Until I was three, my world was my grandparents’ house and the languages that filled it like light through windows. Javanese rose from the kitchen with the steam of rice, curling upward in the same unhurried way my grandmother’s voice curled around familiar stories. Mandarin murmured from the television, its cadences as constant as breathing, as unnoticed and necessary as the walls themselves. When relatives visited, Javanese swelled and crested, laughter breaking over the table in waves that seemed to carry the whole house with them. And Cantonese flowed between my parents—quick, fluid, intimate—a river that belonged only to them, one I could hear but not yet enter, watching from the bank.
English did not exist there. It lived somewhere else, in a world I had not enter yet. I did not know that one day the languages I had would not be enough. I did not know that one day I would have to choose, or that the choice would not really be mine. I only knew that when my grandmother sang, the whole room warmed. When my grandfather laughed, the furniture seemed to settle deeper into the floor. When my mother called me in from play, her voice came wrapped in Cantonese, and I ran toward it without thinking, because that was what home sounded like.
Then came preschool. The room felt enormous, fluorescent light bouncing off plastic toys and laminated posters like something clinical, something that did not know how to hold a child. Children moved everywhere at once, their voices spilling into the air in sounds I could not decipher. I remember needing the washroom with the urgency only a small child feels, the kind that tightens your whole body and shrinks the world to a single point of panic. I cried. I screamed. I repeated the same words—Mandarin first, because that was what I said at home when I needed something, then Cantonese, because that was what my parents used when they spoke directly to me, then Javanese, because that was what my grandmother used when she held my face in her hands and told me everything would be all right—louder each time, hoping someone would recognize them.
No one did.
The teachers looked at me with concern, confusion, a kind of helpless patience that I could feel even then, even without the words for it. Their voices came back in English, soft but meaningless, like waves hitting a wall, like sound without sense, like I was drowning in full view of everyone and no one could see the water.
They don’t understand me, I thought. No one here understands me.
And yet, within a week, I had learned to speak English.
Children learn languages the way water finds a path downhill: quickly, instinctively, without ceremony. One day the words are foreign; the next, they are simply there, available, ready. I don’t remember the moment it happened. I only remember the relief of being heard.
But English did not arrive empty-handed. It took something with it.
The Chinese proverbs my grandmother taught me began to loosen their hold, like seeds slipping from soil too shallow to hold them. The poems she recited while I sat beside her—listening without quite understanding, but feeling their rhythm anyway, the way you feel a heartbeat through a pillow—faded into something half-remembered, then into something only felt, then into something lost. The characters she traced slowly on paper, with patient strokes and careful repetition, grew unfamiliar. I forgot them. Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just slowly, the way a shoreline shifts over time, grain by grain, until one day you look up and the place where you used to stand is underwater, and you cannot remember exactly when it happened, only that it has.
I was too busy learning new words, new sounds, new ways of being in the world to notice the erosion until the shore was already different.
My grandmother noticed before I did.
She rarely scolded; she never raised her voice. But she would watch me struggle over a character, shake her head with a small sigh, and then, almost lightly, almost jokingly, she would say it.
“Banana.”
White on the inside. Yellow on the outside.
The word drifted through the room like something harmless, supposedly playful. But over time, it settled somewhere deeper, somewhere beneath the ribs, somewhere the breath catches when you are not expecting it. Banana. A small joke that carried a heavy accusation: You are not quite authentic. You are not quite right. Something essential has already begun to slip away, and you did not even notice until I named it.
I scoffed when she said it. What else could I do? To not laugh would be to admit it hurt, and to admit it hurt would be to admit she was right. So I laughed, and the laugh covered something I did not yet have words for. But I never forgot. The word stayed, buried but alive, waiting.
I did not understand then why it mattered so much to her. Why every character lost was a small grief. Why she watched me forget with something like fear.
I understand now.
---
She was born in a time and place where being Chinese was dangerous.
Under the Indonesian regime, Chinese schools were prohibited. Chinese books were forbidden. Children who looked too Chinese were stopped on the street, their bags checked, their books confiscated, their faces memorized by men in uniforms who had the power to make families disappear. She wanted to learn anyway. She wanted to read the language of her parents, the language of her ancestors, the language that lived in her home but could not survive outside it, the language that would mark her as someone who did not belong, who could never fully belong, who belonged anyway, stubbornly, defiantly, in secret.
So she hid books under her shirt.
Picture it: a young girl, small-boned and quick, walking past police who would have taken everything from her if they had known. Walking with her heart hammering against her ribs, against the thin pages pressed to her skin, walking as if nothing were wrong, as if she were not carrying a world inside her clothes, as if she were not smuggling language itself past men who had been told that language was illegal. She learned in secret, in silence, in the space between survival and defiance. Every character she learned was a small act of rebellion. Every poem she memorized was something they could not take from her, something hidden so deep they would never find it, something that belonged to her and her alone.
And then I came along, born in a country where Chinese was not forbidden, where Chinese schools existed, where I could learn without fear, without hiding, without walking past men who would punish me for carrying my own name—and I let it slip away. Not because I had to hide my books under my shirt. Not because police would stop me on the street. But because orchestra rehearsals were more convenient. Because I was busy. Because I did not understand what it cost her to have this thing that I was throwing away.
Banana. The word was not just an observation. It was a warning. It was grief. It was her saying: I fought for this. And you are letting it go. I crossed oceans for this. I risked everything for this. And you are letting it go because it is Tuesday and you have other things to do.
I stopped going to Chinese school when it began to conflict with orchestra rehearsals. At the time, it felt like a simple scheduling choice, one activity replacing another, one morning rearranged. I told myself I would go back. I told myself I could catch up. I told myself it didn’t matter that much. I was lying to myself. I think I knew it even then. Languages are fragile things. If you stop tending them, they fade. And I had stopped tending this one long before I admitted it, long before I had the courage to look directly at what I was doing.
Now, when I go to Chinese restaurants, I sit with the menu open in front of me and feel a familiar discomfort gather in my chest, something that starts as a flutter and deepens into something heavier, something that sits on my lungs and makes it hard to breathe casually, to pretend I am not searching. The characters stretch across the page like a landscape I should recognize but do not fully inhabit, like a country I once belonged to but cannot find my way back to. I can pick out fragments. Chicken. Noodles. Beef noodle soup. Survival vocabulary. The rest blurs together in defiance, reminding me of the distance between the language I once belonged to and the language I now only partially occupy, like someone who still loves a place they can no longer live in.
I want to be proud when I bring friends to these restaurants. I want to order confidently, to explain dishes, to read the menu aloud with ease, the way someone rooted in their culture might do without thinking, the way my grandmother would have done, the way I was meant to do. Instead, I scan carefully, pretending I can read everything. Pretending I am not searching for familiar shapes. Pretending it doesn’t hurt, this daily evidence of what I have lost, this menu that might as well be a mirror.
It is one of my deepest regrets. Not because it is a small thing, but because it stands for so many others. Because it is the place where all the other inadequacies gather and announce themselves, like birds returning to the same tree every evening. Sometimes I wonder if my grandmother knew this would happen. Perhaps that’s why she called me banana—not to wound me, but to name the thing before it fully happened, so I might see it and turn back.
I did not turn back.
---
When my grandfather was dying, he was at home.
Not in a hospital room, not surrounded by machines and white walls and the particular sterility of institutional death, but in the bedroom where he had slept for years, where he had dreamed thousands of dreams, where he had woken to thousands of mornings. The bed was large and heavy, carved from dark wood and painted cream, its headboard ornamented with curling flowers and vines polished smooth by time, by hands, by the slow accumulation of years. The sheets were covered in faded blossoms, and thick blankets were piled over him even though the room was warm. He had always liked being warm. Even in summer, even when the rest of us were sweating, he wanted another blanket. It was a small thing, a quirk, a detail that had seemed insignificant until suddenly it was the only thing I could think about—that he would never ask for another blanket, that the warmth he wanted would have to come from somewhere else now.
The doctor had come and told us it was time. There is no gentle way to hear those words. There is no preparation that softens them. They arrive like a door closing, and you are on one side, and everything you love is on the other, and you cannot reach through.
I sat beside him on the bed and sobbed.
The mattress dipped beneath my weight. My shoulders shook with the kind of grief that arrives all at once, without warning, overwhelming the body before the mind can understand it. We had known this would come. I thought I had prepared myself. I had practiced for it, rehearsing the loss in small moments alone, trying to make it familiar so it would hurt less. I was wrong. You cannot practice for this. You cannot rehearse the end of someone. You cannot make grief familiar by inviting it in early. It comes when it comes, and it brings everything with it.
I leaned closer. Close enough to feel the warmth still coming off him, close enough to see the faint movement of his chest, close enough to whisper. The words simply arrived, rising from somewhere beneath the grief, urgent and unformed, like water finding its way to the surface. I told him I would work hard. I told him I would take care of the family. I told him things I hoped he would want to hear, things I needed him to know before he left, things I had never said aloud because I thought there would always be more time.
And then, without meaning to, I started talking about language.
I told him I would finally learn to read Chinese properly. I told him I would understand the characters my grandmother had tried to teach me, the ones that had slipped away so quietly I hadn’t noticed until they were gone, the ones that held all the poems and proverbs and stories I had let myself forget. I told him I would find my way back to the words that first held me, the words that had held him too, the words that had held generations before either of us existed.
I whispered it into the space between us, my voice trembling, my face close to his. I repeated it more than once, softly, urgently, as if saying it enough times could make it true. As if the words themselves could travel from my mouth to his ears and settle there, a promise he could take with him, something to hold in the dark.
His eyes were closed beneath the thick blankets. His breathing moved slowly through the silence, each rise and fall a small miracle, each pause a small terror. I do not know if he heard me. I do not know if anything I said reached him, if there was enough left of him to receive it. But I needed to say it anyway. I needed someone to hear it, even if that someone was only the version of myself who would have to live with this promise long after he was gone, long after the bed was empty, long after the blankets no longer held anyone.
I stayed there for a long time, my hand resting on the blankets, my body pressed against the edge of the bed. The carved headboard held me the way it always had, the way it had held me when I was small and scared of thunderstorms, when I climbed into their bed and my grandfather would pretend to be annoyed but would always move over, always make room. When I finally stood, the mattress rose slowly behind me, the impression of my weight fading as if it had never been there at all.
I have not kept that promise. Not yet.
But I have not forgotten it either.
---
I have always carried the suspicion that I am not Asian enough.
Banana.
The word followed me in different forms, sometimes spoken, sometimes implied, sometimes present only in the way a silence can be present, can fill a room, can say everything. I do not like cilantro. I cannot tolerate very spicy food. I cannot read Chinese well. Small things, perhaps individually insignificant, but together they accumulated into a kind of internal ledger of inadequacy. A running tally of all the ways I fell short, all the ways I did not quite belong, all the ways I would never be enough.
I learned to monitor myself. To notice when I did something too Western, too Asian, too in-between. To anticipate judgment before it arrived. To perform a version of myself that might be accepted, though I never quite knew which version that was, though the performance shifted depending on who was watching, though underneath it all there was always the same question: Who am I when no one is looking?
And yet I never felt fully Western either. At home, my parents reminded me, often and firmly, that we were not a Western family. Whenever I mentioned something my friends’ parents allowed, the response arrived immediately, like a door closing. “Your friends’ parents do it like that. We don’t.” And then, almost cruelly: “Go be their child, then.”
I learned that belonging was conditional. That I had to earn it. That I could lose it. That the door might close at any moment, and I would find myself on the outside, looking in, wondering what I had done wrong, what I had failed to be, what I could have done differently.
Outside the house, the message changed but the feeling remained.
Where are you from?
Canada, I would answer.
No, but where are you really from?
Canada.
No, I mean where are you really from?
The question repeated itself over the years like a refrain, appearing in classrooms, at parties, in casual conversations with strangers who felt entitled to map my origins for me, who felt they had the right to place me, to categorize me, to decide where I belonged. I learned to brace myself before answering. I learned to read the room, to guess what they wanted, to tailor my response accordingly. Sometimes I said Indonesian just to end the conversation. Sometimes I said Canadian just to make a point. Sometimes I lied.
I grew tired of explaining. I grew tired of being an interesting answer to someone else’s question. I grew tired of the way my existence seemed to invite interrogation, as if I were a puzzle to be solved rather than a person to be met, as if my face were a question and they had the right to an answer.
Even in law school, it persisted.
Just the other day, while I was walking down the street, a man stepped into my path.
“Are you Vietnamese?” he asked.
“No,” I said, mostly out of spite.
“Japanese?”
“No,” I replied curtly.
“Korean?”
Finally, I said Chinese, just to get him to go away.
His face fell slightly. “Oh,” he said. “But you’re so pretty.”
I scoffed and kept walking. I had been walking away the whole time.
But later, alone, I thought about it. About the hierarchy he revealed without meaning to. About the way some Asian identities carry a certain cultural glamour—Japanese, Korean—while others carry something heavier, something politicized, something that makes people pause. About how quickly his enthusiasm dimmed when he learned where I was really from. About how the same face that was pretty when he thought I was Korean became something else when he learned I was Chinese. About how none of this is my fault, and yet all of it lands on me.
People perceive Asian countries very differently. The reactions arrive almost automatically, shaped by narratives far larger than any individual. When someone says they are Japanese, people light up—anime, sushi, design, architecture, technology, a whole constellation of associations that arrive before the person themselves. When someone says they are Korean, the reaction is similar: K-pop, dramas, skincare, fashion, a cultural wave that has made Koreanness desirable in ways that feel almost like permission to exist.
But when I say Chinese, the reaction changes. Usually, it is neutral. “Oh,” someone says. “I see.” Sometimes there is an awkward pause. Sometimes a strange comment about China follows, as if I have just opened the door to a political debate, as if my existence is an invitation to discuss something far larger than me. Rarely is there the same enthusiasm. Rarely do people light up. Rarely do they say, “Oh, I love Chinese culture,” in the same way they might say it about Japan or Korea.
I have learned to read these reactions too. The slight shift in posture. The careful pause before the next question. The way people suddenly become experts on geopolitics, as if they have been waiting for someone to explain things to, as if I am somehow responsible for everything a billion people have ever done.
Still, when people speak dismissively about China, as if they understand it completely, as if they have the right to reduce something vast and ancient to a few talking points, something inside me tightens. Even when they claim they are only talking about politics, it feels personal. Because culture is never that easily separated. Because part of me belongs there. Because my grandmother’s poems came from there, even if I can no longer recite them. Because my grandfather is buried there, in a language I cannot fully read. Because my face comes from there, and no amount of distancing will change that.
At the same time, it feels like Canada has never fully claimed me either.
In high school, while I was giving a presentation, a boy said “Ching chong” under his breath.
The words landed like spit. The room kept moving. The teacher said nothing. The lesson continued. And in that continuation, I learned how easily harm can dissolve into normalcy. How invisibility is maintained not only by hostility, but by indifference. How the people who are supposed to protect you can look away, and the world will keep turning as if nothing happened, as if you did not just become smaller, as if something was not just taken from you.
Another time, someone said it while I was walking down the aisle of the lab. That time, I gave him the middle finger. It was a flare of pure, wordless defiance, and in the same instant, a hot wave of shame washed over me. Not for the gesture, but for what it cost me to make it. I had just confirmed I was the one who could be provoked, the one who felt it, the one who broke first. I was angry at him, but I was also, immediately, angry at myself for caring enough to react, for giving him the satisfaction of seeing that it landed, for proving that words could still reach me.
Years later, while working at the courthouse, I came across the first boy’s name in a case file. It came back—the classroom, the sound of his voice, how he made me feel, how the teacher looked away, how the world kept turning. I had to recuse myself, but before I did, I caught his eye and held it, just long enough. Not in triumph, but something steadier, something that said: I remember. I remember what you did. I remember who I was before and after. I remember that no one stopped you. And I am still here.
But what stayed with me most was not the confrontation. It was the teacher’s silence. The room’s indifference. The way harm can happen in plain sight and no one intervenes. I learned that you can be hurt and no one will notice. That you can carry something for years and the people who helped put it there will never know. That memory is sometimes the only witness.
---
I speak English, French, Mandarin, Cantonese, Javenese, Spanish. Languages come easily to me, as if my childhood surrounded by them left some imprint in my mind, some capacity that never closed, some door that stayed open even when others closed. And yet the language that matters most emotionally, the one tied to my grandparents, to the carved wooden bed and the whispered promises, to the poems I can no longer recite and the characters I can no longer read, is the one I struggle with most.
Sometimes I wonder what that means. Whether I have been running from something or toward something. Whether the promise I made to my grandfather was really about language, or about something else entirely. Whether I am afraid to go back because I might find that the language no longer fits me, or because I might find that it does, that it has been waiting all this time, that I am the one who has been absent. Whether the forgetting was ever really forgetting, or just a long detour I am still walking, a path that loops back on itself, a circle I have not yet closed.
I know that some diasporic Asians resolve this tension by rejecting their Asianness entirely. Perhaps it is easier that way, easier to step cleanly into the culture around you than to exist constantly between worlds, easier to choose one side than to live on the border. But I never managed to fully reject it. I tried, in small ways. I told myself it didn’t matter. I told myself I didn’t care. But the question always followed me. The word always followed me. Banana. The shame always followed me, patient and persistent, waiting for moments of weakness to remind me of what I had lost.
At my lycée, there were no Asians at all. The Arabic-speaking students formed their groups. The Spanish-speaking students had theirs. The French students moved comfortably among themselves, as if belonging were something they had never had to question. I had no group. No one who looked like me. No one who shared my particular in-betweenness. I learned to move between groups without belonging to any of them. I learned to be alone in crowded rooms. I learned that solitude could be a kind of belonging too, if you let it, if you make peace with it, if you stop waiting to be invited in.
My partner is Wasian—Taiwanese mother, English father—but their upbringing was different. Their mother never spoke Chinese to them. There were no Chinese books on the shelves, no bedtime stories in another language, no grandmother reciting poems that would later slip away. They never felt torn. When I talk about identity, they listen with curiosity. For them, it is interesting. For me, it has always been something heavier, something that moves quietly beneath the surface of ordinary conversations, something that rises without warning in Chinese restaurants, in casual questions, in the shape of characters I can no longer read, in the sound of my grandmother’s voice saying a word I still carry. Something that sits beside me in quiet moments, waiting to be acknowledged, waiting to be understood, waiting for me to finally turn and face it.
---
Perhaps identity is not meant to be simple. Perhaps it is something layered, something that shifts depending on where you stand, something that cannot be reduced to a single answer, a single box, a single word. Canadian. Chinese. Indonesian. Cantonese. A little bit of everything. A little bit of nothing. A person who belongs everywhere and nowhere, who carries multiple worlds inside them and cannot fully inhabit any of them.
And somewhere inside all of that is the promise I whispered beside my grandpa, on a carved wooden bed with flowered sheets and thick blankets, in a room that held decades of dreams, in a house that held generations of language. The promise I made with his warmth still near me, with his breathing still audible, with his presence still filling the space between us. The promise I have not kept, but have not forgotten.
One day, I will learn to read Chinese well.
One day, I will return to the language that first held me.
One day, I will open a menu and see not fragments but wholeness.
One day, I will understand the poems my grandmother recited, will feel them the way she felt them, will carry them the way she carried them—not hidden under my shirt, but hidden somewhere deeper, somewhere no one can reach.
And maybe, when I finally do, the word banana will lose some of its power. Maybe it will become just a word, just a fruit, just a memory of something that once hurt. Maybe people will stop asking me, “No, but where are you really from?” because I will have an answer that satisfies them, or because I will have stopped caring whether it satisfies them, or because I will have found a way to belong that does not depend on their permission.
Maybe the shore will shift again, this time toward home.
Maybe I will finally be able to read my grandfather’s name, wherever it is written, and know that I kept my promise.
Maybe that will be enough.
Your writing style is beautiful. A really moving piece, thank you for sharing.
Beautiful.