Reconciling my Asian Body

I’ve spent so much of my life hating this Asian body and I’m finally on the path to reconciling with it.

I was told good Asian girls have clear and dewy skin, pin straight hair, tiny mouths, and tiny waists.
Asian girls are supposed to be the perfect fetishized blend of cute, fragile, obedient, and feminine.
But here I’ve stood in this Asian body, unable to separate from my blemishes, scars, unruly curly hair, big lips, straight waist, strange curves, stocky body, and fierce determination of a warrior, with the strength of a baby ox.
I figured if being this way was to be rejected by my culture, the only and best response I could have was to reject it before it could reject me.
Resistance became my focus and self depreciation became a part of my identity as a “bad” Asian.

Then, I was told good white girls have tanned bronzy skin, blue eyes, long blonde hair, glossy lips, athletically thin bodies, and curves in all the right places… the perfect blend of sexy, fun, and sweet.
So I tanned, wore coloured contacts, dyed my hair, glossed my lips, played every sport imaginable and leveraged my fierceness to do everything I could to change the expectations of who I was supposed to be, away from cute and fragile to sexy and sweet.
To some degree, my plans worked. It became hard to tell if I was showing up as a bad version of an Asian or a worse version White girl. I was a walking talking optical illusion. I deflected attention away from the places I felt most rejection and replaced it with confusion, tricking everyone… including myself.

I want to say I was then told what a good Black girl was supposed to be, but the truth is Asians and white people never told me Black girls were good.
Wearing armour made of resistance and confusion, I figured maybe this could be another place to hide.
During the rise of Black culture on mainstream television, I started to dance Hip Hop and found I was pretty good.
To fully become a Hip Hop dancer, I spoke in ebonics, called my unruly curls an Asian Afro, wore big hoops, velour jumpsuits, listened to rap and R&B, hung out with the “bad kids”, and taught myself to act hard… as if any portion of my confused and flat, privileged Asian ass knew anything about what it means to be a Black person in a white person’s world.

I associated Hip Hop culture with the best form of being Black. The more I identified with being a dancer, the more I became the embodiment of Black cultural appropriation.
As a dancer, this was the first time my cultural confusion and search for belonging was rewarded… and it felt good.

Deep down inside I knew it made no sense that an Asian girl, trying to be a white girl, trying to be a Black girl, could ever find a home in an ethnicity twice removed from her truth. None of who I was being made any sense, but I also knew if I didn’t question it, sense didn’t really matter.

When I finally started to question where these expectations came from and who was writing the rules,
I learned that regardless of ethnicity, the biggest underlying message was that women are asked to be less.
That original act of rejecting my Asian-ness to protect myself from being rejected, got redirected to rejecting this notion that I must be less in order to be an acceptable woman. Delusion became my safe place and Illusion felt like home.

In a world where I’ve tried becoming more Asian, more white, more Black, and more accepted, I’ve learned I can be anything. When this truth finally caught up with me the bigger question became, why not be all of whatever it is that I am?

I am my own woman. I have curves in places some find ideal while others find disgusting. I have short, thick muscular legs and inconsistency wild curls. Every spring when I emerge from another Canadian winter I have thin, pale, almost fluorescent skin, with arms that tan, and legs that stay pasty all summer. I have strong core but a lumpy belly. I have super cut shoulders but jiggly arms, and I have six metal pins, one metal plate, and scars and bruises that will leave my body forever changed. I am all of these things and although some things will stay the same, some others are always changing.

Instead of hating, fighting, and seeing this body as a prison, I’m choosing to see it as a vessel. If I’m willing to move it, it will take me where I want to go. What I want is to experience adventures. I want to test what this mind, body, and spirit’s limits might be, and I want to learn how to make adjustments so I can go further than ever before. This body is a place to hold my thoughts, feelings, needs, wants, and desires, and I alone get to put it in motion so I can bring all the things I care about to life.

I’m learning this white-oriented world that fetishizes Asian bodies, and appropriates Black culture is simply what exists now. But I have the freedom to choose how to respond and engage with it. And I get to decide my role in the way the future is written.

I’m learning to embrace my body in all its perfect imperfections because I know it will always continue to change.
There is no arrival, only progress.
There is no perfection, just continuous reconciliation.
As I become more aware of the progress of reconciliation over this body, I’m invited to embrace of all the things I used to resist, reject, refuse, and appropriate,

If change is the only thing that remains constant for the rest of time, then embracing it means I’m touching eternity.
If that’s not the point of all of this, then I don’t know what is.