As I have met more people from international backgrounds, I have been so pleasantly surprised to find how many relatable connections humans have regardless of culture, language, and more. The Zoom conversations with the students at the American University in Cairo further proved to me that my experiences as a several-generation Chinese-American, while unique, are not isolating. Throughout my life, I have struggled with feeling like I don’t fully belong with other Asian-Americans, who typically have closer generational connections to their culture, language and motherland. However, talking with an AUC student, Stephanie, showed me that I am not alone. We discussed feeling like we don’t fully belong in one culture, rather in a diasporic culture that has resulted from increased immigration and globalization in the past couple centuries. She stated that while she was born and raised in Egypt, her ancestry hails from Italy, Armenia, Greece, Lebanon, France, and more. Like me, she shared that she doesn’t know a large majority of her family due to its global spread, as well as not being able to communicate with many of them due to language differences. I found her experience to challenge my preconceived notions that people outside of high-immigrant countries (such as the U.S., Canada, and much of Latin America) are consistently of the ethnicity of the country they reside in. It was a good check on my assumptions.
I found it so comforting that other people around the world struggle with similar feelings of being “in-between”. I think it reflects larger societal misunderstandings of culture and ethnicity, which are most often viewed as being rooted in a specific land and language (frankly due to the rise of nationalism as a result of colonialism). This leaves millions of people who are part of diasporas feeling like they do not properly belong to a culture or ethnicity. For many white Americans, this has less damaging effects– they can exist without a culture and just in their whiteness. That said, this does not deny the experiences of many white people who also struggle with being part of a diaspora and feeling in-between cultures. However, race and physical appearance has stronger effects on cultural judgement of people of color, as people of color are expected to live up to expectations and preconceived notions of how they are supposed to behave and exist. Over all, the discussions with the AUC students showed me the fluidity of culture, that it does not rigidly belong to one location or place.
