When I turned 14, my favorite birthday gift was a painting of a bauhinia. But I never got the actual canvas.
A boy from California, my then object of teenage infatuation, painted the orchid-like flower as an homage to my hometown of Hong Kong. He photographed it with a camera that would be laughable by today’s standards, and sent it via the text-based messaging platform Internet Relay Chat (IRC). I wasn’t used to anybody considering my cultural roots so thoughtfully—least of all someone whose face I had never seen before.
Before Tumblr, there was Livejournal. Before Reddit, there was Slashdot. And before Google Hangouts, there was IRC, where the Californian and I met during the dial-up Internet era. The IRC channel, which functioned like a chat room, was an offshoot of an online forum for people interested in graphic design and coding that 20 other regulars—myself included—frequented. In the channel, though, we discussed everything but.
I learned about IRC, made up of teens my age and the twentysomethings who ran it, as an international-school brat who ran with a pack of uniform-clad outlaws. Growing up in post-handover Hong Kong, a city that struggled to retain its reputation as an East-meets-West cosmopolis, I was caught between cultures. I attended a school that forbade its students from speaking our mother tongue, Cantonese, while living with a family that was becoming increasingly dismayed by my faltering grasp of the language.
I felt no connection to local media or culture, which was relentlessly broadcast from every corner of Hong Kong. I spoke English, but books aside, had little means of accessing Western popular culture—I still haven’t even seen Pocahontas. As an uninformed Hong Kong native who locals perceived as having rejected my roots, I existed in a third-culture kid bubble I couldn’t quite articulate, nor did I want to.
But I hardly understood my experience as a unique one—as if 14-year-old girls have any self-awareness. Here’s what they do have, though: a keen sense of observation because they’re wondering where they fit in, and selfishness because they know so little of what adult happiness ought to be and so chase it blindly. This explains why I invested in my IRC relationships with such zeal.
Everyone else in the IRC channel seemed as displaced as I felt. A part of me doubts they’d be there otherwise. There was the aspiring polyglot from Kansas; a bespectacled bombshell from Alberta, whose occasional selfies never failed to set off a lengthy line of questioning about her last name and exact location; a Middle Eastern girl who regrettably lived in Texas and was a close friend at the time (I’ve yet to again experience a bonding moment quite like hearing her voice over the phone, diluted to a whisper, because her sleeping mother had to wake up in two hours for work).
And then there was the boy from California.
He was the first person I knew to publicly question the values and beliefs that were instilled in him from an early age. I didn’t know any other 16-year-old Latino former Catholics who blogged about atheism, and had deeply religious single mothers. I didn’t even know what atheism meant, which sounds much less ignorant when you consider the godless twinkle present in every shot of Hong Kong’s famous skyline.
The Californian was light-years away from anyone I knew in real life. He was American, but not entirely proud of it. He was an atheist by choice. He went to a charter school. He liked Weezer. Identity politics wasn’t the hotbed issue it is now, so we never discussed it explicitly. Instead, we stuck with quotidian topics that resulted in wonderful conversations but, ultimately, fell short because of the medium's limitations. We tried to paint a picture of our respective lives for each other, but failed, because neither of us had a frame of reference.
Prior to meeting the Californian, my youthful arrogance was in full force. That changes when you talk to people whose backgrounds differ from yours. Conversations with strangers—getting to know them, and them trying to get to know you—act like a mirror. Talking to the Californian and watching him wrestle with a new identity that defied his upbringing inspired me. It also broke me. I felt too culturally and geographically removed, too distracted, to seek the same enlightenment. Ashamed, I stopped frequenting the channel. Months later, I heard he came out as gay.
Conversations with strangers—getting to know them, and them trying to get to know you—act like a mirror.
Hong Kong felt tiny, both geographically and socially. No one had ever been curious about my upbringing because it was all we knew. Even the conflicted, nonsensical parts—how our school’s Canadian curriculum clashed with Asian parental expectations, the exoticization of the three white kids in a class of 75 Asian students, a sex tape in the seventh grade—were glossed over, even normalized. The Californian’s will, skepticism, and nerve inspired me to ask questions about who I was.
I left Hong Kong for Toronto at 17, bored and full of resentment, only to realize how much of what I disliked about it was actually in me: the flip-flopping between heritages whenever it’s convenient, the restlessness. I missed it. I wanted to return, feeling both idiotic and relieved that I could admit my conflicted affection for the city out loud.
The act of becoming is not just an individual, isolated decision. It's an ongoing commitment to contending with an ugliness that sometimes only halfway makes sense. Deciding whether or not to dig deeper, and coming to terms with just how much of ourselves come from a place we've left behind, is the hard part. Any time you take a hard look at yourself, you risk finding more ugly and odd, or risk discovering that the good is actually mediocre. But in my willingness to contend with that messy process, I found something sincere.
Somehow, the self I had compromised felt more authentic than the self I labored to create.
