, and as a cis-man my appearance is nowhere near as dissected as it would have been if I were born any other way.)
Instead, the absent characteristics of my lived experience that have bothered me the most are less obvious: parents that didn’t understand concepts like Western dating culture, the lack of American cultural knowledge (Like, for real, who the fuck is Jim Belushi?), not sharing common Midwestern traditions like camping every summer or going up to a cabin up north.
But chief among these differences for me was the absence of an extended family in the United States. At school, after long holiday breaks, I would hear my classmates talk about travelling to or hosting large family reunions, many of them complaining about the waste of time. I was jealous. In so many of the books and TV shows and movies that I had devoured to better understand American culture, a large, eclectic extended family of slightly crazy characters was commonplace, and seemed so fun to have. And unlike something like a lack of cultural knowledge, which could very easily be remedied with exposure, I couldn’t do anything about it. I was stuck with my immediate family and parties with other Chinese families which, while still enjoyable, just wasn’t the same.
More than just missing out on family reunions, the absence of an extended family close by was felt in the lack of presents on birthdays or on Christmas, the lack of guidance and support from adults who weren’t my parents or teachers, the lack of professional and social connections that come with a wider network. The closest I ever came to any of this was my grandparents visiting for a couple of months every few years, and going back to China for three months in the fourth grade.
A significant amount of people with the social network of an extended family, when confronted with my reality, will respond with something well-meaning but trite, something like how the grass is greener on the other side, or how extended families can be such a pain. But in doing so, they fail to recognize that this isn’t a split between choice A and choice B. Rather, it is a dichotomy of the haves and the have-nots. Even if you find your relatives a nuisance, you can always choose to limit your exposure—I have no inverse option of resuscitating the non-existent.
Last summer, I went back to China to visit my relatives for the first time in twelve years. My second night there, all of my aunts and uncles and cousins showed up, and I cooked beef soup noodles for them as I met my extended family for the first time as an adult. Everyone was there—the aunt that owned a motorcycle when she was younger and let me ride it, the uncle who works as a provincial judge and gets louder and more brash with every beer, the kid cousin obsessed with his smartwatch that everyone dotes on a little bit too much. It was pure pandemonium.
As everyone got together around the dinner table in my grandma’s apartment, all while maintaining the same level of chaos, and I doled out the serving bowls of hot noodle soup with freshly-chopped cilantro, I couldn’t keep the smile off my face.