Introduction
I did not really grow up thinking about being Asian American—not in any deliberate way. Growing up, I moved a lot: born in Palo Alto, moved to Chicago, then Thousand Oaks, then back to the Bay. My race sat in the background: acknowledged, but not really looked at. My mom is Japanese and my dad is Chinese. My father worked, my mother cared, and my brothers and I played sports. We ate Japanese curry on Sundays and dim sum on holidays. No crisis of identity. No language for what I was or was not, because nobody needed one.
Then my father died when I was twelve, and the ground I thought I was standing on turned out to be thinner than I thought. The identity I built after that—the hockey player, the overachiever, the guy who figured he could outwork any problem—held together until my first year at UC San Diego. Then it didn't.
Three chapters of my life—navigating grief in youth hockey, hitting rock bottom at UCSD, and reframing my identity in Japan—map onto how I understand Asian American identity formation now. This course gave me a way to actually name what I had only ever felt before. The memories are mine. The framework for reading them came from the readings, the videos, and the conversations in this course—the ones that pushed me to look harder at my own story.
Section 1: What Grief Builds
My father passed away when I was twelve. He was my first role model, my first coach, and the person whose approval I measured everything against. Losing him that young does not leave a clean wound; it leaves a permanent confusion about who you are supposed to be becoming and for whom. I held onto hockey partly because it was the one place I still felt his presence pulling me forward.
Here is the problem, though: hockey socialized me into a culture where being Asian barely registered, and when it did, it was usually a punchline. Nobody was overtly cruel. There were jokes, there were assumptions, and there were the moments teammates referenced Asian stereotypes with an affectionate condescension, expecting me to laugh along. And I did. I was twelve, then fourteen, then sixteen, and belonging somewhere felt urgent enough that I did not stop to ask questions. I stopped examining or looking at race at all.
Over country music, football, and the UFC, I bonded with my teammates. Around my Asian peers, I got called “whitewashed.” Around my hockey teammates, I was “Tlee.” Tlee is relentless, gritty—the guy who outworked everyone in the room. He did not try, did not ask for help, and did not need anyone holding anything for him. Once that identity worked on the ice, I dragged him straight into the classroom too; if Tlee could play double-shifts while exhausted, he could pull an all-nighter and still ace the exam. I did not want to be Tristan. Tristan was the helpless kid carrying a confusion he could not explain to anyone, including himself. Being Tlee was easier.
Jeff Chang’s chapter, “The In-Betweens,” finally gave me language for what I had been living. Chang writes about existing in a world that does not have a clear label for you, describing the feeling as being “conspicuous and invisible at the same time” (Chang 138). That is exactly my experience. The hockey world saw me and registered me as different, just not enough to actually do anything about it. My Asian peers saw me and registered me as different too, just not enough to fully include me either. Neither space had a category that fit both the kid who could talk about money lines and sports stats, and the kid who ate rice with every meal at home. So I occupied both and belonged to neither. That double position was not a conscious identity formation at the time—it was just my life. This course is the first place anyone actually handed me a framework for what that experience was.
Section 2: The Collapse and What It Cost
I tested out of high school at seventeen because I was worried about slipping below a 4.0 GPA and losing my competitive edge for college. Transferring through the community college route was my guaranteed ticket to a UC. A year and a half later, I was at UC San Diego in the Electrical Engineering program—a pace that was objectively too fast for me, yet completely on-brand at the same time.
My first year at UCSD humbled me in ways I did not see coming and was not equipped to handle—not even a little. The academics were harder than anything I had faced before, and my hockey performance was flat. Both pillars I had built myself around—school and athletics—were falling apart simultaneously. I was so disappointed in myself that I could not look at my own reflection in the mirror while brushing my teeth in the morning.
I had spent years running the playbook of work, provide, keep moving, and never reveal a chink in the armor. That playbook—not my grades or my hockey stats—was the actual problem. My Week 3 journal for this class traces my mindset directly: I wrote about how I let structural responsibility swallow my grief before it could ever pin me down. That worked—until it didn't. When both my academic and athletic identities collapsed at UCSD, I had no language for what I was feeling and zero practice reaching out.
This is exactly what Lee et al. document in their study of Asian American young adults and mental health. Participants in their research described a cultural environment where mental health problems are seen as something an individual should control privately, with one participant explaining that emotional issues are “something that we should deal with in private” (Lee et al. 147). That was not just a cultural norm I observed from the outside; it was a norm I had fully absorbed and was actively living out. Even walking into counseling at UCSD felt embarrassing. As I wrote in my Week 3 journal, verbatim:
“Humiliating, really. It felt shameful to call myself a man when managing my own life had suddenly become completely impossible.”
The lowest point came in Japan. I had flown to Kyoto to study abroad at Kyoto University, carrying two failed quarters and the severe anxiety of a student who still had not figured out how to ask for help. Two days after landing, I checked my grades for a final exam: 14.75 out of 36—below the threshold needed to pass. I felt a wave of passive suicidal ideation—a feeling of not caring if a bus hit me. I knew the moment would pass, but I simply did not want to be me anymore. I want to be honest about that here, both because this course has asked us to be vulnerable, and because that moment is the clearest possible illustration of what Lee et al. describe regarding the cost of delayed help-seeking in Asian American communities. The study notes that among Asian Americans, the severity of distress tends to run high precisely because individuals delay seeking treatment until symptoms reach crisis proportions (Lee et al. 144). That was me. I had been delaying for years—essentially my whole life.
I did one thing right that day: I reached out by emailing my dean and messaging my counselor. Thoughts are just thoughts—I never acted on any of them—but saying that out loud to another person was the first time in a long time I let someone else hold the other end of the rope. I had lived every day as if I had to earn my worth, like one slip meant hitting the floor with nobody holding the line.
The next day, I checked my portal expecting to see devastating damage to my GPA. Instead, I saw a 2.32 for the quarter. Curves I did not expect had pulled two of my grades to passing marks. I do not have a clinical explanation for what I felt in that moment, other than grace. The distance between my ideal self and my actual self never closed, nor has it since. But in that moment, I chose to sit in that reality rather than run from it.
Section 3: Japan and the Reframe
Studying abroad at Kyoto University is where the reframe happened—slowly, unevenly, and not all at once.
In Japan, I look Japanese. On the street, people assume I am local before I open my mouth. For someone who spent his entire life being visually marked as different in American spaces, that initial invisibility felt like a relief. Then it got disorienting fast. The second I spoke Japanese with a foreign accent or carried myself a certain way, the assumption collapsed. Locals would switch to English, look confused, and recalibrate. One of the other exchange students told me early on, “You got that American swagger in you.” He meant it as a compliment, but it clicked something into place for me: the identity I thought was a fixed fact about myself turned out to be a product of a specific context—nothing more.
Sensoy and DiAngelo argue that knowledge is socially constructed, stating it is “reflective of the values and interests of those who produce it” (Sensoy and DiAngelo 7). My sense of who I was had been produced almost entirely by American systems of racial classification and a hockey locker room. Asian American is not a biological category; it is a political and social construction built on the continent, for the continent, through census policy, activist organizing, and legal battles—just as Chang traces across his chapter. In Japan, that construction meant nothing at all. I was just American: specifically and unmistakably American, even when I appeared physically similar to those around me.
My international friends in Kyoto often liked to joke about America's problems, which frustrated me at first. Eventually, it pushed me to think harder about what I actually believed, rather than what I assumed I believed. This course helped me see that gratitude and criticism can live in the same sentence—that pointing out what a place gets wrong does not cancel out loving it. The Asian American communities we studied all semester held both concepts at once. Chang holds both at once across “The In-Betweens,” loving a country while naming exactly what it has gotten wrong and continues to get wrong. That is not a contradiction; that is accuracy.
Japan also gave me time—something I had not allowed myself in years. Time to sit under a sakura tree and actually reflect on my life and my family's history instead of running to the next milestone. I thought about my grandfather's migration from Guangzhou, the Cultural Revolution he fled, and the choices he made so that I could eventually stand in Hong Kong as a visitor rather than a refugee. My Week 3 PCAR connects this to the Cambodian Town documentary's concept of secondhand trauma: the weight a young person carries from a parent's history without having lived through the original event themselves. My grandfather's history shaped the material conditions of my family's life in ways I am still mapping out. The freedom I have to fail a class and still be okay is partly a product of his sacrifices, and sitting with that in Kyoto humbled me in a completely different way than UCSD had.
Conclusion
Looking back across all three chapters, I can see how much of what I thought was just "personality" was deeply contextual. A sport socialized me into "whiteness." Grief made belonging feel urgent enough that I would have taken almost any version of it. And underneath both, a nation's racial categories had already shaped what I could imagine about myself before I had the tools to question them. The in-between space I have always occupied was not a failure of identity—it was simply where I stood.
I still deal with cognitive dissonance—the gap between the person I expect to be and the person I actually am at any given moment—and this course did not magically close that gap. What it gave me was far more useful: a vocabulary for experiences I had only ever felt before and never had the words to express.
- Chang's phrase, "conspicuous and invisible at the same time," named something I had tried to describe for years. I finally understood why I kept getting sorted into partial versions of myself in spaces not built to hold the whole picture.
- Lee et al. provided the other half: explaining why asking for help felt like failure instead of strategy, and why the cost of silence compounds until something breaks.
I am still figuring out how to look at my own reflection, if I am being honest. At the end of the day, there is no one I would rather be than me—even if I did not fully mean it the first time I said it out loud. I am working toward meaning it.
My father gave me strength. My mother never judged or stopped believing in me. My brothers taught me resilience and to keep going no matter what. Beyond my immediate family, my village showed up: my aunties, my godparents Mike and Karen, and hockey coaches who genuinely cared and checked in when I needed it most. My village built me. This course is starting to help me understand what was built and who I became because of those foundations. And for once, that is worth looking at instead of running away from.
Works Cited
- Chang, Jeff. “The In-Betweens.” We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation, Picador, 2016, pp. 136–57.
- Lee, Sunmin, et al. “Model Minority at Risk: Expressed Needs of Mental Health by Asian American Young Adults.” Journal of Community Health, vol. 34, no. 2, 2009, pp. 144–52.
- Sensoy, Ozlem, and Robin DiAngelo. “Critical Thinking and Critical Theory.” Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, Teachers College Press, 2012, pp. 1–13.