How young Chinese-Americans are embracing their identity
For many biracial children growing up in the US, it can be a struggle to fit in – but as adults they are connecting cultures
Growing up as a Chinese-American in suburban Chicago, Eric Stinehart remembers vividly the fear and confusion he felt as a six-year-old, standing in a soccer field at school as his classmates split themselves into teams by race.
Did he belong to the American team, or the Asian one? He wasn’t sure, but his friends decisively assigned him to the team full of Asian faces.
“Partly because of my appearance, I was mostly considered just Asian,” said the 19-year-old student, whose father is from Iowa and mother is from Shanghai. “In elementary school [when] the teams would split up by race, that was very upsetting for me.”
Yet when Stinehart, who is studying public policy at Princeton University, travelled to China to visit his mother’s relatives each summer, it was a vastly different experience.
“In America, people mostly assume that I’m only Chinese and a lot of them think I’m these classic Chinese stereotypes, like being smart. Interestingly, when I’m in China or Asia, people think I can’t speak Chinese because I’m mixed,” he said.
“It’s really quite different. I definitely feel like a minority in America and I’ve been discriminated against. But in China, more people can tell that I’m mixed instead of full Asian. I’d get stares on the subway, people would notice that I dress more like an American, and they see me as a ‘beautiful half-Asian’.”
