The first year of university is a major transition for all students. For me, the biggest change was not just moving across the country, but additionally learning to adapt to a completely different environment, both culturally and socially. Culturally, as I grew up as a Taiwanese immigrant in a small,[Read More…]
Tag: identity
No, I will not curb my enthusiasm
I always freeze up whenever I’m asked to describe myself. From introducing myself at the beginning of each elementary school year to writing college essays in high school, I consistently clam up in confusion when forced to encompass myself in a short paragraph. While basically everyone I know has experienced[Read More…]
Finding new words for my identity
It took me until I was 12 to realize that my father’s English was accented. Before that, it was just my father’s voice: Familiar and melodic, a vestige of his first, tonal language. Like many mixed kids, I was hyper-aware of the racial categories I fit into from a young[Read More…]
Meeting myself halfway
“Hi Halmoni,” I say, as I draw my Korean grandmother into an awkward, very loose, hug. “Hi say-quoi-yah,” she beams back at me, purple puffer jacket, tattooed eyebrows, and all. My grandparents are very predictable; Halmoni will measure herself against me and tell me I should enter Miss Universe; Haraboji[Read More…]
Revealing a sense of identity through personal style
I have always been fascinated by personal style, and I often wonder how our unique and individual styles are formed, what causes trends to come and go, and why we dress the way we do. Though we might assume that we can tell a lot about a person based on[Read More…]
Learning to love my big nose
I love my big, crooked nose, but that hasn’t always been the case. The first time I was made aware of its size was when my aunt asked me if I had broken it. Her sentiment made me feel sick. I pushed aside my childhood ambitions of becoming a writer[Read More…]
Unlucky inheritance
There are many things in my life that I’ve accepted as inevitable: Breaking a bone, teenage heartbreak, and failing a final exam, for example, I have a strange sense that those events are predetermined. This may be symptomatic of a childhood spent in front of a television—each event in my[Read More…]
Identities should start conversations, not end them
Being Israeli is something that I keep to myself at McGill. After returning to school this September, my peers often asked what I did over the summer. I told them that I had been travelling, but omitted that I had actually staffed a trip that took Jewish-Canadian 17-year-olds to Israel.[Read More…]
Piecing together my McGill puzzle
Growing up, university was the light at the end of my tunnel. My family, friends, and teachers always pushed the idea that at university, I would find a place for myself where I would fit in perfectly—that I was a unique jigsaw piece yet to find the rest of its[Read More…]
National Geographic’s race cover story misconstrues multiraciality
When I first read Patricia Edmonds’ cover story on Millie and Marcia Biggs—half-black, half-white fraternal twins—for National Geographic’s April 2018 Race Issue, I felt conflicted. As a person of mixed race, with a father from Hong Kong and a mother of largely Scottish descent, I was happy for this family’s[Read More…]
