May is Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

I’m sad to recall that growing up as an Asian American to immigrant parents, I often pushed back against my own culture and heritage: I was ashamed of everything that made me different.

My parents insisted that we speak Chinese at home, and learn Mandarin after English school and on the weekends, but all I wanted was to go home after school and enjoy my weekend like the other kids. We had home-cooked Taiwanese meals, but all I wanted was Pizza, McDonald’s, and Home Town Buffet.

I realize now that I was trying to protect myself from being made fun of. If I could just distance myself from the culture that my appearance associated me with, then kids would stop stretching their eyes when they met me, stop asking me why I don’t eat with normal utensils, stop saying “No, but where are you REALLY from?”

I distinctly remember in the 5th grade being made fun of because my grandmother had packed dried seaweed and 油饭 to school for me for lunch. We had recently moved to a mostly white neighborhood and this was my first year as one of three Asian kids in my class. The other kids would sit farther away because they said it “smelled funny.” I remember begging my parents to buy Lunchables and Capri Sun, like the other kids.

I always thought that what I wanted was to be just like everyone else … But no, what I wanted was to be accepted in a world that labeled me and my culture as foreign, strange, and something to be ashamed about.

I rejected who I was to survive and to cope — to make sense of why I felt like I didn’t belong. I thought I hated myself but what I really hated was not knowing why I couldn’t control the narrative and the assumptions that people placed on me. I hated that I was stuck in a body, behind a face that betrayed me: told its own story before I could tell it myself.